Play Time: much more than 30 hours
Progress: All charcters and stages unlocked
You’ve been waiting for this game ever since you finished unlocking Mr. Game & Watch in Melee. You’ve yearned to once again feel the excitement of unclocking a host of new, amazing characters and stages. Nintendo has delayed this game twice already, great to the chagrin of the gaming world. Is it worth the wait? Well, we’ve been playing it for a month, so here’s our spoiler-free views on this year’s most anticipated Wii game.
Gameplay:
So…. how does it feel? Feel is an intangible but crucial element of every fighting game. How responsive are the controls? Well… at first, especially if you’re playing with the Wiimote/nunchuck, the game will feel about 10% slower than Melee. This is luckily a feeling that quickly passes, especially if you stick to the GCN controllers. I tried all of the combinations of controls, and ended up just staying with my beloved GCN controller. The other control methods suffice, I suppose (the movement-based C-stick like smash option (off by default) for the wiimote is particularly cool), but the GCN controls are just classic and awesome as far as I’m concerned. Otherwise, the gameplay feels very similar to Melee in most respects, except for the Smash Balls, which everyone instantly goes after upon their appearance. In other words, it’s still awesome.
Graphics:
No matter what anyone says, graphics matter to a degree. No one, period, will play a game with either horrendously ugly characters or with Magnavox Odyssey graphics these days. Because it is relatively easy to make a game look good these days (there are many ways of accomplishing this). Brawl, fortunately, looks awesome. The awesomeness does fade slightly when it’s put on a fairly large HDTV, even with the Progressive Scan cables. Things move so quickly that you usually won’t notice the considerable aliasing of the graphics, but if you ever pause to look around or take a screenshot, it becomes apparent. Everything is slicked-up considerably, though, and I have no complaints at all. Could it have been done on a GameCube? Maybe not. The game, just because of its sheer size, though, wouldn’t have fit nicely even on 3-4 Cube discs.
Sound:
OMG. Lots and lots and lots and lots of music. A lot. The best composers in the business all came together to rework their old tracks and update them for Brawl. Brawl has a great mix of both new arrangements of classics and the classics themselves. Definitely a soundtrack that you’re going to want to pick up.
Other Stuff:
35 is a good amount of characters. If you haven’t seen the final roster yet, you are going to be very pleasantly surprised with some of the hidden characters that Nintendo has kept up its sleeve. The 40-some maps are generally all pretty great too. Around 10 or so have come back from Melee, and they’re all pretty much exactly the same. EXCEPT Nintendo edited them a bit to stop some glitch-oriented cheapness that I used to love. I.E. Marth cannot slash through that broken pillar thingy on the huge Zelda stage anymore. 🙁
Both Sonic and Snake preform admirably as new characters. Hopefully this will open the door for even more closely-beloved third party characters in future installments. I just hope that it won’t get out of hand. I’d be upset if Spyro or Crash were thrown in there for sure.
The single-player mode is expansive and engaging. It’s also tied together by a good deal of cut-scenes that are very fancy indeed. All of your favourite modes, like Target Break and the Classic single-player mode have come back and are better than ever.
Nintendo is also thinking about having new developer-designed stages and characters available for download through the upcoming WiiWare channel. We’ll see what they come up with.
Essentially, you should be very excited indeed.
Pros:
- Awesome
- Awesome
- Awesome
Cons:
- Could’ve had more characters (no Bomberman, Isaac, or Geno)
- Some characters are too damned slow/cheap
- Couldn’t come out soon enough
This game, even though it has some flaws, it so packed with awesome that it isn’t even funny. This game has earned its:
11/10
