Super Smash Bros. Retrospective Part 1/3
I got several games over the holidays that I’ve meant to play through and review (like Beyond: Two Souls, The Wonderful 101, and Zelda: Link Between Worlds), but…well, I haven’t really played any of my new games extensively y0et. I will at some point, but for the last few months I’ve been investing the majority of my gaming time into playing the Super Smash Bros. Brawl mod known as Project M.
It’s been a work in progress for a long time and I’ve been playing the older builds of PM for about 2 years. For the unfamiliar, it combines Super Smash Bros. Brawl’s huge and creative roster of characters with the fast-paced, more competitive gameplay of its predecessor, Super Smash Bros. Melee. On December 9th of last year, the newest build was released, and it completely blew me away. They finally completed every character, added multiple cool looking alternate costumes, new stages, refined menus, a whole new way to play in the form of Turbo Mode, and what personally had me the most excited, the return of Mewtwo and Roy from Melee. It’s an awesome mod with a lot of effort put into it and I’ve barely been able to put it down since downloading it back in December. If you’re interested in trying it out for yourself, check it out right here.
And as many of you know, the 4th installment of the Super Smash Bros. series is set to come out…wait, this year!? Good lord, time flies. It’s already been over 6 years since Brawl! The new game looks impressive, to say the least, the colorful HD graphics, the super unique movesets given to the newcomers, and…hell, dude, it’s Smash Bros. This is a series known for having an absurd amount of content that lasts for years without getting old. Between the hours I’ve poured into Project M and the excitement of knowing that later this year I’ll be playing Smash 4, it’s hard not to be reminded of the series’ history and be kind of taken aback at just how much time I’ve put into playing this game with my friends. To celebrate, I decided my next blog will be the first of a 3-part series; you guessed it, a Super Smash Bros. Retrospective!
I played the first Smash Bros. when I was really, really little. I was in a store with my mom, and I saw a game with the most peculiar packaging. Mario…fighting Pikachu? I was awfully young so I wasn’t acquainted with very many games, but Mario and Pokemon were two of my favorites. I bought it, turned it on, and was presented with a selection of 8 characters, of which I recognized 5 or so (Mario, DK, Yoshi, Kirby, and Pikachu.) That said, there were also 3 I didn’t recognize; Link from Legend of Zelda, Samus from Metroid, and Fox from StarFox. And ironically, I think those characters I didn’t know were one of the very best parts of the first Smash Bros.; the fact that I was introduced to so many iconic and memorable characters that I may not have known otherwise.
Mario’s the undisputed face of gaming, it’d be impossible to run around for 5 minutes in the late 90s or early 2000s without seeing Pokemon everywhere…but series like the aforementioned StarFox and Metroid don’t have quite as much star power. Smash Bros. became such a hit that the recognizability of these characters and their games absolutely skyrocketed. Without playing a Zelda game before Smash, I still thought Link’s character design was cool, and I really liked the way he played in-game: his cool sword slashes, his big arsenal of weapons, everything about him was really intriguing to me. And because of his cool appearance in Smash Bros., I went to Funcoland (lol) and bought a copy of Ocarina of Time, which would eventually become one of my favorite games of all time. That’s not to say by any means that less popular series would have failed without Smash Bros, but I do have to wonder; would my appreciation for Zelda or StarFox have ever had a chance to exist if I hadn’t been drawn to the characters in SSB as a young kid? I think the definitive way you can judge the success of a crossover is by asking yourself the following question: does seeing this series represented in a crossover make me want to check out the source material?
In the case of Super Smash Bros., the answer is absolutely yes. As a kid, I wanted to play Earthbound and F-Zero soooo badly just because of how much I loved Ness and Captain Falcon in Smash, I bought Ocarina of Time just because of how much fun I had playing as Link, and while I had already been familiar with Kirby, seeing his funny and endearing moves in Smash Bros. really got me into the series. The game did
a phenomenal job not just from a gameplay perspective, but from serving as a sort of museum for Nintendo history, bringing joy to those who had been longtime fans and doing a wonderful job at introducing the variety of cool series and characters to newcomers.
The game opened with this super-stylish intro sequence doing a good job at representing every series present in the game and the scale of their coming together, putting forward the reason for their battles in a way that makes all too much sense; the characters are actually toys being played with. Clever! After that, the presentation remained consistently outstanding throughout. While the graphics are a bit off-putting even by N64 standards, there was a big variety in modes, in stages (accompanied by delightful music consisting of remixed versions of songs from the original games), and of course in characters. One thing that this game doesn’t get enough credit for is its sound effects; while a bit on the cartoony side, they deliver such a perfect feeling of satisfaction upon impact. Landing a giant punch with Donkey Kong and hearing the huge noise that accompanies it feels really, really good, and these fun, over-the-top sound effects are unfortunately something that would be abandoned as the series progressed.
The single-player aspect of the game is limited in that you’ve only got one mode, but that mode itself still has a lot of variety. Aside from the fighting, there are modes like Break the Targets, Board the Platforms, and Race to the Finish (in which you break the targets, board the platforms, and race to the finish respectively) that incorporate some cool challenges between battles, and it’d be a sin not to mention the extremely memorable final battle against Master Hand. While the mode would be pretty much the same every time you played it, every character got an awesome ending picture upon completion of the game. Look at some of these:
While not quite as impressive these days, seeing these colorful images on your 4:3 TV in 1999 after the credits rolled and being met with a loud “CONGRATULATIONS!” was totally awesome. I made sure to beat the game with all 12 characters just for the sake of seeing all these awesome pictures.
But single-player aside, the focus was on the multiplayer modes. You had 9 unique stages, 12 unique characters, a whole bunch of chaotic items, and the ability to bend and play around with whatever rule you want to. Want to fight your buddy? Okay! Want to fight three of your buddies? That’s cool! Want to fight with your buddy against two of your other buddies? That’s fine too! Play timed matches, stock matches, team battles, free for alls, whatever you want with any amount of players between one and four. This super flexible and customizable set of rules is the key to this game’s success, if you ask me; despite the relatively small roster of characters and the pretty basic gameplay, it doesn’t really ever get old! There are so many cool things to switch up and play around with that it’d take forever to explore every single possible combination of rules, stages and characters.
But what’s all this without fun, tight gameplay? Not much. Does Super Smash Bros. deliver in this regard? Yes! …sorta. At the time this was beyond unique; keep in mind more traditional fighting game series like Street Fighter and Tekken were dominating the PS1, but the N64 didn’t really have a fighter of its own. Instead of making your generic Street Fighter clone or a sloppily thrown together 3D fighter, the developers
sought to make a game that could be just as competitive, but also infinitely more accessible, more random, and more creative. Keep in mind that Mario, Kirby, Link, and Pikachu aren’t traditionally fighting game characters, so the fact that all these cartoony mascots who had otherwise only existed in their own games were able to blend together in this game so well is absolutely astounding. The creativity put into their movesets can’t be overstated enough, with each character feeling just like they would in their own games while also coming together and fitting into Smash together, and somehow it all results in a game with a surprising amount of depth and balance. In all honesty, there’s not much reason to play this game in the year 2014. The second game literally doubled its amount of content, the third game built even further than that, and they both arguably have refined and improved gameplay in terms of speed and options. That said, the innovation of a 4-player, easy-to-access fighter like Smash is something that’s really hard not to appreciate.
In the end Smash 64 may be kinda dated, but for me at least, it’s impossible not to smile looking back at what an awesome job this game did at so many things. It brought together characters I recognized with characters I didn’t and made them all awesome! It gave me hours of entertainment simply fidgeting around with characters and learning all their different moves! And perhaps most important of all, it killed weekend after weekend of just kicking back and having a blast with a couple of friends. This game’s 15th anniversary was the 21st of January this year if memory serves, and after all this time a lot of the appeal has worn off in that its sequels have done so much to add to the initial formula. Even so, it’s impossible to deny the impact Smash made on Nintendo and its fanbase. And it’s all only going up from here!
Check back next week for part 2!
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