Super Smash Brothers Brawl: Advance Review

Super Smash Brothers Brawl, recently released in Japan, has unofficially made its way to the States via imports. I recently got to actually play it (with Link as my main, of course). Super Smash Brothers Brawl has its ups and downs, but in my experience, it was quite worth the multiple delays. Brawl has changed a few things from Super Smash Brothers Melee, its immediate predecessor, not all of which are considered good, but I for one agree with the changes. I'll go over each aspect of the game and break it down as I saw it from my playing time. This should give American players waiting for the official release a view of what to expect.

Graphics:

Super Smash Brothers Brawl runs its animations quite smoothly. If you search for some videos on Youtube or elsewhere, you can see this for yourself. The Final Smash attacks (more on these in a bit) look absolutely incredible - for a while. Then they just get old. That's no flaw of the game itself, just a natural thing. They're essentially really powerful attacks. Super Smash Brothers Brawl is overall vastly improved graphics-wise from Melee - remember how it was going from FF7 to FF8 on the Playstation? Something like that. Sure, they're not completely realistic or perfect, but it's Smash Brothers, what do you expect? Also take into account that the Wii doesn't focus so much on graphics...either way. I like the look of the characters, especially Mario and Link. Mario's overalls actually look like denim, and as for Link....Link's Twilight Princess outfit is quite faithful to the actual game. No complaints as far as graphics go.

Sound:

Oh God, the sound...the music....it's unbelievable just how much music was put into Super Smash Brothers Brawl. From pretty much every Nintendo series, music was added. However, it was tweaked to fit the fighting game theme - some music was made more upbeat, and the opening theme sounded like it had vocals backing it. A lot of people I've talked to think the Super Smash Brothers Brawl music shouldn't have been remixed, but I think the efforts were well-placed. As for the voice acting, it was pretty much spot-on, except for Sonic.

Gameplay:

Basic rundown of Super Smash Brothers gameplay: Get a bunch of Nintendo characters. Put four on a stage at a time. Give each of them a set of moves from their respective games and let them move freely and beat each other up with aforementioned until various ones are catapulted off the stage into oblivion. Sounds simple? It can be to novice players. It's also exceptionally fun. This isn't like your traditional fighting game a la Soul Calibur or Mortal Kombat.

Now, for those who remember Melee, you'll immediately notice that everything seems a bit slower. This is because Nintendo wanted to give the more casual gamers a fair edge. Melee was so fast sometimes, and the camera zoomed out so far, that it was impossible to tell what was going on.

The roster is pretty impressive - 48-ish characters. I'll not go into all of them, but suffice to say I was for the most part impressed. There are a few clones (different characters with the same movesets), but it's nothing too severe.
Now, about that Final Smash I mentioned: The Final Smash attacks for each character are...broken. By which I mean, some will KO everything at once, whereas others only do very minimal damage or are hard to connect. Going back to the clones, the Star Fox characters' Final Smash is the Landmaster, the

For those who played at the advanced level in Melee, you'll notice that Super Smash Brothers Brawl is lacking a few moves you may have used: mainly L-cancelling and wavedashing. Basically, these were glitches in Melee, not intended to be in the game in the first place. However, Brawl likely has glitches of its own to uncover, so don't count it out just yet. There are a few other modes of gameplay such as the Subspace Emissary, but as I didn't see that, I won't remark on it.

Overall:

Super Smash Brothers Brawl meets my expectations in every way imaginable, based on the bit of play time I got and the information I've gleaned from message boards and forums. In short:

No graphics flaws.

No sound flaws.

Addicting gameplay.

Final Destination.