If It Ain’t Broke…
Sakurai clearly knows the strengths and weaknesses of his formula, and so he chooses not to tinker with what makes Smash Bros. so successful. The copious attention to detail and outrageous amount of content still remains in Brawl, and in many ways, it’s more pronounced than ever. If you’ve played Melee, you’ll feel right at home with Brawl, which capitalizes upon that design with more of everything, including a seemingly endless amount of subsidiary content. The heart of the franchise remains untouched, though some of the capillaries have seen adjustment.
Right from the start, the game resembles Melee’s design. Amid a plethora of modes and options you will find mostly familiar substance: an Adventure Mode, Event Mode, Classic Mode, Stadium Modes (Home Run Contest, Multi-Man Melee, Target Test, etc.), Practice, and an enormous array of multiplayer options. In Brawl, most of these modes are nearly identical to those in Melee, although a couple of them have been completely worked over.
The most obvious of these is Adventure Mode, which is now a full-on ten-hour-long side-scrolling adventure game of its own, featuring a wide range of locales, characters, and enemies from all Nintendo universes, full-motion video, numerous boss battles, a save system, and more. Adventure Mode is deeper than it seems, with a good helping of hidden content and the ability to apply stickers you find to your characters’ trophies to endow them with heightened abilities (more on this later). The FMVs are nicely done, though the storyline and environments honestly could have been better (nonsensical fusion of different gaming universes notwithstanding). Overall, it’s a cool addition to the game, though it does tend to drag in the later stages, and the gameplay isn’t quite as compelling as you might expect (seeing as it’s truly nothing more than traditional Smash Bros. gameplay set in a number of side-scrolling levels).
Apart from the Adventure Mode, most everything else in the game is simply Melee refined plus more. There’s so much content here that it’s likely to make your brain bleed from dopamine overload. More characters, more levels, more music, more items, more trophies, more secrets; you can take snapshots, save replays, send them to friends, create your own levels… if you thought there was a lot to see in Melee, this game will send you reeling.
As for the rest of the game modes, Classic Mode is essentially the same format as it was in Melee; it’s classic fighting game design where you’re pitted against one character after another in their home environments, with a few variables tossed in (giant battles, metal battles, etc.) to make things interesting. Event Mode offers a few dozen preset scenarios which you can choose to complete on any of three different difficulty levels, plus an additional set of co-op events. The Stadium Mode includes the same modes as the last game (plus one that’s hidden), and this time, each mode can also be played with two players as well. You’ve got your training, of course, and lastly, the most prolific mode of them all—the multiplayer Brawl.
Quality and Quantity
Beyond that, the game is simply brimming with encouragement to continue playing. During and after nearly every match, you’re bound to unlock something, and probably for the first solid week or so, you’ll be rewarded with something pretty big at least once per play session. The prizes range from items as small as any of over 700 stickers, or more than a few hundred trophies, or spendable coins, or tons of awesome unlockable songs, to as significant as new playable characters, levels, modes, items, and features. Brawl truly has the concept of positive reinforcement down to a science: you play, and whether you win or lose, you’re rewarded simply for spending the time. An enormously expansive 3-D Challenges matrix graphically documents some of the more noteworthy prizes you can unlock, all of which are contained neatly in one of 128 sealed boxes. It plays out sort of like a game, revealing the prerequisites to winning the prizes in each box only as you complete one of the adjacent boxes. Before long, you’ll find yourself browsing this array of rewards in search of something to go after next, and you’re bound to have fun doing so.
The unlockable characters and levels are fantastic treasures, of course. But even the stickers and trophies provide ample incentive to anyone with a thing for collecting (packrats unite!). The stickers are merely game art… they’re abundant and yet they serve a worthwhile purpose in the adventure mode (while that lasts). The trophies, however, just as in Melee, all include exhaustive descriptions of their origins, and they’re often beautifully detailed. Collecting them is as simple as picking them up during single-player gameplay, completing certain objectives (as detailed in the Challenges matrix), or playing the addictive Coin Launcher mode, which is sort of like a shoot-em-up mini-game where your weapons are coin projectiles and your targets are enemy ships and collectible trophies (but once you run out of coins, it’s back to the other modes to earn more, you bum).
And the music… oh, the music. At first, I was openly concerned about the fact that most of Brawl’s music that had been released in preview form was clearly not done with live instruments (in Melee, a respectable portion of the soundtrack was live orchestra). However, now that I have unlocked a majority of the songs in the game, I must happily rescind my concerns. This is, quite simply, one fabulous soundtrack; in fact, it’s probably one of the best in videogame history. The theme song, while overused throughout the production, is excellent (and written by ex-Final Fantasy composer and legend Nobuo Uematsu, no less). The rest of the soundtrack is either original (a small percentage of it) or comprised of rearrangements and original versions of a grand selection of tunes from other games. And there are some truly wonderful pieces here—stuff that’s really surprising, and a wide range of different styles to behold. You will hear everything from orchestral to hard rock, ranging from the famous to the obscure—and if you’re an audiophile, you’ll be grinning the entire way.