"The Biggest Disappointment in Gaming History"

Let's get this out of the way. It's a great game. But it doesn't live up to the hype and is downright frustrating at times because of some of the horrible decisions that were made in development.

The soundtrack is good and is by far the most epic part of this game. Over 200 songs from all different eras remixed by more artists than you can count in more ways than I even thought possible. Everything from Michiko Naruke's classical guitar style to retro NES themes. It is seriously the best soundtrack ever devised, and the inclusion of Sonic and Metal Gear Solid tracks don't hurt it at all. Everyone involved with this soundtrack needs to give themselves a pat on the back. Good job, guys. And I bet Nobuo Uematsu was happy to compose something other than a remix of One Winged Angel.

My Music was a great idea. This is a feature where you get to decide what tracks play and when. However, its execution is actually pretty terrible. Each track is assigned to one stage, and you can only set the probability that it will play on THAT stage. The vast majority of good music is tied up in a select few stages, and there's one stage that actually has no music at ALL. Melee stages get one or two tracks, usually the tracks that played there in Melee.

Stages are where the game STARTS to get ugly, and then it gets worse from there. Most of the stages have some gimmick that not only gets in the way of fun, but can be and usually are instant death. This makes any serious match a pain to say the least. I've already mentioned the soundtrack issues, but most of the stages are just flat out terrible for their own reasons. There are a ridiculous number of instant death traps that in some cases you can't do anything to see or avoid. One stage "flips" and will reverse your controls without warning, usually while you're recovering. The new Pokemon Stadium is far more intrusive on gameplay, in that its conveyor belts and wind gusts will force your character into places you don't want to go. Norfair's capsule is useless as you can just shield or sidestep the lava wave. Stages like Final Destination and Castle Siege have ledges that you can and will get trapped under while recovering, as opposed to Melee where most of the stages had sloped edges to prevent that.

Speaking of Melee stages, they've also been drastically changed in some cases. Pokemon Stadium 1's edges are now paper-thin and you will more than likely miss and get caught under the stage while recovering. In addition, the windmill is now solid, you can not pass through it. This makes the water stage an enormous inconvenience as some characters absolutely can not get past the windmill now. Between all these factors, there are very few stages you can play on where your opponent will kill you more often than the stage itself.

Subspace Emissary was great. I honestly have no complaints about it. It was actually incredibly challenging on the highest difficulty, and ridiculously easy on the easiest. The storyline was nice too. The one complaint I have is that several characters were not part of the story of Subspace, and more had a mere bit part in it. For those of us who wanted to play one of those characters and save the world with them, we were out of luck.

The hidden Boss Battle mode is incredibly hard. Possibly too hard, considering you're expected to beat it on the highest difficulty, where nearly every attack will instantly kill you.

The character roster is great. There is a very wide variety of characters, plus Sonic and Snake. Aside from Mega Man (who, thanks to Star Force, doesn't deserve a spot right now) there are no serious gaps to be filled. Most franchises now have at least two characters, and there aren't nearly as many clones as there were in Melee.

Character balance is still a serious problem though, worse than it was in Melee. Tournaments so far have essentially been the Snake and Meta Knight Show. Several characters are completely useless, but compared to Snake and Meta Knight, they all are. The intricacies of why this is are too much for a review, but ask any GameFAQs member and they'll tell you the two of them are unstoppable.

The stage creator is a joke. It's honestly the second most half-baked thing I've ever seen in a game. There are exactly SIX unlockable parts. For a total of 24 parts. There are three themes for a stage, each has their own set of 24 parts, which you can enlarge into 3 different sizes.No, you can't use parts from one theme in another. Nor can you change the background. Each part takes up a certain area, made up of blocks on a grid.

The parts are:

Under Floors: A thin horizontal pass-through platform, a slanted pass-through platform, a smaller horizontal platform that's in the middle of the part area, a solid square block, a triangle shaped block, the same triangle shaped block with a stair texture that does NOTHING (Literally it's the same exact piece), and an elongated ramp. The only one of these you can actually grab is the solid block. In fact, it's the only part in the entire game you can actually grab onto. A massive oversight considering how big a part of the game tether recovery is. Anything with a slant takes up both the block it's actually in, and for some unfathomable reason the block above it. What the heck, Nintendo?

There are also structures. These vary between the different themes, and they're by and large ugly and stupid misshapen things that serve almost no purpose. You can not seamlessly integrate a structure into your stage for aesthetic value, as they require not only a block above them , but also the blocks to the left and right. So for a structure two blocks long and one block high, you need an area of four blocks long by two blocks high. This just makes no sense, and pretty much prohibits this entire section from being used in a stage.

Finally we have "Features". I use the quotes because they should be called "The only parts remotely usable other than solid blocks". You get two kinds of moving pass-through platform (Vertical and horizontal), a ferris wheel, a spring, a block of ice, a block that falls if you step on it, a conveyor belt, spikes, and a ladder. While there aren't any real problems with these (aside from the fact that none of these have edges you can grab, which is really the entire point of the ice block, making THAT useless), it's less than impressive. Oh, and the spikes can't KO you, so you can't make a stage with an instant death trap, unlike nearly every other stage.

This is honestly the most pathetic assortment of parts I've ever seen. The very first Tony Hawk Pro Skater park builder had a better variety. Oh, and they can only be flipped horizontally. Not vertically. So it's impossible to make a stage with sloping undersides like Smashville or Melee's Final Destination.

Now to talk about the worst part. Online play. Honestly what were they THINKING? With Anyone is so woefully inefficient it's ridiculous. They stick you in a lobby (by yourself by the way) as it automatically finds people for you to play with. Doesn't sound bad, but that's all it is. There's only two types of gameplay: Team Match and Four Player Battle Royale. If time runs out in battle royale they'll RANDOMLY (sometimes they will, sometimes they won't) add computer players. I don't want to play with a freaking computer! NOBODY wants to play with a damn computer! That's the entire POINT of online play. You can never get a 1v1, even if you want to. There is no confirm button for the players to bypass the timer for waiting for a new player. Instead you're there for up to three solid minutes, more if someone loses patience and drops out. Oh, and there's only one ruleset: Two minute time match. Who the heck plays timed matches? Why doesn't Nintendo just set it to Coin and bury any enjoyment? The item rules are randomly determined based on everyone's rules. No voting or anything. You CAN continue to play with the same group of people by hitting "Continue" after a match, until Nintendo randomly breaks up the room.

How is this a good idea? It's as if they said "Hey, we don't give a flying firecracker about our players, let's stick them in a white room (which is a much better stage than the new final destination, yet is unplayable) with sandbag while they wait for three other people to connect. it's far more efficient for our servers to match up four players, sending and receiving data from four different computers every time." Before someone who actually knew how to execute online play busted into their office with tear gas bombs. Sadly they arrived too late and we're stuck with this pile.

To put the nail in the coffin, if one person lags, the whole GAME lags. And I don't mean the match, I mean the game will FREEZE and you can't get out of the match because the game flat out will not accept any input until the lag spike is over. This means short of a hard reset you're STUCK.

As far as With Anyone, I really don't have any complaints. The connection indicator doesn't work, and there's no voice chat, but that's about it.

Finally, tripping. WHAT is WRONG with you, Nintendo?! . I can forgive literally every other mistake on the list because the gameplay is fundamentally solid except for tripping. What is tripping, you ask? Randomly, your character will just fall on their duff for no good reason, leaving them vulnerable to whatever the opponent has in mind. Tripping makes absolutely no sense from ANY perspective! From a developer's perspective, this involves many new lines of code, especially considering the chance for tripping is weighted by character (Captain Falcon trips the most). From a gameplay perspective, there is no part of this mechanic which is fun. If it's funny to WATCH, it should be a taunt. In fact, that's what I'd have happen if you taunted while dashing. And from a character perspective, if Sonic tripped, instead of a blue streak speeding by, he'd be a blue streak on the pavement. And Captain Falcon's iron nipples would cause potholes in the stage. The mechanic just doesn't fit in this or any other game, and violates the number one rule for developing in a game. And that rule is, when you ask yourself "Is this fun?" the answer should never be "No."

This is a good game. The gameplay is solid. I still enjoy it, I do online play. But it could have been SO much better. As it is, it doesn't even live up to Melee, much less the hype surrounding the release of Brawl. In defense of the Brawl delays, Miyamoto himself said, "A good game comes late, but a bad game is bad forever." or something like that. Well, this should have come later. A lot later. I believe this will forever go down in history as the biggest disappointment in gaming history. At this point, I would honestly be more willing to spend $50 to buy the SOUNDTRACK to this game, than the game itself.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/26/08

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