Super Smash Bros. Brawl

One of my friends said this game was the reason he bought a Wii. I wasn't that anxious to try it out and having it being released in the US millennia before it washed ashore in Europe didn't help either.

The thing is that there are lots of people going nuts over this game with their videos on Youtube and angry replies to anyone with anything negative to say about it. Remember when Yahtzee got bashed for stating his opinion on the game? I even linked to his reply video because it was that good. Anyway, this is simply yet another Smash Bros. game, same old same old.

Before I go into the game I have to say that despite the fact that there are lots of control schemes available, only one really works and that's the traditional gamepad approach a la Gamecube Controller. You could use the Classic one too but the fact that it dangles from your Wiimote makes me ignore it completely for any game. The Wavebird is your best choice if you want to be any good at this game just like with Mario Kart Wii.

I have to start with the one point that I don't see many complain about for some reason. I guess that reason is that I'm alone on this issue but it sure does bother me. The issue is control. The characters behave oddly and the cancellations for their moves are annoying as hell. You don't get an exact idea of what it is but the game is fast and your movements seem too slow to keep up with the pace. When you start hitting in one direction you can't change direction until your animation comes to a full halt and it gets even more annoying when you press one button enough times to get a combo off and thus an even longer animation. It's better to have a short hit animation and check for direction facing changes from the player's controller between each one and also not have a long combo from a single button.

But that's also part of what Smash Bros has always been about, easy button mashing. Of course the better players will be better but the new guy can always have a chance. We played a few games with some friends of which one was a girl that doesn't like games at all. She beat us a few times easily. It's partly to do with you losing points for falling down and on a subconscious level nobody wanting to hit the pink Kirby played by the girl I guess, but the game is still fairly beginner-friendly.

Anyway, back to the controls, another thing I find them lacking is precision. This is painfully evident in the platform jumping sections of the single player Subspace Emissary (SSE) campaign. The jumps vary WILDLY, to say the least, between characters and thus getting to know one character well is vital, however in SSE you have to switch characters between every level. The other thing that breaks precision is the dash mechanic. You have to "jab" your joystick to the side fast, instead of gradually pulling it there as you normally do, in order to make your character run. This doesn't work very well because your motion has to be really damn fast and takes getting used to and because it's on the same joystick as your regular move you'll keep trying to jab the stick a bit to the right to line yourself up for a jump (you know, taking fast short steps to get exactly on an edge for example) but instead end up running off the cliff altogether. Happens often in the Home Run Contest special mode. You also start running often when trying to switch directions like turning to the right when you're facing left and thus you sprint too far to the right.

Let's just say Viewtiful Joe did the controls better. Learn from there. Both games are fairly similar in the end.

I already wrote of the characters being very different and how that can be a bad thing, but it can also be a good thing. It's fun to know that they really did put thought into them and some are slower, some faster, some are different versions of each other (Fox and Falco) and so on. There's a lot to choose from when you unlock all of them. However, I don't think it really needs pointing out but without Nintendo characters this game wouldn't have sold nearly as much. For me the novelty value of having Mario beat the living shit out of Peach wore off on the N64. Unlocking the characters has always pissed me off though, it makes no sense in a game that you play with friends even though you could unlock them with your friends by playing hours of brawl mode but I think Yahtzee summed it up well enough to not go deeper into it. I just think unlocking characters and levels should be implemented better into multiplayer like doing events with 2-4 players. There are some events now but not for more than 2 players and they're not very interesting. Just the basic, "Kick ass and get reward" affairs. Some of them have a bit more imagination like collecting coins but mostly they require you to beat some AI controlled fighter. Yay.

Speaking of multiplayer, WiFi play sucks. Sakurai said in an Edge magazine interview that only lately are the Japanese people getting more into online play, and judging by Nintendo games I would say it sure looks like it. Why can't you play with your friend on the same console like in Mario Strikers Charged or Mario Kart Wii? Spectating matches and betting your coins on who wins is fun but other than that it's really only possible to do simple fights against friends or random people. Where are the top player charts, servers to upload your levels to, online achievements, custom matches, etc.? I couldn't even find a multiplayer game when I checked. So nevermind WiFi.

They've done a lot for the game it seems with all the different things you can unlock but the problem for me is that most of them are totally useless. I never understood the trophy thing for example. Why on earth would you want to collect these boring looking 3D rotatable items (that have been done in every game) and even worse, why would you want to set up 4 of them and take pictures of them?? Taking pictures in general is cool during matches but a trophy picture room? Geez. If they wanted to spice it up a bit then create in-game action figures of each character that you could freely move the limbs around (might be too hard to set up to control for a console gamepad) or then simply have preset animations you could run to create your own machinima. That would be fun. Currently there's not enough useful stuff in the game but again, I think I'm alone on this.

The stickers are a nice idea and a good mechanic, although only for SSE. It's a sort of simplified way of adding a role-playing element to the game. The problem is there are too many characters and each one has their own sticker setup. Seeing as the stickers can have effects that only affect certain characters (like adding lightning damage) you can get to fine-tune your character army nicely but it's not really needed to pass the game, which is a good thing too to not complicate this casual game. The idea that they disappear if you take one off from a character's trophy's base (good idea too) is explained well by them being stickers and the glue surface thus gets worse and doesn't stick anymore. All in all a good simple idea.

So what about SSE then?

The cut-scenes are absolutely amazing. Not because they have some new effects or anything, but they are smooth, very fun to follow and use no speech but still succeed in telling a great story. A story that's very dark I might add. The Master Hand boss even has blood dripping out of its wounds at the end! In a Nintendo game! Scary stuff. I really feel bad for Lucas, that little kid went through hell in Earthbound/Mother with his mother dying and all and now you see him fight for his friend Ness. The cut-scenes rock. Even cooler is the character selection before levels where the cut-scene stops and you get 1P and 2P arrows on top of the characters letting players choose who they want to be in the coming level. It's got an awesome sense of style when everything just stops from the fast frantic action and you get control. Introducing the characters is done well too by once again stopping time and showing their name in a very simple, non-glorified, huge font for a while. And to top it all off the story is funny and I found myself actually laughing out loud at some of the things that happened.

But the thrills of SSE end there. The rest of it is a chore. It's boring to play and the terrible control the game has shines through on center stage in this mode. It's not nearly as bad in crazy brawls but jumping and oldschool side-scroller action is not for Smash Bros. The engine just isn't built for it, BUT I have a habit of saying that anything can be made to work if done right and that applies here too. If SSE was done by emphasizing short fights against harder foes in detailed locations it might be more fun. Now I find myself just running through to the next level exit hoping to see some more cinematics. But then you have to go back to another level of boring stupidity. There are trophies and stickers locked in secret rooms but I couldn't care less and therefore haven't fully completed nearly any of the levels.

Later on SSE gets even more annoying. First, you get to the areas where the camera scrolls onwards in some direction as you have to keep up or you die. I've always hated this. A good example of bad design is a section where you have to jump up some platforms and the camera keeps panning up. If you jump up off a platform to the next one and let the camera pan past the last one, then jump back down where it should be you die. I know the idea is that you have to keep up with something and thus this adds to the speed and adrenaline level when you get baddies attacking you at the same time but I find it odd that the camera fucks you over. It's the same as in the earlier Resident Evil games where Leon would definitely see a zombie at the other end of the corridor but you wouldn't as the player because your camera angle is set to only view half of the area. I think these types of things should be a thing of the past and you should see what your character sees. If you want a platform Ice Climbers area where you have to keep jumping up then add a pool of rising lava to the bottom to explain the scenario a bit instead of saying "the world outside the camera doesn't exist". The second thing that annoys me about the end of SSE is the last level. It's called The Great Maze and that's enough said really. It's a huge maze and thank God for the map you get when pressing start. If hell was all about boredom this would be it. The idea of the black stuff eating the little worlds is cool but reliving through each and every one of them is dumb, why not make your characters walk on miniature versions of a few of the coolest levels instead to give it a cool new flare.

SSE is a good idea in general but these game mechanics don't lend well to it. There are some bosses along the way but they're really more about button mashing than actually avoiding many of their attacks. The last boss is the worst of them all because he teleports all over the place and have to take your time trying to catch up.

The AI is slightly annoying at times too. It tends to do the opposite of what you do. When you press a certain directional C attack for example, the Wii knows you pressed it so obviously the enemy dodges at the exact same time numerous times in a row making it feel very inhuman. The difficulty can get quite high though as seen when unlocking the last character I got, Wolf (who I thought was Link's wolf form from Twilight Princess, which would've been cooler). It's not exactly a game you play solo anyway though so nevermind the AI.

The graphics aren't very different to Smash Bros. Melee for the Gamecube even though the textures are more detailed. You still get the annoying ultra-far zoom out in some levels like the Zelda castle and New Pork City levels. If it was HD it wouldn't matter.. It's also very inconsistent at times partly because of so many different characters from different types of games. The characters themselves fit together fairly well though but the surroundings don't always. I probably wouldn't have had photographed food drop as powerups. Better draw them or make sprites from simple 3D. Also, the target practise levels look like something an amateur did graphically. Their flow and playability is good though with precisely positioned walls and paths.

There are still some really interesting ideas and cool designs (getting Sonic and Snake in is a big deal, really cool), but it's mostly from the old games already. How about the Double Dragon brothers as playable characters? Or maybe Megaman. I'm sure their choices rely on copyrights and what character is hip/"in"/trendy currently too but I felt it didn't have enough despite all the reviews stating how much there is to gather. There is a lot but it's a lot of rubbish. Taking screenshots and video of your play is very cool and should be implemented in every game. Then there are these little things like pressing down on the directional pad when using Snake against Yoshi, you get an interesting little conversation:

S: Otacon! What's this lizard thing?
O: That's a Yoshi. It's a dinosaur from Yoshi's
Island.
O: Watch out for its long, chameleon-like
tongue. If it gets you, you'll be swallowed
whole.
S: It lays eggs and throws them, right?
...Then it must be female.
O: ...Actually, it's a "he". At least, that's what
it says.
S: It talks!?
O: Yes! It talks! Well, kind of...
S: Now you've got me curious. ...How about I
capture one so we can see what they taste
like?
O: Uhh, Snake...

The game reminds me of Kingdom Hearts in the way that KH wouldn't have sold well either if it weren't for Donald and co. But we've already covered that. It's why I bought this game too, I'm not that big a fan of fighting games. Although Soulcalibur IV and Street Fighter 4 both look amazing..

The level editor in Smash Bros. Brawl could use some work too. First off, why do you need to "unlock" some pieces you can use by creating some crappy simple levels first? I would understand it if you unlocked huge piles of advanced pieces at a time that you could fine-tune and thus need more experience with the editor but since it's all very simple (and yet frustrating) I don't see the point in holding you back. It's just so you could have something more to unlock for the sake of unlocking which isn't a good thing. The editor has too many things I would change to start listing them all here. I'll just say that the user interface is done a lot better in the menus of the game (even though sometimes you get lost trying to find what you wanted because they're found behind some weird Vault option instead of Data or whatever). One key point is that you have to scroll block by block to the left of the screen, away from the level pieces, to get to erase some part and you if you press A to place a piece you get sent back to the piece selection area. It would be more logical to swap A with Z and thus Z only places one piece whilst A lets you place as many as you want. Overall it's a nice addition to create your own levels but the interface isn't very good. If you're thinking "but it's a console game, you can't have too complex an editor in it!" then have a look at Timesplitters 2 on the Gamecube for example and see how that's done. It's even 3D and works a whole lot better. Level building is a creative process and having to pause every now and then to navigate the menus is counter-productive.

The Music is Smash Bros. Brawl is great but again tunes we've already heard. They're remakes in a way and hearing Sonic's first song in the Green Hill Zone level was awesome. There are songs used in TV ads and the main song is by the legendary Nobuo Uematsu so I'm not really complaining on this front. The actual Latin lyrics to the song, with English subtitles, are shown along with the end credits to SSE and it makes the song 100 times cooler. Collecting the CDs to unlock the songs might be a bit dumb again but these guys sure like to emphasize the COLLECTING aspect. There are some guides on Youtube, found by searching for CD Factory, that show you how to make custom levels that can be used to "farm" these CDs so that helps a bit whilst at the same time showing how a community comes together for a solution to a problem in a game.

I'm not so sure about the game balance in the game. It seems to work fine and with some of the movement tweaks implemented to combat problems in Smash Bros. Melee, Brawl seems to be a better package altogether. These problems were supposedly related to people locking others in place by bashing some buttons thus causing the game to be called broken by some of the more hardcore fighting game people. After spectating a few WiFi matches I can say that I'd probably get my ass beaten by the skill some people have. People know exactly what each of the power-ups do that might drop on the playfield and they use them wisely in conjunction with their own character which they've mastered.

This doesn't really feel like a game that needs to be absolutely perfectly balanced, it's just a casual fighting game with a twist and even though the controls annoy the hell out of me, it's fairly fun in a group of friends. Not really worth 56 euros though, but that's probably just me again.