Review: "Super Smash Bros: Brawl"

I have been touching on Super Smash Bros Brawl on ZhaoHan's Wii these few weeks. It's incredibly fun, and I feel that this game might make it on the competitive stage, although I shouldn't be the one to judge that since I didn't play SSB: Melee in the first place. There seemed to be many complains by the Smash World community about Brawl, mainly because they felt the competitve level of the game has toned down to a crawl. The creator of SSB series, Sakurai, states that he's trying to "make losers and winners feel happy" (summerized), so the community interprets it (probably correctly) as "I don't want SSB to be hardcore competitive like a SF2".

I do feel that Sakurai managed to accomplish that though I've never actually played Melee to make a comparision and make a judgement. I had a blast playing 4 FFA with all items on. Items are goddamn fun, fun because they are damn random and some of them are very creative (eg football). Stages are well designed too. I mean, only Nintendo can come up with such unique stages. I liked the Sonic stage, mainly because I totally recognize it from the first Sonic game I played about 15 years ago when I was just a small boy. Nostalgia is fuck awesome. Too bad I don't think I ever completed the game. Good thing I still have my 16-bit sega in my uncle's house :D...I hope -.-

There are many characters in the game, featuring characters from games like Fire Emblem (Marth, Ike), Kirby, Sonic, Legend of Zelda, Pokemon, Metal Gear (Snake), and of course, Mario Bros themselves. There is no doubt that this game has their fair share of tiers. Characters like Pit is arguably better than Wario, but from what many people feel, the game is more balanced than it was in Melee. They are only afraid that the ultimate strategy in brawl, in the end, is to camp and wait instead of advancing and chasing down an opponent. In short, many feel that this game will favor people with no 'O'ffence. A thread has been created suggesting to do a 'Heavy Brawl', which is to increase the gravity of the game, since Brawl is very much slower (and more floaty) as compared to Melee (from what I experienced within 10mins of Melee long ago).

Well, my group of friends playing Brawl isn't really at that level of expertise yet, so I don't really care or feel what they felt. Right now, we are just playing the game for fun, and slowly exploring the details the game engine and the characters.

I'm awaiting the next Brawl get together. I hope my arms heal up then (seems to take a long time to heal, 4th day and it just got worse).