Reviews: My Junior High Fantasy Complete

Well, at the very least it's the fantasy I'm willing to talk about here.

I refer to Smash Brothers Brawl, the third in the increasingly popular fighting game series by Nintendo. The fantasy refers to their change of policy; unlike earlier games in the series, this one allows for some third party characters to join the fight. One of them was Sonic, the Sega mascot and a long-running rival to Nintendo's rival Sonic. This addition was one of many new features that made this game more exciting than previous installments; fantasy battles imagined for well over a decade can finally be realized!

Yes, this is indeed an incredible game. It got nearly perfect reviews by critics, putting near the most popular games every made, and sold millions in the very first weeks. And yet...

One particularly famous critic, Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation, said that he hated the game. There's nothing wrong with that specifically; anyone can have their own opinion. But while some of it was purely subjective (he just didn't find the game's often chaotic gameplay fun, so it goes,) he also raised some objective points that deserved attention.

I'll start by explaining the series for those unfamiliar with it. Smash Brothers is a game about Nintendo's mascot characters, but not about any series specifically. Instead, it's a fighting game where all their major characters fight with each other. So Mario goes against Link, who is also fighting Metroid's Samus and Pikachu. Despite debuting on the 3D heavy Nintendo 64, the series is primarily a two dimensional game. Instead of the usual flat battlefield of a fighting game, each level is a series of platforms hovering over a bottomless pit or surrounded by barriers that can't be passed without suffering a loss. Instead of health, every character has an increasing damage percentage, and the distance an attack knocks you back is based on how high this percentage is at. When around 100% or so, many attacks are lethal, either knocking enemies past the barriers or so far away from the platforms that the victims can't return, despite all characters having the ability to double jump and a special move that includes enough mobility to count as at least a third jump.

In addition, the game shakes things up by allowing four players to fight at once, creating team matches or free for all matches where allegiances shift instantly based on who happens to be winning. Randomly dropped items are also added, from new weapons to deadly explosives and healing items. And most stages have further hazards as well, creating yet another thing that has to be avoided. The result is a frequently high-speed and intense melee, but despite the chaos and simple controls there is a deep fighting experience, with advanced players relying on high-speed evasions, shield and rolls, dodging, and attack priorities.

The frantic gameplay, innovative fighting system, and sheer nostalgia of the characters, settings, items, and music are enough to make every game in this series very impressive. And Brawl improved upon the series in many ways. The simple single-player quest, used mostly to earn hidden things like characters and trophies, the game's collectible trinkets, was refined to include an entire ten-hour side-scrolling adventure, with a plot tying the game's characters together and a new enemy for all of the thirty+ characters to unite and fight. The graphics have improved, but the music really stands out, with dozens of the best composers in the video game united to provide their interpretations of the industry's most memorable music.

But one problem that Yahtzee noted persists, and it may very well be a matter of philosophy more than anything. Like every game in the series, much of the content starts out hidden. In the very first game, 4 of the 12 characters were hidden, along with one of the stages. At this point, of the 35 characters, something like 15 were hidden, as were a dozen or so of the total stages. This list of hidden characters include Snake and Sonic, which was odd, as one of the selling points of the game were these hidden third party characters. And to unlock them in the easiest possible way, you have to defeat somewhere between 2/3 and the entirety of the adventure mode. On some ways, this method is much easier. In Melee, getting some of the characters involved hours of guesswork. In Brawl, all the secrets are conveniently listed on a single screen, and all the characters can be found just by defeating or carefully exploring the levels of adventure mode. So while I can understand why a neophyte of the series is annoyed by this, as an experienced player, I find the same system an improvement.

This sort of thing reveals a conflict we're seeing more often in games. It's not even the now traditional narrative versus open world or single versus multi player default; it's a matter of how much we own the very games we buy. In other words, should we, the purchaser of the game, decide how it gets played? After all, if we buy a DVD, we expect to pop it in and, should we want, fast-forward or scene skip to the last five minutes. But in video games, not only are there hidden objects and rewards, but the game makes playing it in its entirety obligatory. What if someone wants to get, say, Grand Theft Auto 4, turn on invincibility from the start (and legitimately, not by having to search the Internet for cheat codes,) level select to the final battle, and watch the closing credits before the plastic wrapping is even off of the box completely? If that's too extreme, there are other points of debate like skippable/pausible cut scenes and the ability to save and load everywhere. For the record, I'm fully in favor of the former, but reluctantly supportive of the latter. Saving everywhere is crucial, but loading everywhere leads to obsessive gaming of the sort that encourages reloads if you lose more than 2% of your health in every room, and increasingly lethal game design to make up for it.

Anyway, I will argue that Brawl overused the hidden aspect in this game. It was less of a problem in earlier games, as the hidden characters were more obscure ones or clones of more popular characters. If you bought the game so you could play as your favorite Nintendo character, you had that chance right out of the box. However, hiding the third party characters was dirty pool. I also found that they overused the collectible features by making you beat the game on three other modes in addition to the adventure for all 35 characters! That made beating parts of the game feel more like a chore than fun.

The only other complaints are the still unfriendly and unreliable internet system, which seems to be a Nintendo staple, and still too many clone-y characters. Seriously, Gannondorf deserved his own move set this time, and there was no excuse for Fox, Falco, and Wolf from the Star Fox series to all have only slightly divergent moves. Plus, no Megaman! Why introduce third party characters and then only use two of them? I only hope this will be a more thoroughly used feature come the next sequel; heck, make it the game's adventure mode theme, toss in at least a half-dozen more, and treat it like one of those Marvel Versus DC style crossovers.

The final rating is still an A-, despite these flaws. And if it did have Megaman, I probably would've bumped it to an A.