Super Smash Brothers Brawl Review

I’m a huge fan of crossover, so it comes naturally that I would play a JRPG that focuses on this. Super Smash Brothers: Brawl features characters from a number of different games, a few of which aren’t even RPGs. I’ve been excited about reviewing this game for quite a while, so I’m just going to dive right in.

The story of Brawl starts with Mario and Kirby having a friendly competition. However, a weird airship shows up and spawns these purple thingies that start attacking. From there an epic quest begins to find the source of the seemingly unending swarm of shadowy creatures. One cool thing is that there’s next to no spoken dialogue in the whole game, which leads to a pretty unique style of storytelling. Overall, it’s a pretty good story, with lots of surprising twists, and a staggering number of characters.

The characters in Brawl, though they may hail from a large number of different games originally, are portrayed quite well. Not having played all of the games that they’re originally from, I don’t know for sure if they’re portrayed faithfully, but at least their interactions in this game are believable. King Deedeedee is an ambiguous enemy who actually manages to pull off a surprisingly authentic heel/face turn. Zero Suit Samus is a great strong female character who, refreshingly, isn’t some kind of sex symbol at all. Fox is a nice stand-offish character who actually ends up being pretty sympathetic. The only problem is that the characters are broken up into strict tiers of usefulness, where a character in a lower tier, like Metaknight, is strictly worse than a higher tier character, like Ganandorf. You can still have fun playing as a worse character, but the game obviously wasn’t meant to be balanced.

The battle system in Brawl is an action RPG type of thing. Each character has a number of normal attacks, which can be performed by pressing the “a” button and a direction. If you press the directional button and the “a” button at exactly the same time, you get a smash attack that is better in every situation. This takes a lot of practice, but it is worth it. Each character also has special attacks, which are triggered by pressing the “b” button and a direction. Most characters can perform a double jump, and a few characters, like Jigglypuff, can fly. You explore a mazelike set of rooms in two dimensions, height and length. Enemies appear on the overworld map, so no random battles. There are segues to boss fights, but that’s all that breaks up the action.

The only place where this game falls flat are the graphics. When it came out like three years ago, the graphics were pretty good, but that was like, three years ago. When you compare it to new games like Call of Duty: Black Ops, or Dragon Age II, it’s really kind of shitty. So, yeah, the level of realism in the graphics didn’t seem like a big deal then, but looking back on it now, it really decreases my enjoyment of the game.

The main story has a number of branches to it, based on which characters you choose to control/save, and a number of optional characters who can be pretty hard to find the first time through. You can even customize your characters by attaching stickers to them, which gives you a number of different ways to play the game. There’s even a couple of minigames to extend the playtime. The target hitting minigame is pretty fun, but the fighting game one is pretty bad. No one wants to play a fighting game with characters from tons of awesome games, so I don’t even know why they bothered to include this one. Anyway, the replay value on this game is “two should get you all of the story segments.”

The overall rating on this game is a painful place to go. I really want to give this game a high rating, because I think it’s a lot of fun. I still enjoy playing it, even if I’ve beaten it about two or three times. But, those graphics… Okay, if it had better graphics, I suppose I would give this game a 9.1. But, given the graphics as they are, 2.6. Really, in the world of RPGs, graphics are the most important feature. That’s why no one wants to play RPGs that came out even last year, because the new ones have much better graphics.

Fun Fact: If you get Mr. Resetti before you’ve reset the game even once, you get a different conversation.

How I Broke Game: So, apparently while you’re using Metaknight’s “b”-down attack to teleport, if you mash up on the “c”-stick quickly enough, you can stay in the teleporting mode indefinitely, and continue moving. This is pretty much only good for committing suicide, considering that Metaknight is such a shitty character to begin with, but it’s a fun little glitch.

If you enjoyed this game, you might want to try some of these other games. Tales of Symphonia has a pretty similar control scheme to this game, and an equally good story. Paper Mario and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, also play with the silent characters trope, though mostly just with Mario. And, of course, Call of Duty: Black Ops has much better graphics, so you’ll obviously like it a lot more. Super Smash Brothers: Melee, the predecessor, is also a good choice, though going from Brawl to Melee is a jarring shift, as the former is a much faster paced game than the latter.