Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Now with online play, Sonic The Hedgehog and Solid Snake!
Genre(s): Fighting Platform(s): Wii Release: JP/HK: January 31, 2008 NA: March 9, 2008 AU: June 26, 2008 EU: June 27, 2008 KOR: April 29, 2010 Developer(s): Game Arts Sora Ltd. Publisher(s): Nintendo (1889-2015, 2017-2020) Country: Japan Series: Super Smash Bros. Predecessor: Super Smash Bros. Melee Successor: Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U

"They're back. Stronger than ever. And they've brought friends. Lots of them."

— North American commercial

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a crossover fighting game developed by Game Arts and Sora Ltd. and published by Nintendo for the Wii video game console. It is the third game in the Super Smash Bros. series, and was released on January 31, 2008 in Japan as Super Smash Bros. X. It was followed by Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U in 2014.

Why It Brought Lots of Friends

1. There are a lot of characters to play as, from both Nintendo franchises, and for the first time, Sonic the Hedgehog and Solid Snake from the Metal Gear franchise, both third-party characters.
   • You're too slo-ow!
2. Great gameplay.
3. Play with up to four local players for lots of fun.
4. An awesome single player or co-op mode called "Adventure Mode: The Subspace Emissary", which is a long story based adventure. You can upgrade your characters using stickers that you place on the bottom of trophies, which has the effect. The level "The Great Maze" is considered best, because you can choose three characters and can fight the false characters and re-battle the boss. It is also nice that it recreate stages with many having slight modifications and different music from than the originals. You can also battle and unlock Toon Link, Jigglypuff, and Wolf. After you beat all the battles, a large purple door becomes accessible in the center of the maze, which leads to Tabuu's Residence.
   • On the topic of Tabuu, he seemed to have one of, if not the best boss fight of all time, although some attacks are harder.
5. For the first time ever (excluding Master Hand, Crazy Hand, and Giga Bowser), the Story Mode has boss battles.
6. Gorgeous graphics, even by Wii or even 2008 standards.
7. Introduced a new item, Assist Trophies that function very similarly to Poké Balls. However, an NPC would come out instead of a Pokémon. And once an Assist Trophy is grabbed, it is automatically activated (assuming the holder is standing on the ground and not jumping, attacking or being hitstunned), with many of them also features iconic/fan-favourite characters such as Little Mac from Punch-Out, Hammer Bros and Waluigi from Mario franchise and Knuckle Joe from Kirby franchise who can support them, making this one of Brawl's coolest items.
8. Extremely iconic theme song.
9. An online mode, a first for the Super Smash Bros. series, before Nintendo officially shut-down the servers of Nintendo WFC, which is very difficult, unless you must use homebrew to connect to a third party server.
10. You can now build your own stages using the Stage builder, newly introduced in the series. It is however limited.
11. You can now take screenshots during a match and record a replay after one (if it lasted 3 minutes or less).
12. This marks the first time Lucas from the Japan-only Mother 3 makes his appearance outside of Japan, allowing western players to get an interest in Mother 3.
13. Again, there are tons of more returning game modes to choose from, with most of new introduced like Masterpieces, and Boss Battles.
14. The game has a nice dark tone in it.
15. Incredible and awesome effect sounds.
16. The Smash Ball and Final Smash was introduced in this game. Break a Smash Ball and attempt to use your power attack to activate a Final Smash attack which will do massive damage to other players, for example Mario blasts giant fireballs from his hands, Donkey Kong plays drums, damaging foes in the process, and Link will use the Triforce of Courage to catch foes and attacks them several times and lands a powerful final blow. Most of the Final Smashes were also incredibly best and the idea of having the Smash Ball and Final Smash are incredibly unique.
17. Some characters will change to other characters during gameplay. For example, Samus will lose her power suit and turn into Zero Suit Samus when she uses her Final Smash, and Zero Suit Samus will regain her suit and turn into her power suit when she uses her Final Smash. Another example is Pokémon Trainer, who controls three Pokémon, Ivysaur, Charizard, and Squirtle, and the Trainer can switch Pokémon throughout the battle.
    • Also, it marks the first time Sheik is listed in the character selection screen. Because of this, Melee only shows Zelda on its character selection screen, but in this game however that Zelda and Sheik are the only two characters (in this game only) to share a character select icon.
18. There is an official site about the game called Smash Bros. Dojo, which is still up! But that's not all.
19. Lots of mods have been made for the game, most notably the character ones. And the game itself is also great for modding, when you have unpatched Wii.
20. The musical score is so perfect that it became the most popular moment in gaming history and others will find it catchy and timeless. The example are the main theme, Final Destination and credits song.
21. This is the only Super Smash Bros. game to have a native Korean announcer, as the next two Smash games would reuse Xander Mobus' voice clips for the Korean version.

Bad Qualities

1. Finding matches online was very difficult and the Nintendo WFC servers are now permanently down. As the result, it is now impossible to do an online match unless you use homebrew to connect to a third party server.
   • On top of that, online battles were often borderline unplayable. Lag, disconnects, and frame drops were rampant.
2. 100-Man Brawl and Cruel Brawl are very frustrating and unfair: in the former, there can be up to 5 enemies at the same time and they easily overpower you, not to mention that you must clear it with every single character to get the Blue Alloy trophy, and the latter also because enemies vastly outnumber you, but also because a single tilt, aerial, or smash attack can KO you, and you must defeat 10 foes to unlock the Liquid Snake sticker. Yes, all that work for a single sticker.
3. The game is known to be easy to crash, as demonstrated by Nintendo Unity. Simple methods include:
   • Using King Dedede's Final Smash against six Ice Climbers and a handful of sandbags and smart bombs. This may not always crash the game, but make it lag horrendously.
   • Using Sheik's side special at the peak of her short hop as the first move of a match. This has to be frame perfect, making this method difficult.
   • Escaping Yoshi's grab before entering his mouth, by mashing buttons extremely fast.
4. There are some more frustratingly hard or unfun event matches such as Molten Norfair, All Star Battle X2, The Final Final Battle and Advent of the Evil King.
5. There are a handful of more bad or mediocre stages, including:
   • 75m
   • Rumble Falls
   • Hanenbow
   • Norfair
   • Mario Bros.
   • Mushroomy Kingdom
6. Long loading times, at least when played on real hardware. The Classic mode is especially notorious for taking way too long to load stages, and on Multi-man brawl battles, it also takes very long for more characters to appear.
7. During a match, there is about a 1% chance of tripping after a dash, which made dash-dancing risky and camping easier as a result and stupid idea. This infamous mechanic has been toned down in the next games, where the characters only trip under certain circumstances.
8. Some Final Smashes are practically useless.
   • Peach's one, for example, means that you failed to launch the opponents, which put them to sleep instead.
   • Ness' and Lucas' is another example, as it is RNG-based instead of being controllable. Thankfully, Smash 4 and Ultimate allow you to control their Final Smashes.
   • Also, sometimes actually good Final Smashes can be useless, for example Link's Final Smash consists of you having to catch foes in his Triforce of Courage, otherwise it does basically nothing.
9. While this game introduced the Smash Ball, it also introduced the Smoke Ball, which is not very effective, and while the Assist Trophy is a neat item, there are some useless assist trophies characters that destroyed the fun experience such as the Nintendog (that takes the entire screen), The Devil (who messes with the screen by moving it where it makes fighting the opponents difficult) and Mr. Resetti (who does nothing but make speeches).
10. The game is a lot "slower" than the previous entry and didn't have many of the movement tools and combos that Melee had (there's little to no hitstun), leading to a much smaller competitive scene. There is, however, a mod called Project M which fixes this issue by making the game faster paced, a variation of it, Project + even introduces Knuckles as a playable character.
    • There are severe problems with the balance and development of characters as well, like in Melee:
      • Meta Knight is extremely overpowered. His attacks have little startup/ending lag, making them so unstoppable and also almost unpunishable. In addition, all of his special moves can be used for recovery, and like Pit/Charizard, he can glide as well. Due to his unfair moveset, many Brawl tournaments have banned the character.
      • Mario is pretty underpowered, as his attacks are weak and/or have pretty little range like his Fireball and F.L.U.D.D.
      • Captain Falcon is also underpowered as most of his attacks are slow, badly nerfed, and/or have poor reach and hitbox placement. His grab range is also short and his vulnerability to chain grabbing is extremely high.
      • Pokémon Trainer Red’s Pokémon all suffer from their Exclusive Stamina mechanic with Ivysaur Getting It the Worst which explains one of the reasons why All Four are so low in Brawl’s tier List.
        • Speaking of Which, Ivysaur is the worst out all of the three Pokémon as its recovery and Air Game are in atrocious use and most of its attacks are pathetically weak and/or slow.
      • Jigglypuff is super underpowered as its attacks are useless and/or too weak like its rest move and Puff Up, Its Final Smash. Its ground speed is also super slow and it can still Get KO'd from its own shield break.
      • Zelda is worse and barely any better than the horrible fighter she was in the previous game.
      • Ganondorf is the worst playable character in the entire game. He is extremely slow in terms of speed and even moveset, and his jumps are so low that he can barely do any aerial attacks. He also can barely continue moving when it comes to defending himself from fast projectiles like Falco's Blaster and Link's Arrows.
      • Ness and Lucas have 10 additional frames after they are released from grabs, which allows some characters (like King Dedede) to indefinitely pummel them, and explains why they are so low in Brawl's tier list.
      • Sonic and Olimar are poorly developed. For Sonic, most of his moves simply consist of him attacking in his ball form and his down aerial leads him to death when meteor-spiking out opponents hit him, and if he tries edge-guarding the platforms to prevent foes from getting back on the field, he can end up falling of the battlefield to his doom. For Olimar, most of his attacks simply consist of him using his Pikmin.
        • Not to mention, Sonic was one of the reasons why it took so long for the game to release.
11. Some plot holes in the story mode, like how Snake entered the Halberd without any backstory. Not only that, but some characters, like Wolf, Toon Link, Sonic and Jigglypuff get little to no screentime in it and thus had a lack of proper character development.

Reception

Super Smash Bros. Brawl received universal acclaim, with praise centered on its entertainment value despite issues relating to its content loading times. Its musical score, composed through a collaboration of 38 renowned video game composers, was lauded for its representation of different generations in gaming history. Brawl received an aggregate review score of 93% on Metacritic and was named the "Fighting Game of the Year" by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. In 2010, the game was included as one of the titles in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die. As of 2008, it is the eighth best-selling Wii game of all time, with over thirteen million copies sold worldwide.

Trivia

• Pat Cashman, the announcer of the game, and the voice provider of Master and Crazy Hand, was the announcer for Bill Nye the Science Guy.
• In the game's code, there is an unused character list called "The Forbidden Seven", and are identified as Dr. Mario, Roy, Mewtwo, Dixie Kong, Toon Zelda, Toon Sheik (Speculated to be Tetra), and Pra_Mai (Speculated to be Plusle and Minun).
• Pac-Man, Villager from Animal Crossing, the Miis, and Ridley from Metroid were intended to be in Brawl. They were scrapped because thought it is impossible for these characters at the time to join Brawl (each character had it for different reasons) meaning that they were not ready yet until they appeared in later games. However, Ridley did appear as a boss in the game, and the Villagers make cameo appearances in the Smashville stage.
  • Other characters were intended to join Brawl such as a Nintendog, Blastoise and Venusaur (were going to be part of the Pokemon Trainer's pack-of-three) from Pokémon, Krystal from Star Fox, and Geno from Super Mario RPG. Nintendog was cut because Sakurai thought it wasn't such a good idea most likely due to the Nintendog's realistic appearance. Blastoise and Venysaur were cut because they were replaced by Squirtle and Ivysaur due to balance regarding with the Pokémon Trainer's Pokémon. Krystal was cut due to time constraints. Geno was cut due to copyright issues with Square Enix.

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