Super Smash Brothers Brawl

Trying to come up with a good way to begin my review, my head is a jumble of ideas, features, and concepts that swirl around each other in a chaotic mess. But, somehow, that's the perfect introduction to this game: Super Smash Brothers Brawl is chaos, and that's a very good thing.

When I was a kid, I used to get out all of my action figures and have a huge battle royale. Sure, they didn't all have the same scale so some of them were huge in comparison, and more often than not in my excitement I'd break something or put dents in the walls of my room...but I'd be lying if I didn't say that those were always the most fun times I had with those toys, because something about the mash ups and juxtapositions it allowed for was ridiculous and compelling. Thus, the main reason why I think Smash Brothers fascinated me before in the first two games and continues to fascinate me and everyone else with this new installment: it's just fun to see totally unrelated characters fight each other.

The best way I can think of to describe the Smash Brothers series is the following formula: one part party game, two parts fighting game, one part platformer, and three parts nostalgia. Let's take these parts one at a time.

Ever since the original on the N64, Smash Brothers has been one of those de facto party games that people get together to play. It's simple and easy to play, and while skilled players will normally dominate, there's enough chaos and randomness to allow even newcomers to win. Or lose miserably, which is just as fun. It is exceedingly rare that a game can make losing fun, but Smash Brothers does it. Perhaps that's because Brawl, more than ever, makes death a constant. So many things are happening on screen, so many attacks and items are being thrown around, that you're bound to miss something and eventually die. But I almost always find myself laughing and having a great time when, say, a stray Bob-bomb nails me or someone else gets to the Final Smash (a floating item that, when hit enough times, grants the player an overpowered super attack) and destroys everyone on screen. In any other game these kind of things would frustrate and have you shouting "CHEAP!!" alongside obscenities, but as long as you aren't playing to win, you'll always have a great time.

The fighting game aspect of Super Smash Brothers Brawl comes in the fact that it's the game's basic genre. The goal of the game is to knock the other players off the stage rather than simply wearing down a fighting game standard life bar. However, the higher each player's damage percentage becomes, the easier they are to knock away. At the same time, Smash Brothers has always been a pick up and play kind of fighting game because it uses far fewer buttons and attacks than the typical fighting game. The A button is responsible for your basic attacks--kicks, punches--while the B button does all the special moves, of which each character has four. These special moves are unique to each character: Mario has his fireballs, Link has his bombs, Pikachu has lighting attacks, etc. While there are hardcore Smash players out there who will master Brawl, the game is still decidedly aimed at the casual gamer who won't want to--or even need to--master the crazy, advanced moves that people discovered in Smash Brothers Melee on Gamecube.

More than the previous two games, Super Smash Brothers Brawl has inspired stage design just like a platformer. Whereas most of the stages from the others were relatively static, almost all of the new ones from Brawl change as time ticks on and do all kinds of creative things, from the WarioWare stage that interrupts the action every so often to make the players do WarioWare minigames to the way the Frigate Orpheon stage flips upside down, disorienting everyone for a few seconds. Moreover, the new single player mode--Subspace Emissary--is even closer to a platformer, similar to Melee's Adventure mode but much more fleshed out and varied. Though it's no Super Mario Galaxy, Brawl's level designs are one of the many things that make the game as amazing as it is.

Finally, and this part is critical, the nostalgia factor. If you've been a Nintendo fan for any length of time, this game is essentially aimed directly at you. Even setting aside the characters new and old, Brawl has the series standard huge number of Trophies to collect (essentially just collectible 3D models with accompanying text) that are items or characters from seemingly every Nintendo game from the past 25 years; Stickers, which are similar collectibles but ones that can be used in the Subspace Emissary to power up your characters; and Music CDs, which allow you to listen to tracks from a variety of Nintendo games. The fact that they included Pit from the NES game Kid Icarus as a playable character--a character, it's important to note, who hasn't appeared in anything since--speaks volumes for how dedicated this game is to pleasing Nintendo fans from the absolute hardcore to the most casual.

There is so much more I need to talk about--the Stage Builder, the minigames, the Events mode, the Challenges wall, not to mention more about Subspace Emissary and the characters/stages themselves--but I need to get to perhaps the greatest addition to this series: online play. Using the Wii's WiFi Internet capabilities, players can battle each other online. Using game specific Friend Codes, you can play with friends online in a handful of the games modes (one hopes that someday we'll be able to play the singeplayer-only modes like Subspace Emissary and All-Star with friends online) as well as use primitive chat via the game's Taunts. Then there's the Play Anyone option, which finds random players online to fight, though you can't use any of the Taunt Chat and are limited to the basic fighting mode--or you can be a Spectator and bet coins on other people's matches. So far my experience with Online has been hit or miss, both with Friends and Play Anyone. Matches ranged from no latency whatsoever to a one-to-three second delay, which completely ruins a fast paced game like this. As for Play Anyone, sometimes you will find three other willing opponents in less than a minute, and other times you will find no one after three minutes of waiting (or simply get disconnected from the servers). In short, when it works it's great; when it doesn't, well, there's enough other things to go on your own.

From a purely "is this game fun or not, and is it a good value??" point of view, Super Smash Brothers Brawl is the best title currently available for the Wii. I could put on my critic's cap and really dig into the minutiae, how some characters seem overpowered or some of the game's single player content is frustrating and cheap on higher difficulty levels, but this is the sort of game that resists criticism.

It seems as though this entire review ended up being a big jumble of ideas, concepts, and features after all, but as I said at the beginning, maybe that's the point. You don't need to sit around and think about the game like you would a BioShock or Silent Hill, where even though it may not have always been fun, it was a compelling experience. You don't need a critic to help you make sense of it. All you need to do with Super Smash Brothers Brawl is just put it on, hit start, and have fun.