The Brawl is on in North America!!! (A bit late)

I never got to writing this article until now >.<

I had a date on March 9. It was so dang beautiful. It was the best night of my life! What? You think I had a girlfriend? Noooo!! I bought Super Smash Brothers Brawl and played it for quite a while. The story is well set up, and even if there is absolutely no dialogue, it works amazingly!

The story mode is called the SubSpace Emissary. The story is basically that there’s the SubSpace Emissary, who are destroying parts of the Smash World with special bombs that turn the area into SubSpace. We also have the 2 greedy kings (Bowser and Dedede) beating the crud out of our heroes and turning them into trophies. The story is actually full length this time, and lasts probably 10 hours.

Brawl includes a new an improved group mode, which includes rotation (automatically swaps out players if you’re playing with more than 3 buddies), improved special brawl (bunny ears + large sized character + high gravity + metal), and the removal of the cruddy game variants we didn’t like (coin and bonus).

The game includes a lot more items and characters, such as the long awaited Sonic The Hedgehog, and the unexpected Solid Snake . There are about 34characters total, and will keep you playing for a while until you finally get them all. Some items from melee reappear, as you battle with an improved beam sword, super scope, and fan (it’s only better because you can trap people in your fan’s fury for a while LOL). The bumper (remember from the original SSB?) made a reappearance too. The nice new toys you get to play with are the cracker launcher (sounds a little weird), which shoot fire crackers at an angle that you choose, the smash ball, which summons your character’s special attack, and the Smart Bomb (Star Fox), which makes that huge explosion you see in Star Fox 64.

The vault mode (has collectibles) has a lot of nice features, such as the returning trophy feature, sticker feature (another nice collectible), stage builder (have not tested it yet), and screenshots + replays. I have not really tested much on Vault.

I have a few complaints about Brawl (it doesn’t matter how good a game is. There is always going to be something wrong with it).

1. Final Smashes are cheap and unbalanced. Kirby’s is almost impossible to avoid, and knocks you off the map easily, but Peach’s only makes you fall asleep and doesn’t make you fly off the map.

2. The game doesn’t have a dedicated camera mode. You can only angle the camera when you have paused the game. A lot of videos I see on SSB use the dedicated camera on Melee and angle their shots while the game is not paused. The zoom is not as good anymore (doesn’t zoom in as much as it used to).

3. No language changing

Gameplay: 9/10

Graphics (based on my taste, not compared to those fancy 360 and PS3 games): 10/10

Concept (same as always): 8/10

Controls: 10/10 for 4 different methods

Music: 9.5/10 because it is like a compilation of all the Nintendo stuff

Replay Value: As high as the moon gets.

Overall: 9.5

-sakuramaxx