Super Smash Bros. Melee Brawl
There once was a game by the name of Super Smash Bros. Melee. Released on the GameCube, it quickly became one of the most popular titles on Nintendo's little geometric box of tricks and won critical acclaim from critics who acclaim such things. It took the premise from the original Super Smash Bros. — Nintendo icons beating the crap out of each other in the same game — and simply made it larger, with more playable characters and a host of new, more complex arenas. That was the best part of a decade ago. Times have changed. This one's on a full-size disc.
Nintendo fans have a hard lot in life. They wait for months, even years, to play the next iterations of ancient franchises. In the meantime they have to survive on a diet of mostly mediocre third-party tltles and the occasional bliteringly brilliant hidden gem, while enduring the scorn of PlayStation fans who have nothing better to do while they wait for the next Final Fantasy. All this means that every Wii owner with a spare £40 had already preordered their copy of Super Smash Bros. Brawl as soon as their local emporium allowed it, making reviews largely useless.
That makes my job difficult then, as I have to write about Brawl while addressing people who aren't really sure if they need a new Wii game. Both of them.
The easiest way of determining one's potential reaction to Brawl is to read through the following transcription of a fight. Make it to the end without piqued interest and it's fair to say that you can find better things to blow the cash on.
The setting: The pirate ship from Zelda: Wind Waker. Bounty hunter Samus Aran teleports onto the cel-shaded deck, briefly followed by Falco Lombardi, Princess Zelda, and a confused-looking Solid Snake. An unseen announcer commands them to fight and the music from Dragon Roost Isle fires up in the background. Falco is quick to take action, sprinting across the ship in a wave of flame towards Snake. Not being short of reflexes, Snake effortlessly sidesteps the attack and kicks the bird in the back of the head before grabbing him, twisting his neck, and throwing him overboard. Meanwhile Samus, having decided that Zelda looks a bit piratey, stuns her with a missile attack before leaping in with a devastating blitz of kicks and punches.
Snake, in need of some female attention, picks up a stray Bob-omb and tosses it at the girls, the explosion neatly separating them and putting a premature end to their fight. Falco, having saved himself from a watery grave by grabbing onto the side of the ship, flips back onto the deck to find himself face to face with Zelda, who is now armed with a beam sabre. After taking a few cutting blows, Falco launches the princess high onto the mast of the ship and dashes back into the melee.
Explosions rock the ship, leaving dispersing clouds of toony smoke, as a distant pirate crew bombard the fighters with cannonfire. The appearance of Kirby's warpstar grants Snake an opportunity to breathe, as he grabs it and disappears temporarily into the stratosphere. From her safe perch in the crow's nest Zelda smashes open a glass case, summoning a horde of Excitebike riders to swarm the deck below, interrupting Samus and Falco's growing feud and juggling them across the length of the ship. It is at this moment that Snake and his star come crashing down on top of Zelda, catapulting her off the stage at breakneck speed. Falco takes the opportunity to rekindle a seconds-old rivalry and leaps up to pay Snake back for the earlier neck breaking, bringing him down with his reflector shield and throwing him off the ship with a well-timed uppercut smash.
With the attention off her for a few seconds, Samus has been focusing on breaking open a Smash Ball and is now glowing with energy and searing with revenge. Unleashing the fury in the form of a massive phazon laser that leaves her power suit in shards, she catches the tumbling Snake in its blast and launches him into another time zone. Meanwhile, as Zelda reappears on the battlefield, she notices a tornado closing in on the ship...
That took up about twenty seconds of a three minute match. Brawl brawls are a constant assault of nostalgic mayhem where if you spend too long thinking about your next move you'll suddenly find your three opponents are a few KOs ahead of you. And you're on fire. Fighting is alarmingly simple: Every character has just two attack buttons that each do four different things depending on how you move the stick when you hit them. Throw in the occasional shield to break attacks, and grab to initiate easy throws, and you have a system that takes just seconds to learn regardless of your choice of fighter. You don't even need to pay attention to health bars, or combo gauges, or anything else traditionally associated with the beat-em-up genre, because there aren't any. Damage taken accumulates as a percentage against you, and the higher a character's damage the further they will be launched on the next hit. Launch someone off the stage such that they are unable to get back without falling off the screen, and you score a KO.
These basic mechanics are both the series' unique selling point and its downfall. The more damage you take, the more time you will spend flying around the screen desperately trying to recover and land a few hits in yourself. The visual noise is incredible as a result, with four characters launching all manner of attacks using a variety of wacky items against a fully animated (and often interactive) backdrop of mayhem. Even relatively simple stages such as the Lylat Cruise, positioned atop a wide spaceship, are rendered chaotic by the ship's insistence on dogfighting in asteroid fields and ploughing through atmospheres. It can simply be too much for a new player to take in unless you turn off all the items and settle on a basic stage that's easy on the eye. However, that's really not the point of Brawl, and the best experiences are when you can gather like-minded gamers together and play what is essentially realtime lightspeed Worms in a kaleidoscopic orgy of geekiness.
Surprisingly, there also lurks within another game. Named the Subspace Emissary, it replaces Melee's Adventure mode with a full-fledged RPG, chronicling the game world and its attack from the forces of Subspace. New characters may be unlocked here, and stickers can be applied to their bases in order to boost their skills for the purposes of the single player game. The Emissary is reasonably large, taking a few days to see through to its conclusion, but it is more than worth it for an insight into the politics behind the unusual world of Smash and to collect those delicious trophies for your hoard. The structure of the single player campaign also provides a drip-feed of characters, forcing you to try them out and adapt tactics that will come in useful in later games. Thankfully, there is no voice acting.
There are, of course, very competent AI routines waiting to demonstrate their electronic superiority in lieu of other people. The AI can be taken on in any type of brawl, making up numbers if you're short or taking you on alone if you have no friends. Customising your own match is simple, and it's even possible to set up special fights whereby everyone starts at 300% (!) with bunny hoods and low gravity. Additional game modes let you brawl in teams, use more traditional HP gauges, or take the morally questionable route of beating money out of other players. For the solo player, there are structured matches against a series of randomly-determined opponents and specific mini-missions as well as the normal botmatch-style fighting.
Brawl takes full advantage of the Wii's power, light though it is compared to the other members of its generation. The backdrops closely resemble the original games, rendering them particularly eye-searing on the likes of F-Zero GX's Port Town, and the array of characters are well-animated without causing any slowdown. It works with the Classic Controller, Nunchuk, Wiimote alone, or the trusty 'Cube for purists. Pop an SD card into the machine and you can save snapshots of your trophy collection, freeze battles mid-action to take the perfect picture, or even save entire matches (up to three minutes) to preserve memorable victories.
There is so much to see and do in Brawl that I managed to lose an evening writing this, because I had to go back to check my notes and kept getting dragged in to fights. You will likely tire of the single player modes before 100%ing it — completing every task with every character is somewhat masochistic — but as a competent, varied, and reasonably simple multiplayer mashup with dip-in single player modes and more retro fanboyism than any other game to date, Brawl is a keeper.
In Conclusion
It's difficult to come to a meaningful conclusion about Brawl. It is without a doubt an essential Wii title and is a improvement on Melee in all the ways it tries to be. The enjoyment you'll get out of it is directly proportional to the amount of Nintendo in your history, which ironically goes against the Big N's commitment to drawing in new players. This means that the very people who should be playing Brawl are probably already doing it and are just checking this review to see what they can flame me for.
So I'll say this: Mega Fast Coin match, no Fox, items on, Pokémon Stadium 2. Suck it.
| Super Smashing Great |
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| Bus Fare Home |
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| Final Score | |
|---|---|
| Visuals: | Eye-meltingly confusing |
| Innovation: | What? |
| References to other games: | They don't make numbers that high |
| Nin out of Tendo | |
| It's like Super Smash Bros. Melee, but on a bigger disc. | |
