"Brawl is the best game in the series, though the worst for it's time."

Some people here might remember a decade or so ago, watching tv and seeing a commercial of a few Nintendo characters happily skipping along before they begin beating the unholy **** out of each other. Most of you, probably not. Super Smash Bros. was a bit of a sleeper hit which offered unique, addictive gameplay and allowed you to take a handful of Nintendo's most popular characters and let them at it.

Melee was a natural and far-reaching extension of that game, offering more than double the original characters and pounding feature after feature down our throats. The gameplay was arguably worse, what with it's focus on speed limiting any heavy hitting characters, but few can doubt that the sheer abundance of features and ways of playing made for an overall better game.

Now we have Brawl, a game which has gone back to it's roots with slower gameplay while keeping the abundance of features. There's little doubt that the more balanced gameplay as well as even wider range of features makes this game stand head and shoulders above it's predecessors, but there's also little doubt that many of these features could have been made much, much better.

Graphics: 7
No Wii game will ever have especially good graphics, but the game runs smoothly and there's nothing to make you cringe. If you're playing offline it's a chore to make the fps so much as flinch so there's a bonus. The only bad thing of note is how small some objects you pick up tend to be. For whatever reason the devs decided to shrink a lot of objects and even give a couple similar colors. For instance, motion sensor bombs and screw attacks are roughly the same size and color, the latter differentiating itself only with a small lightning bolt which can easily go unnoticed in the action. Screw attacks also look much like the Franklin badge. And then there's deku nuts which are, again, a similar color and size. It's a rather annoying detail which should've been addressed in play testing early on and can actually cut into gameplay at points. However, it's not enough to drag the graphics down to mediocre levels.

Sound Effects: 9
Every thud, bump, hit and groan has it's own sound. Most of it is well done and can be told relatively easily from the next sound. No real problems here. Voice acting is generally good with a couple bad lines or odd choices - most notably, Pit sounds like a grown woman, Meta Knight has a Spanish accent and I don't remember Wolf ever sounding southern. These are all generally easy to look beyond, but they do keep it from a perfect score.

Music: 10
Easily the best-done portion of the game, there's enough tracks here to satisfy all but the most die-hard Nintendo fans. Again, there are a couple odd choices (the Super Mario Bros. remix), but the sheer selection, all of it orchestrated, really doesn't deserve anything less than a 10. You will simply not find a better available soundtrack for a game anywhere.

Stages: 8
41 stages, not including those you can create in stage builder, is nothing to wag your finger at. Added, they included some of the more popular Melee stages into that mix and you really won't have much trouble finding what you want. That doesn't mean the stages don't have their problems, however. New Pork City, for example, is so large and constantly zoomed out that it's difficult at best seeing what the characters are doing. Spear Pillar, on the other hand, has so many effects which can kill you with little warning that it's more of a hassle playing than anything.

What annoys me, however, is that not all characters get their own stages still. Ike and Marth share one between them, Ganondorf has no stage to speak of, and arguably Zelda as well, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. Meanwhile Metroid has three stages, two new, two featuring the same old lava design and one taking place in a rather random location in the Metroid universe.

To sum up, while there's something for everyone, the design choices for a lot of stages are odd or even downright awful. When I say stages are an 8/10, I mean a very low 8.

Roster: 7
The best in a SSB game, but that's not really saying much. The original game had such a small roster while Melee, while a great game, had outright terrible selections for some characters. Brawl's roster problem isn't so much the size, despite what people might argue, but the choices made with some of the characters.

For instance, Ganondorf is still represented terribly. He has never been in a fist fight as far as we can tell and has a plethora of potential moves from his games, yet here he is, fighting with his fists. I can understand not changing a character from the previous game, but Brawl plays so differently from Melee this really isn't an excuse. Meanwhile Snake doesn't use his trademark pistol for reasons of not including realistic weapons, despite that he still uses other realistic weapons and despite other characters firing pistols of their own, futuristic as they may be (not to mention his taunts are all the same - simple laziness by the developers). A lot of moves like this simply don't make sense to me and some outright don't fit the character. Characters like Lucas and Toon Link could've just as easily have not been clones (of Ness and Link, respectively) yet there it is. This is worse when you include Final Smashes, the game's new uber move you most collect by beating a floating smash ball. While many are very original and good, some are simply wasted potential, either copies of other Final Smashes or just odd. Most notably, Wolf in a Landmaster tank despite never driving one or Pokemon Trainer's triple beam where all three pokemon come out at once. This would have been a great opportunity to throw in the ousted fan favorite, Mewtwo, to shine with his true power for a few moments, yet we're given yet another powerful beam FS. Or then there's Ganondorf's classic turning into Ganon, which ends up lasting so short a time those ignorant to the series might wonder what just happened.

Then there's simple series representation, which is noticeably uneven. Starfox, which has not seen a great game in years, has three characters while Metroid has two, one essentially the same character as the other and all the while ignoring the much clamored-for, Ridley. Or F-Zero still only claiming one character while the long-ended series, Mother, has two - clones, no less. Lesser known series as well get little love in the playable roster, though the new assist trophies, objects which summon a temporary and random ally to your cause, alleviate this somewhat.

Another poor point is the lack of alternate costumes. Yes there are recolors, but why can't we get, for instance, a Doctor Mario reskin of Mario? A Roy version of Ike or Sigurd version of Marth? We saw bare hints of this with Wario having both a biker outfit and his classic outfit, but it ends up being failed potential.

In the end, however, the roster is rather large at 35 characters with 39 movesets. Yes it could have been better, but the most necessary characters are here and they all have a moveset which suits them, even if it doesn't represent them the greatest.

Features: 7
Brawl packs many of the same basic features as Melee, only it's regressed in a few ways and added online and stage builder. I'll get into online first.

Random online is laggy, boring trash. You don't know who you're fighting, you cannot communicate in any way and there are frequent hiccups - potentially disastrous in such a chaotic fighter. Playing with friend codes is better, but not by much. There's little to no lag and you can actually choose your matches, but there's still no way to communicate, leaving you with the feeling that you're still playing by yourself. It's a quick fix if you have a favorite opponent or some other means of communication, but otherwise the online is forgettable trash.

Single player can be fun, but is simply not well refined. Classic mode is the same as ever, pitting you in a few battles against opponents, sometimes in a team sometimes when they're metallic, sometimes when they're in large groups, sometimes when they're gigantic. It's basically a quick fix and an easy way to get used to characters. All Star mode pits you against all the characters in the game based on the series. Pretty standard and good for a challenge, but nothing special. Event matches are specialized matches where you must fulfill certain objectives. They can be fun, though having a difficulty setting really cheapens the experience, allowing your to get most of the rewards for completing these events with little effort. This is somewhat similar to the complain I have for the new layout of target smash, a mode in which you pick a character and destroy a group of targets as quickly as possible. Only instead of having a layout for each character like in previous games there's now only five settings, all based on difficulty (which is rarely very difficult). This serves to somewhat cheapen the experience, even for such a relatively minor mode. Multi Man Brawl pits you against a group of polygonal characters in an attempt to destroy as many as possible. It's good for a challenge, but little else as each of the modes basically consists of you spamming a character's attacks and taking advantage of the polygon's crappy AI. Home Run contest is basically a means to unlock a couple trophies and little else and the only other single player mode, Boss Battles, pits you up against the game's 10 bosses who, aside from two or three, rather boring and forgettable.

The real meat and potatoes of the single player is the Sub Space Emissary, a seven hour or so story mode placing you in the role of different characters throughout. Honestly, it's not all that fun. Your character is too zoomed in for the mode to be played as a platformer, yet there are many platformer type levels, and the fighting is not well tweaked for the enemies you face. The story is forgettable, the action dull and, oddly and disappointingly, despite all that the game has to fall back on, it creates many of it's own basic enemies and bosses. You can also go through SSE to unlock characters (and, in fact, need to beat it to get your hands on a few) but this feels rather cheap as the mode offers little challenge and allows you access to the entire roster with little or no effort. In the end, single player mode is there to get you acquainted with the rest of the game and little else.

Stage builder is a nice addition and is what single-handedly brings the features from a 6 to a 7. It's rather basic, but it's still nice creating a stage all your own and has the potential for some very fun mixes. For instance, I have a custom stage built almost entirely of springs, which makes for some rather unique fun. Very nice to have around, just wish they'd built on it more.

The game modes, aside from special melee, have ultimately regressed from Melee. This mostly falls upon your inability to select which stages are ineligible for random stage select. Selecting 'Random Stage' gives you one of any possible stage you have, be it from Brawl, Melee or a custom stage. You might be indecisive on the stage you would like and click on this only to end up in a stage you hate. Meanwhile tournament mode only allows up to 32 characters to enter at once, a smaller size than the actual roster and half of Melee's 64. The shining point is that you can have multiple characters battle in a tournament at once, unlike Melee. Special melee fortunately improved a bit, allowing you to select multiple features at once, such as giant and small character sizes, game speed, gravity and the like. Unfortunately you still cannot select these to go along with any traditional rules, such as stock. Therefore the sheer potential of all these little feature is all but erased. Due to this, playing the game is much the same as playing Melee. There's nothing new here, just tweaks. And this may be where the game falters the most.

Finally we get to collectibles. Namely trophies and stickers. Stickers (and it's album) tend to be rather boring, but they do come in handy for SSE, being as they can give certain boosts to characters for that mode only. Other than that, they're a forgettable feature. Trophies, on the other hand, are a rather fun collectible. With close to 700 to find in total, trophies give background info on a lot of the series, characters and objects seen in and out of Brawl, not to mention are just fun completionist items. My only real issue is how poorly spread across the series they are. Trophies for the less popular games are minimal at best while games like Zelda get a lot of trophies which represent pretty much only the last two games of it's long series. I don't know if it's laziness or what, but overall the trophy selection is a fun feature. Also of note is the challenges guide, which is a sort of menu to show what items (aside from characters) you have yet to unlock. It's a good feature for someone who wants to get it all, but it's cheapened by the fact that you can use a set number of hammers to get by most challenges and get the unlockable item without any effort. It doesn't work for all challenges, but even so it's annoying to think so much of the hard work I could put into the game as a completionist can be matched by a beginner child with a couple clicks of a button.

Menu: 3
Simply put, the menus in this game are horrible. They take longer to load than most games in the last five years have seen and it's really not all that user friendly. It may take a bit finding certain features with how they organized it, but none of this touches on the most annoying feature they forgot to include; default names. When you change a control setting you save it under a name which you then select whenever you play a game. Only you must always remember to select it. You cannot have a default name and every time you enter a new mode you must select that name all over again to use your settings. This is nothing short of annoying as hell and serves to make you restart many games should you forget.

Gameplay: 9
Ah, the real meat of it all. The gameplay. Brawl plays incredible. Those used to Melee will have to adjust, but the game is truly refined from it's predecessors. The characters are well balanced to the point where, for most people, tiers really won't matter. The game is slower than Melee which offers the heavier, more powerful characters their chance to shine. Thus the game is much more strategic and less about having the fastest reaction time (though it definitely helps). Any way you try it, the game is simply fun to play. It's a party game with all the chaos one might expect in the middle of a battle yet it offers something much deeper to those who want a skill fighter. Sure it has a couple problems - items, often explosive, dropping on top of characters at random can be extremely annoying, the bot AI, while a fun challenge at higher difficulties, can really cheat you out of items, most notably by not dropping valuable objects such as smash balls nearly as often as you the player might and some idiotic dev thought it'd be a good idea to have characters trip completely at random (though rarely) which serves only to be a simple, quick annoyance more than anything. But these are nitpicks compared to the sheer fun which is Brawl.

Overall: 8
SSBB is a fun game which could've been so much more. Even so, it is arguably the best game on the Wii and will provide plenty of addictive fun until the next game in the series comes out. Here's to hoping Nintendo connects the dots better for their next attempt, but until then Brawl is an incredible, if flawed, game.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/24/08

Game Release: Super Smash Bros. Brawl (US, 03/09/08)