Hello and welcome to Under the Super Scope where we take a look at some of the most famous
games of all time and try to work out if they still hold up today, and this time we’re
taking a look at one of the most ambitious Smash games in the series but also one that’s
polarising to a lot of players.
Of course, it’s Super Smash Brothers Brawl.
Now if we take a step back Melee was developed in just 13 months which
is utterly ridiculous for a game like Super Smash Brothers and while the rushed development
certainly shows – it enabled the game to be something different to a the fighting game
community.
Perhaps not the intended vision, but a viable way to play Melee nonetheseless.
Brawl on the other hand took just over 2 years to develop and built upon the foundation of
Melee.
In fact from here on the series would continuously use the previous game as a groundwork for
development just because creating an entirely new setup from scratch in such a short time
again would be utterly ridiculous, especially as with crossovers like this you always need
to top yourself.
Melee had a roster of 26, Brawl had 35.
Melee had 29 stages, Brawl had 41.
Melee had 60 songs, Brawl had 253.
It was a bigger game in just about every respect and is evidently very different to its predecessor.
Some were disappointed with Smash for Wii U and 3DS as they didn’t have an ambitious
statement that said “This is what makes me distinct” whereas Brawl certainly did.
There are so many new elements crammed into this game but even from the outset, you can
look at Brawl and look at Melee and just tell that these aren’t similar looking games.
Particularly impressive as the Wii’s hardware wasn’t all that different to the GameCube’s.
Whether you like them or not, brawl adopted a realistic visual style often using photorealistic
backgrounds and giving charaters like Mario dark lifelike textures.
This synergy was shared across the entire roster which allowed characters as different
as Sonic and Snake to viably appear side by side.
Personally I’m not a big fan of the art direction and feel it hasn’t aged as well
as Melee’s simpler visuals but it’s still a key area that makes Brawl feel distinct.
It’s of course not the only one though, Brawl’s entire combat systems feels completely
overhauled with the game being slower, more floaty and generally easier to play.
Whether they were intentionally trying to match the Wii’s more family orientated demographic
or not, I don’t know but I’d say they passed with flying colours.
Smash isn’t quite as easy to teach to those who don’t generally play games as Wii Sports
and Mario Kart but at the same time it’s easier to teach than other fighters like Street
Fighter and once someone understands the controls for one character, those skills can be extrapolated
to another thanks to the shared control scheme.
Brawl slower pace and floatier physics give those people more of a chance and with it
being the best selling game in the series at 13.29m copies it’s safe to say that the
social circle pushed this game pretty hard.
Though it also helps that the console sold over a 100 million units.
I’m fully aware a lot of people don’t like the fundamentals of Brawl’s fighting
and we’ll of course get deeper into that but being slower isn’t inherently bad, it
just means the game wasn’t made for the people who went deeper into Melee’s mechanics.
The series would go on to form something of a middle ground.
Ultimate is certainly a much faster game than Brawl but the team didn’t necessarily look
back to Melee to accomplish this.
Brawl’s DNA undoubtedly stuck with the series and was a key stepping stone in making Smash
more accessible, afterall that was the entire point of Smash to begin with.
But that’s not to say Brawl is balanced.
One of Melee’s biggest problems is half the roster just isn’t aren’t that fun
to play as mostly because that other half are just better.
Comparatively Brawl has a much nicer chunk of enjoyable characters and it really did
a great job at making most of the roster viable.
Even if there are still a handful who are simply worse like Samus were her overly floaty
physics in an already floaty game and Ganondorf who is slower than ever.
But where Melee had a Marth problem, Brawl has perhaps an even greater problem – Meta
Knight.
Yeah Marth could grab you from across the universe but Meta Knight has an attack that’s
very hard to interrupt, he can recover like crazy with multiple jumps and even a glide
and his attributes match and exceed pretty much every c haracter in the game.
Speaking of gliding, that was something exclusive to a couple of winged characters in Brawl
like Meta Knight, Charizard and Pit.
It’s fun to glide around but my god is it broken for recoveries, you can save yourself
from insane circumstances as these characters.
Probably a reason is was cut in Smash 4.
The Ice Climbers likewise have an exploit of being able to continuously chain grab.
It’s certainly not fair to call Melee broken and then praise Brawl as both games have characters
with tremendous advantages, it’s just Brawl has a higher pool to choose from.
Variety really is in Brawl’s favour as while Melee was a neatly packed Museum of Nintendo,
Brawl came along and dwarfed it.
290 trophies?
Try 544 and 700 stickers.
Try demos for key franchises represented in the roster, try stages from franchises who
aren’t even in the roster.
There was so much to learn from Brawl and chances are this is where a lot of fans were
introduced to games like Kid Icarus, this is where fans started yurning for Mother 3,
this is where a whole generation of children who grew up with the Wii found out about all
these Nintendo franchises.
Brawl enabled so much not just with its fighting but everything surrounding it and one of the
core elements of that was of course the Subspace Emissary.
The first option that greets you when you go to single player.
Now I’m going to preface this before going in too hard.
Going from Melee’s Adventure mode which only had 4 actual sidescrolling levels with
a mix of traditional classic mode stuff to a 10 hour long platforming adventure is wild.
Especially with an hour worth of prerendered cutscenes showing all these Nintendo characters
interact with one another, it’s essentially a fan dream come true.
But I do feel like we sometimes only attach ourselves to the good parts of Subspace and
forget the bad, cause there’s quite a lot of bad.
Yeah the cutscene where they all zoom out in ships is freaking awesome, yeah opening
makes quite a statement with Kirby trying to save Peach and Zelda from Petey Pirahana
(which is a sentence I never thought I would say) but the actual levels have severe pacing
issues, especially in the middle half.
It starts off strong introducing all these subplots that gradually merge together but
there’s this lull in the middle where you’re bouncing back and forth from the insides of
the Halberd which are basically just metal corridors and the insides of a research facility
which are basically just metal corridors.
It’s an immensely ambitious mode but it can also be extremely generic.
Like there’s a few levels where you’re in Skyworld and a few where you’re in a
DK jungle complete with barrels and those are pretty great.
But then the majority of it consists of sand dunes and lava pits and it’s just a bit
too unexciting.
Though there are more exceptions like boss fights against freaking Ridley and I actually
really dig this Ice Climber level, seeing the mountain scale on your accent gives you
a great sense of progress It’s great to see all the Nintendo characters
come together but they don’t really bring their worlds with them.
They’ve all come together to face a unified threat in unified locals which could probably
be pulled off pretty well but Subspace just doesn’t take it far enough.
This 10 hour game basically spans 6 settings which get repeated with slight variants and
the gameplay itself sort of shows why Smash is designed the way it is.
Look at Mario, look at Sonic, look at Rayman and Banjo and basically look at any of the
most critically acclaimed platformers.
What do they have in common?
One jump.
Some have midair munovers like Rayman’s temporal helicopter hair or Mario finding
a temporal powerup that can be lost but as a basis the best platformers tend to only
allow 1 jump and they do their best to make that jump at satisfying as possible.
Cause when you have multiple jumps all of a sudden you can correct your mistakes and
it undermines the calculation process of momentum which I think is one of the key parts of what
makes platforming fun.
Smash has three jumps.
This works because it’s not a traditional platformer where you generally battle on small
platforms, so you need small jumps, but you also need to recover, so you need big jumps.
Sometimes a double jump or even a triple jump works.
And hey look at Kirby, that guy can jump for days.
Hey, actually no, do look at Kirby.
The level design of Kirby and the level design of Subspace Emissary is remarkably similar
and that’s because Kirby, much like Subspace.
Is kind of a Brawler rather than a platformer.
And so Brawl will often do what Melee’s adventure does and also what Kirby does and
lock the screen at certain points as you deal with a fight.
Smash is a fighting game afterall.
The main difference though and the main reason I find Subspace Emissary inconsistent with
the rest of the game is almost every fight is a stamina one.
Sometimes the enemy AI will be silly and just walk off the stage but a lot of enemies don’t
even flinch when you hit them.
You have to slow smack them one as their health depletes.
That or you get tired of that and run away from them when you can.
It’s something I think Smash usually does very well.
Board the platforms is about teaching you the movement mechanics, that trophy minigame
in melee is all about launching but in Subspace base gameplay isn’t that transferable – but
at least it gives you a lot of one on one time with each character which is something
the series hasn’t really encouraged since.
It is all about the characters afterall.
It’s even the easiest way of unlocking characters as once you play as them in the story, you
can play as them in any mode – so the stakes to keep playing are pretty high.
Speaking of characters though Kirby games revolve around Kirby – obviously – he
can get multiple different powers but he’s always able to essentially fly.
Smash has over 30 characters to juggle so while all those battle sequences are great
not every character or setup is as great for platforming – like it feels wrong to mix
a barrel fire but then just double jump – or with some character – fly into the barrel
anyway – it feels bad to bypass entire platforming sections entirely just because the character
can – Subspace undermines its core principles a lot and while characters built for metaknight
won’t generally feature long platforming sections because Meta Knight can just fly
– they end up feeling the most repetitive of them all.
The simplicity of a goomba is that you can defeat it quickly – I can kill goombas all
day – But when you throw enemies that take multiple hits, some dozens –are repeat them
across the entire game it starts to get grating – especially if you just don’t like some
of the designs.
Like I hate this bucket who pours flaming contents over you – it especially sucks
if the character your using isn’t great in the air.
Likewise this swordblade thing isn’t tough, it just takes a while to defeat and that gets
tiresome when they keep showing up.
Reusing assets is a tough balance – absolutely reuse familiar enemies if they’re quick
to dispose of and have flexible properties but there’s a reason why Mario 64 has a
pit of Bob-Ombs and not a pit of King Bob-Ombs.
King Bob-omb is great, but he’s best as a one off.
Subspace doesn’t always seem to grasp that.
Some of my favourite platforming levels in Subspace are the ones with Goombas and Koopas
simply because they’re more fun to encounter then swarms of subspace enemies who all need
to be pummelled, it somewhat ruins the flow of levels.
Subspace is an ambitious mishmash of things that work and things that frankly a fighting
game just doesn’t do well.
We remember the best parts, like these amazing cutscenes that bring all our favourite Nintendo
franchises together in an epic battle but we forget the lesser ones like Pokemon Trainer
needing to double check that the giant orange dragon is infact Charizard and not Ivisaur
– which is actually hilarious.
We remember flying through Skyworld and hearing all those beautiful musical pieces but we
forget that most of the levels are generic and a little boring.
It’s actually kind of a success.
I don’t think Subspace is great all around but despite spending hundreds of hours fighting
in Brawl – it’s the Adventure mode that comes to mind as its identity.
Smash 4 on the other hand is possibly a better game but it’s also iterative and safe.
Unless you really liked Smash Tour.
The single player segments of a fighter are immensely important as they not only give
people without friends nearby a way to play the game but they serve as a tutorial.
All of those little breathers in Smash 64 and Melee’s Classic mode did something to
help you master the game mechanics – break the targets is partially ingenious.
I think Subspace is a little loose with the rules of Smash as you rarely have to actually
launch opponents but it gives you good hands on time with every character – Except Toon
Link, Wolf and Jigglypuff – they’re hidden away for some reason.
Brawl did so much – it doubled down on the multiplayer aspect of Smash and allowed everything
to be played in co-op, it had challenges to keep you playing in unique ways – all with
meaningful rewards and it was the first Smash to be playable online.
Though online being disabled now days doesn’t feel too different to when it was active.
Online was often like this – but the fact we COULD play Smash online was already a massive
step.
So yeah Brawl does stumble in a few areas but for its time it was not only one of the
most consistent games in the series but it had so many things to do and kept giving the
player more and more for doing so.
Whether they’re new stages, new music, new trophies, new masterpieces.
I think what I like most is that Brawl is still unique.
It doesn’t feel like the original and it certainly doesn’t feel like Melee.
Smash 4 is also different but it’s kind of an inbetween title and I do wonder if that
game will be remembered as fondly.
It’s the transition between Brawl and Ultimate and doesn’t do all that much to stand out.
Mechanically it’s more defensive and Ultimate is more offensive but I’m not sure that’s
enough to build a standing legacy.
Brawl’s not perfect in fact it does a lot of things poorly but you can still very easily
plug in a Wii and play a few rounds like it’s 2008.
It isn’t for everyone but I absolutely think it holds up today.
It’s still one of the best Smash games to play with friends who don’t typically play
game . Yeah it was the first Smash to have a few cuts like Pichu, Mewtwo and Roy but
are there place were some of the most unique characters to enter the series – like Snake
and his arsenal of weapons and Lucario who gets stronger
the more damage he takes and Ike who played nothing like
the previous Fire Emblem characters.
Brawl absolutely has a legacy and it’s more than just tripping.