*In case you aren’t familiar, in the world of Smash Bros, one must knock his/her opponents off the edge of the screen in order to defeat them. Rather than a life meter, characters sport a percentage indicator that rises with damage taken. The higher the percentage, the farther they fly when hit.
In 2001, though, Super Smash Bros. Melee changed all of that. With this single gargantuan salute to all things Nintendo, the brilliant designer in charge of the project and responsible for the creation of the series, Masahiro Sakurai, supplemented a wealth of Nintendo nostalgia with one of the most unique and compelling fighting systems in any game of the genre. This led to a community of serious competitors (all of whom could undoubtedly trounce the Chumps here on staff), and ever since then, the Super Smash Bros. elite have argued that their choice of competition is every bit as hardcore as that of the Soul Calibur and Street Fighter variety.
Considering that, after having played Melee for hundreds of hours, how many of us actually expected Nintendo to attempt to successfully expand such a vast experience even further? On one hand, they absolutely rank amongst the top developers in the world. Having said that, though, judging by precedent, it might not have been outrageous to expect a Smash Bros follow-up of the Double Dash!! assortment; that is, puzzlingly different, questionably balanced, and arguably shallower than its predecessors. But perhaps Sakurai is the special ingredient here. With Melee, he took his direction to an entirely new level. Can Brawl replicate that degree of success, or is it trapped within the shadow of its world-famous predecessor?
The Basics – Controlled Chaos
If you’ve read the short italicized synopsis above, that’s the meat and potatoes of the Smash Bros. approach. It’s truly the only fighting game of its type, and it’s amazing to behold the level of balance achieved by the designers in implementing such a novel concept. Beyond that, the game exerts a focus on reflex and strategy rather than a wealth of complex techniques, a philosophy that happily foregoes the need for memorization of profuse amounts of button combinations. And you can forget the inescapably endless combos and positively geeky frame-counting opportunities that adorn some fighting games; in Smash Bros., every match is different, thanks primarily to the game’s ingenious implementation of controlled chaos.
What I mean by this is that Smash Bros. will not allow you to formulate a foolproof sequence of events to win any match. It invalidates such strategies by introducing a system of random variables that affect the flow of a typical match. The first, and most pronounced, of any of these variables is the items system. Throughout the course of a match, any number of over 50 different items—swords, bombs, laser guns, Pokéballs, you name it—will appear in an attempt to shake things up. Any character that comes into contact with one of these items can pick it up and use it in a variety of ways at any time, or even just throw it at their enemy as a projectile (each item produces entirely different results when thrown as well). Some items are relatively weak, and others are very powerful and can produce game-changing results. Love it or hate it, the Smash Bros. series was designed around the existence of these items, and while you can disable them at will (even tinker with their rate of appearance or selectively turn them off if you wish), there’s something to be said for their appeal in three- and four-player Brawls. In one-on-one, most serious players tend to switch them off entirely, but otherwise, a low appearance rate and exclusion of the truly powerful items makes for a well-balanced, albeit stimulating and chaotic, battle.
The second most prominent element of controlled chaos in the Smash Bros. modus operandi is the interactive levels. In contrast to the mostly passive environments in other fighting games, Smash Bros. levels are dynamic and dangerous. While there is still a small selection of inert locales to satisfy those times where you just want to spar without distraction, the rest of the levels are built upon a principle of patterned interference, chocked full of variable fare and all manner of hazards. The levels range from mostly tame and calm (Final Destination, Battlefield) to outright treacherous (Pictochat, DK Rumble Falls). There are dozens in all, every one of them completely unique and highly entertaining in its own right. A select few of the levels are so hazardous as to be overly distracting, but the random stage switch, which is available after you unlock all the stages, rectifies this problem by allowing you to turn off the ones you wish to avoid. Overall, the levels in Brawl are very well-balanced; they’re interactive, but usually not so much as to be bothersome after a bit of practice.
The final major element of this chaotic formula is the in-built uncertainty of techniques. As with most fighting games, by studying your character’s various moves, you can get a good feel for which ones are most powerful and will be more helpful in certain situations (a training mode is included to assist you with these study sessions). However, unlike other games, the damage potential of each technique varies ever-so-slightly with each execution. That means that you can’t base your entire strategy on preformulated mathematics, as things will turn out differently every time. Likewise, still other random variables are introduced to foil such attempts: in Brawl, for instance, rolling dodges occasionally result in your character tripping (presumably to discourage incessant dodging matches, which were all too common amongst experts in Melee).
What does all of this mean? That the game does not require skill? That it requires less skill than other fighting games? No and no. As any seasoned player can show you, Brawl requires plenty of skill, but it’s an entirely different type of skill. As opposed to rout memorization and programmatic strategies, Brawl requires practicing for uncertainty, and it rewards quick decision-making in times of crisis. What separates Super Smash Bros. from other fighting games is this break from the formulaic and deterministic. Through its inclusion of various anomalies from one battle to the next, the series breaks ties with the rest of the fighting game genre and instead embraces a philosophy that is still highly rooted in skill and reflex, yet overwhelmingly probabilistic. In Super Smash Bros., you must pay attention to more than just your opponent—the environments and items are equally threatening. You get good by perfecting compartmentalized techniques and practicing for specific scenarios that can arise at any given time. In other words, it isn’t that item that caused you to lose the match; it’s how your opponent used the item and how you responded to his use of it.