Super Smash Bros.: A Retrospective Part III: The honeymoon and the aftermath

Day three of the Retrospective, release day for Ultimate. Let's continue.

Reminder that this happened.

So, with Sonic confirmed, I was already set for Brawl. I had the Wii console and was saving money for the game. So it was just a matter of waiting it out. Around this time, I wondered who else was slated for the roster and I was also anticipating the Subspace Emissary.

Basically a fanfic come to life. At the time, it was a nice way to expand on the Adventure Mode. It did what it was supposed to do. A story to tell, great graphics (For the time), an orchestrated theme, Brawl was pulling out all the stops and anyone following video games overall was suckered in to its campaign. From now until late January, the DOJO!! would update with characters, music, modes, items and so on.

And at the date mentioned, someone on 2ch received the game in Japan early. Said player started playing and putting screens on the imageboard, screens that would make its way to 4chan's /v/ board. Naturally, everyone from all corners of the gaming internet congregated to that one board to see what was up. Needless to say, things got real crazy. And it was a little earlier that the final roster got leaked.

Along with who was shown on the site, Wolf, ROB, Olimar and Toon Link were the last characters mentioned. I loved Pikmin 2 and The Wind Waker is arguably my second favorite Zelda title.

Oh man. Seeing this little brat in Smash made me giddy. Alongside our newcomers were Ness and Ganondorf returning. And of the roster, Dr. Mario, Mewtwo, Roy, Pichu and Y. Link were confirmed to not return. Four clones and a unique character. But the tradeoff was much better. So let's do a roundabout with Brawl's newcomers like the last time.

• Diddy Kong, at long last. He missed the trophy roster in Melee but made it in the playable roster here. My second most used after Donkey himself. I've come to appreciate Diddy a lot more when I joined the DKVine.
• Metaknight. Okay. I was neutral towards him so not much to say. But I did like the detail to his armor but I still consider his feet to be purple and not armored. I wasn't a fan of the English voice nor the special jingle he got.
• King Dedede I liked more. I'm surprised at least one of the two didn't pop up in Melee. I really liked his moveset and his voice. He oozed personality.
• Zero Suit Samus, the subject of a lot of porn. This had to be the game to ramp it up. So much so you have a lot of people who use Samus in the Zero Suit as the de-facto Samus. Even more damning is Zero Suit is better than normal Samus when Zero Suit was meant to be a point where Samus was vulnerable and weaker.
• Pokemon Trainer a year later I came to really like. I got back in Pokemon shortly after buying Brawl and this character or characters repped the staple avatar nicely with Red and the Kanto starters. Who do I prefer? For now, I can't say. It's been a while. I'll catch you on that one when I play Ultimate. I didn't like the stamina system though. That was a flaw.
• Wolf was a definitely an odd choice, but I liked him. Star Fox 64 was that good of a game. With him and Kirby's reps, you'd think that Donkey Kong would get King K. Rool or Dixie (hoo boy, just wait 'til I get to that part). He was the last character to be made and is composed of many other character's moves. He also shared a Final Smash with the other two Star Fox reps, the Landmaster.
• Lucas, until Ness was confirmed to return worried me. Now I had no issue with both PSI boys on the roster. Mother 3 also had a translation patch worked on at the time. I still laugh at the people who think NoA are going to localize it. Mother only got released because they could grab the Earthbound Zero ROM and reskin as a prequel (Ha, nice try).
  
• Lucario. Again, after replaying Pokemon and getting back in the grind, I've come to appreciate it a lot more. All the people crying about Mewtwo was obnoxious. Lucario was okay. A shill pick, but okay in my book. It's still popular to this day.
• Ike. He fights for his friends.
• Pit's redesign stands out a lot. Compared to the Melee trophy, this is like a 2000's reboot...which is exactly what it is and was with Kid Icarus: Uprising four years later. Never used him much.
• Wario, I already explained him.
• Captain Olimar, I admit I never used as much as I could. But again, Pikmin 2 was a superb title. Some people imagined him as an assist trophy but thankfully he avoided that hell. The individual Pikmin in Subspace had their own elements, a nice nod to their properties in the source material.
• ROB, the surprise character. Some people thought it was ROB 64 from Star Fox. No way Star Fox is getting four reps. That's not happening anytime soon. Though it's very flattering to give the would-be savior of video games in the North American market a spot on the Smash Bros. roster.
• Sonic the Hedgehog. No explanation needed.
• Solid Snake. Thanks for paving the way for Sonic and eventually the rest of the outsiders. Asshole.

But overall, a strong roster with a lot of good picks, probably the strongest set of newcomers to any Smash game in general. Honorable mentions to the Forbidden Seven.

• Dixie Kong, who some speculated may have been a team character with Diddy. She lost her chance in Smash and will never get in now.
• Toon Zelda, Wind Waker's Zelda basically. Ah man. This one really stung, because I not only love that game, I love that rendition of Zelda, by far my favorite take and most of my favorite Zelda titles have that design, Spirit Tracks being my absolute favorite Zelda to this day. A speedier Zelda would have been amazing. 
• Toon Sheik, who I think is actually Tetra. Another character I loved from Wind Waker. The transformation could have worked with her and T. Zelda. Oh well.
• Plusle and Minum were heavily speculated going by the Pra_Mai section in the game files. That would have gotten Gen III a rep, two at that if true.
• Roy, Mewtwo and Dr. Mario were discovered too. Overall you'd have eight more characters for the roster and I think that would have rounded things up fantastically. 

Mods have recreated most of them, one mod in particular I'll mention later on. But back to the leak on /v/, everyone was coming in to see the dumping of the Subspace mode. It war around 2AM where the first screens popped up and I remember this lasting until 7:30 PM that same day. Man. I was disappointed that a few other characters weren't around but it was something else. The music was being uploaded and this is by far Brawl's strongest point to this day. The soundtrack. A lot of music was added, so much the game disc had to be dual-layered to fit it all and the Subspace cutscenes, another con for this game.

But nonetheless, the wait continued and I had stuff to keep my occupied for the time. A few months and a small delay later, I managed to get a copy of the game one Friday before Spring Break. Hot damn. I remember playing training mode and picking Donkey Kong, admiring his increase in size. That model is probably my favorite compared to Melee's. He really was huge. Then I played the game in general. It did what it was supposed to do. Then I played the Subspace Emissary.


Fast forward a few months later, the game was losing its appeal. Everyone who played it got hype, got overhyped and the hype crash was settling in. One feature I hated was tripping. Tripping was a mechanic added simply because Sakurai hated the way people were playing Melee. It was meant to be a way to laugh at the situation but all it did was annoy people, even the people who don't play Melee competitively, myself included. When I played with friends, I was the better player and the game did this a lot: The weaker player would return, Final Smash ready. This was prominent in Mario Kart Wii with the Blue Shell attacking the lead racer. Basically they casualized the games so that non-gamers would have a chance to win but it backfired; the said group didn't like it either, be it tripping or the blue shell attack. And because Brawl was supposed to follow-up to Melee, this was a bit damning.

I don't play Smash competitively, but I acknowledge the people who do. What made Melee fun is that everyone could enjoy it, even the people who weren't as good. Sakurai's attempt to make it easier for the novice only pissed them off as well. How do you learn to play a game? You keep playing it and get better. I said this with New Super Mario Bros. Wii: Having the game play itself because you're not good at it stifles growth and development. The Wii generation overall watered down a lot of IP's and games and Brawl was the sign of things to come.

On the note of Brawl, I'm going back a bit to bring up a notable mod for the game, Project M. The mod started off as a way to fix Falco to play like he did in Melee in 2011. I didn't think much of it but I get why it was done. Same with Brawl-, another mod to fix the physics. But Project M was the main mod of Brawl. It started with modifying characters and grew to adding its own stages, costumes and even characters down the line, Mewtwo being one of them. Some of the characters got references from other games. I was very impressed to see Wario take nods from Wario Land, even taking his trademark shoulder bash for a Side-B move, something that took a decade to pop up in Ultimate. On the note of Wario, the so called shoulder bash in Brawl was a joke unless you were Wario Man. Brawl in general was broken with its balance. If you weren't Metaknight or Snake, you were screwed.

Most of the time, I just listened to the soundtrack, making the game more obsolete when I got an MP3 player. And I couldn't really play it due to my early Wii console not being able to read newer dual-layered discs. So, as quickly as I may have gotten into Smash, I slowly lost interest when I couldn't play it anymore. Such ends the tale of Brawl. I focused on Pokemon and could really care less about Smash, rolling my eyes when people brought it up. Another nitpick of mine was how everyone blew Nobuo Uematsu when he composed the main theme for the game and everyone remixed it. It got really annoying. Some renditions were cool but the rest were mind-numbing.

Another three years later around 2011, Smash was announced yet again, for the 3DS and the Wii U. Great. Back to this tired song and dance once more. But it was announced, not shown. At the time, Sakurai was focused on Kid Icarus: Uprising. The stress of another Smash title with your current project still incomplete had to have worn on his mind...

And that episode will be touched on in our next entry.