Super Smash Bros. Brawl – The Best in the Series?
Overview of the Game:
The Super Smash Bros. series has gone though three games now, and the main question left to ask is, after a few months of playing, is Super Smash Bros. Brawl standing up to the legacy created by the original and Melee? Being a gamer, I have played the other games as well, and I have to say, the highlight of the series was Melee. It was one heck of a great game, with the least amount of flaws in the series. If you have played Brawl then you have probably asked yourself, “How many people do I truely see playing as characters such as Bowser, Princess Peach, Wario, Caption Falcon, or Jigglypuff?” The reasons behind people not playing as these characters is because of the lack of even game play between characters.
Bowser is too slow without enough power balance him out, and I don’t know what Princess Peach is supposed to be good at, and the same goes for Wario. Caption Falcon verges between power and speed, and as such, does not have enough of either. Jigglypuff, sorry, people have hated you since the first game. The character scheme is just not even. If you want even game play between characters, go play a game like Team Fortress 2. If you have ever watched a tournament, it proves that the characters were uneven, not just the players. In one tournament I was in, Ike won 1st and 2nd place. Ike was created unevenly, with many powerful attacks, and with a proper user, he could even create the illusion of being a fast character. The only downfall on him was his return move, or up-B. Overall the game just does not live up to its legacy. I’ve played Melee for 7 years, and it wasn’t until the 7th year I’ve started to get bored with it, whereas I can get bored of Brawl after about 2 hours. For the first 3 or so months it wasn’t boring, because there were achievements to fulfill. These are a good addition to the series. I enjoyed checking the section with the challenges to do, as it gave me something to do with my time in the game. Now that I have just 10 or so achievements left, I realize just how much of a waste of time it was, seeing as I could never get all of the pointless trophies and stickers. Stickers are completely pointless. They conduct even less of a thrill than trophies, which at least give you a brief background into the game that you have won the trophy for. The only thing you can really do with stickers is put them on the bottom of trophies. Why did they even put these into the game?
Game Play:
Game play is screwed up in so many ways. Some items have been changed, such as the fire flower. You can now move while spewing fire. This gives you the ability to deal massive damage at any time. It can build up to almost 50% before you run out of fire from the flower. With someone like Ike, this will allow you to kill someone with only one smash attack. In battle, weird things can happen such as an attack reaching too far, or a character turning around for no reason. The stages are brilliantly made, however. There are 41 preset stages to choose from, some of which you must unlock, and 35 characters, also some of which you must unlock. For the first time in the series you are able to create your own stages, increasing my stage selection screen to 140 stages (I made 99 custom stages with the aid of a friend). One of the best additions to the game is being able to save replays and pictures at any time in the pause menu. You are also allowed to download one stage, replay, and picture at random from Nintendo a day. You can go to a stage compile website to download stages that others have built if you have an SD card. All in all, game play is not poor, but the stage builder fails for what was expected, and the glitches in game can really drive a player crazy.
Single player (Story):
The story was extremely lacking. None of the characters would talk to each other. How can you create an interesting story with no dialog? And Nintendo pull the old game lengthening trick of making you play every level twice. Why? No one, except people who really like the game, will want to play every level again just for the sake of playing them again. Every boss was too easy until the final boss, when the difficult level goes from a 10% difficulty throughout the entire game to a difficulty rating of about 35%. Once you have beaten the game after a good 6-20 hours of your life, depending on how good you are at this game, you can finally play as one of the most anticipated characters, Sonic. He turns out to be hard to control, extremely weak, and has only 4 different moves. One of his moves turns him into a spiked ball that does very little damage. He can punch, he can jump up high on a spring, or he can kick down so fast you would think he was made of lead. All in all, new characters are found lacking and boring except for a few, such as Snake and Lucas, who find themselves thrown into the storyline with absolutely no introduction. If you read the literature found at The Official Smash Bros. Site, then you find out that the Halberd (the big ship that looks like Meta Knight) was stolen a long time ago, so Snake has probably been there for a long time. All in all, the story is one of the most pointless things I have ever taken time to go through, but I wanted Sonic, so I had to fight though endless amounts of pointless enemies to fight a stupid boss that doesn’t seem to mean anything to anyone. At least the other bosses came from another game and made sense.
In the end, Super Smash Bros. Brawl just didn’t cut it for me. It was below par after all that time they spent delaying and delaying, and Masahiro Sakurai just spent the whole time trying to tell us what he was going to do on the Smash Bros. site instead of actually working on the game. Half of the stuff that he said would be excellent was terrible, and a few of the things that he briefly mentioned, or didn’t mention at all, were better than the things that he wasted his time writing about. So if you are looking for a quality fighting game, go and buy Super Smash Bros. Melee for $30 bucks cheaper than Brawl.
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