Metroid Prime 3
Metroid Prime 3... Nintendo's first of the "Big 3," has finally arrived. But, was it worth the 10 month delay?
Metroid's controls have raised the standards for First Person Shooters on the Wii platform. There are plenty of customizable options to make the controls fit your needs. Aiming with the Wiimote is no harder than aiming and shooting. It puts dual-analog set-ups to shame. On the down-side, turning while grapple swinging is done with the analog stick and feels horrendous.
Scanning is the game's best tool. You can scan ANYTHING you wish to. Power ups, doors, bosses, enemies, and other human beings. It does lower their identity to a specific group of people, and it just feels uncomfortable to "scan" a human. You can scan dead people and get an autopsy as to how they died.
Aside from scanning, Hypermode is a lifesaver as well. You can go into hypermode at any given time and it raises the amount of damage you can deal out to an insanely high level. Outside of the game's highest difficulty setting in which hypermode is almost required to defeat any enemy, it's overpowering and does make killing a breeze.
The game's camera suffers from the closterphobic first person view. When jumping, you don't really see where you're going to land, and when screw-jumping, the camera zooms out to a third person view that isn't any better. Doors often load quickly, openning as soon as you shoot them, but they sometimes take up to 10 seconds to load. You think you can knock them down to move on, or that the game didn't pick up the fact that you didn't shoot at the door and break out into a spasm. Cutscenes come plenty, but most of the times they just mask the game's load times. While the cutscenes aren't obvious about it, when you realise you can't skip them and it keeps looping over and over, it makes a statement.
But of all things, the map, is the worst Metroid Prime 3 has to offer. Everything is a transperant orange color making the already-confusing layout even more confusing and annoying. 3-d makes the map less of a map and more of a level's mini-me. Mini-me just doesn't make anything easy to understand. The only way to eliminate the barrage of orange and annoying 3-d layout, is to view the map from a birds-eye view. But then you can't see what floors you need to go to! As if that wasn't enough, not all the doors in a room are connected to each other. The camera rotates around your selected room, but selecting a room is a task in itself! This isn't a minor flaw that you can just pass over, the map is the 1 tool you get to understand each and every level of the game. Everytime you get a new objective, you also get the map. You either deal with it, or wander aimlessly for hours trying to find a save room or your ship.
The game is incredibly detailed with a wonderful art style. While the environments are sometimes put together with a low amount of polygons and when they are it looks incredibly annoying, the texture work and art styles are simply phenomenal. The skybox (backround) looks like concept art, which is a great thing! High Dynamic Range Lighting makes the game worth the 10-month delay, and the polish is incredible.
The game's MIDI sound is very wierd, and matches with Metroid Prime 3's exotic nature. The vocals might be awkward like crazy, and one of the game's pieces is a mere 2 seconds long, but the music is fine. The credits will make you deaf though. The sound effects are subtle and not really that interesting. If you get this game for the music, I question your mind.
People say that it lasts 20 hours, but real gamers can finish it in 15 easily. At the end of the credits, you're asked if you want to start the game over again, and you never really finish the game. But playing through it again would be an honor!
Overall, Metroid Prime 3 is a great endevor and a true masterpeice. However, in the long run, it might not seem that way. With the rest of Nintendo's Big 3 around the corner, this game could be just another disk collecting dusk in your game library. Nevertheless, Metroid Prime 3 is one of the greatest Wii games made thus far. Lack of multiplayer doesn't make the game worse, but it doesn't make it any better. Seeing as how other FPS's on the console have multiplayer capabilities and more shooters underway, this title may easily be forgotten.
Controls: 9.5
Fluent, responsive, and simple controls never got this good in a First Person Shooter. The simplicity of the nunchuck/wiimote combo eliminate the PC as the superior shooter platform and the accuracy makes us wonder why Nintendo hadn't done this sooner. Only drawback is the map, with God-aweful controls and an interface which makes it more confusing than trying out each path and seeing where it takes you, and trying to remember the whole level by heart.
Gameplay: 9
Action/Shooting elements are perfectly balanced. The environments are wonderfully puzzling, and the bosses are incredible. The map system is just horrid and load times are a lot longer than the usual Nintendo standard of 3-4 seconds.
Graphics: 8
Unparalleled at time of release, Metroid Prime 3 combines technical achievements such as the HDR lighting, draw distance, and great textures with a great art style. Low-poly environments are a major drawback. The Wii can do better. Even Retro Studios said so, and Nintendo will prove it soon.
Length/Replay Value: 8
At 15-20 hours a run, Metroid Prime 3 succeeds in leaving you with a game you just want to play over and over. Hypermode difficulty isn't really "difficult," but when you see an enemy blast into their own version of hypermode, RUN. The ending doesn't make you want to play again, but the game does. Lack of multiplayer doesn't help in replay value beyond beating the main quest with it's hardest difficulty.
Sound: 7
MIDI files. That means wierd music, if you didn't know. Of all of Nintendo's Big 3, only Metroid Prime 3 has MIDI music, and for a good reason. The music matches the nature of the game. Sound effects are not very interesting, but match the situation at the least. Put simply, if you like this game because of the music, I question your mind.
Overall: 9.1
Super Mario Galaxy
History:
Mario is full of spin-offs which make the majority of his vast 230+ game collection. But there is always 1 series that defies them all: the Super Mario series. Starting in 1985 with Super Mario Brothers, each game in the Super Mario series recieves massive critical acclaim and sales. When Nintendo transitioned to 3-D, their consoles get well over 500 games each. However, there is only 1 game on that console that belongs to the Super Mario series. With 11 games covering 150,000,000 units, 3/4 of Mario's total game sales, Mario has become well known as Nintendo's Icon, and the very symbol of videogaming itself.
Nintendo's transition to 3-D wasn't easy. Super Mario 64 has been in the planning stage for 5 years. Once the design was complete, it took another 2 years to model and develop. While Super Mario World has over 90 seperate levels, it would be impossible for them to make more than the featured 15 in Super Mario 64. Nintendo had to find a way to make each level playable more than 1 time and each time not feeling repetitive. Mario cannot move in 3-D space with a d-pad as easily as he could in 2-D. The camera in 2-D was always perfect. It never changed, and just followed Mario wherever he went. But in 3-D space, there are more factors than Mario moving left and right. Nintendo bypassed all this and made what went on to what some consider "the greatest game ever made."
The fans and media were shocked! Nintendo, with their mysterious magic, was able to construct a "perfect" 3-D title before 3-D became mainstream! Even to this day, Super Mario 64 stands as the one title that sets the videogaming standard, much how Super Mario Brothers revolutionized gaming by creating levels and bosses that can be beaten. We were waiting for the next one. Super Mario 64, 2 was schedualed for a release on the N64DD, a disk drive add-on to the N64. It failed to gain popularity in Japan, and as thus, all it's games were either shelved anyway, cancelled, or moved to the N64, the most famous of these was The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask which required an expansion pack on the N64. Super Mario 64, 2 never came to existance. Nintendo announced their next project on the Gamecube in 2001, nearly 7 years after 64's debut, and the fans were screaming. However, while still an unmatched platformer, it failed to hold up to the unspeakable quality that is Super Mario 64, and it's "sequal" Super Mario 128. The tech demo (Super Mario 128) was just that: a tech demo. It did not influence Super Mario Sunshine in any way.
Super Mario Sunshine still recieved great praise and sales. However, once we all finished it, what's next? 5 years of spin offs? Apperantly. Our next Super Mario game would be on the DS in the form of Super Mario 64 DS. 30 more stars and new levels with multiplayer just wasn't enough to satisfy the Mario gamer. After all, we already did it before, and now that we have better jumping powers thanks to Luigi, the game was a piece of cake. Not to mention that Yoshi is no longer on the castle top. Super Mario 64 succeeded at being a DS game but failed at being a worthy 3-D Super Mario game. Our next Super Mario game would actually be a 2-D one in the form of New Super Mario Brothers, and it just wasn't enough. It was far too short and easy. Nintendo was suffering a slight drop in the franchise. But then came along Super Mario Galaxy. Nintendo went all out throwing Mario into space and centering the gameplay around gravity manipulation. New power ups, Wii controls, and 39 levels... Could this be the Super Mario 128? The "spiritual successor" to Super Mario 64? The Super Mario 64 killer?!
First off, I want to say that this review is 100% by me and 100% my total opinion on the game. There are 2 types of Mario fans: Fanboys, and Hardcore. Fanboys just like any Mario game that comes out. Hardcore Mario fans know exactly what to expect from each individual title and know exactly what's good, and what's not. If you see me saying things other reviewers didn't catch, just remember, I am a hardcore Mario fan ;)
Once you start the game, you'll realise the importance to the Wii's controls. At first glance, it seems as though the Wiimote was used in gimmicky ways. Shake it to go up vines, twist it to control a Manta Ray, etc. but it never feels gimmicky when you do it. You collect objects called Star Bits with the Wiimote and shoot them. In some stages, you'll be trapped inside a bubble being moved with a "blower" that looks like a horn with a gear at the end of it. However, I disliked the way it was used in other instances. To control a Manta Ray in 2 of the game's galaxies, you twist the Wiimote to turn. While it feels a lot better than I thought it would, There are so many different ways it could be done. You could hold the Wiimote like a steering wheel, or you could just use the analog stick simple as that, but NO. You have to twist the thing. I swear, I got major wrist exersizes after I kept losing the course. You eventually get to roll a ball for a few galaxies by standing on top of it. To control the ball, you hold the Wiimote strait up and tilt it toward the direction you want to go, like a joy stick. The precision and accuracy is nearly perfect, but why do I have to put my whole arm in an uncomfortable position to play the game?! Again, the nunchuck is sitting there all bored and lonely and offers a perfect "cure" to this problem. While the whole idea of difficulty should come from level design, something Mario does extremelly well, in this case, not so much "level design" as it is "stupid controls."
Outside of the good-but-sometimes-awkward-and-gimmicky uses of the Wiimote, Mario's moves are better than ever. The spin jump done by shaking the Wiimote is one of the most useful moves. You use the spin jump to break crystals and beat enemies, though you can also jump on them as well. The spin jump adds a little mid-air jump Mario never obtained before which is extremelly useful. If you're about to fall off, it can be a lifesaver. You can use it to land on platforms more accurately (extending the time of your decent) or to increase the distance of your long jump and together with wall jumps, you can scale walls much greater than before. The wall jump system has also improved. In Super Mario 64, jumping on a wall would just knock you down, and if you happened to press the jump button right before you hit the wall, you would perform a wall jump. In Super Mario Sunshine, this issue was addressed by letting Mario slide down walls instead of getting knocked off of them. However, in Super Mario Galaxy, Mario literally clings to the wall like Spiderman for a few seconds before sliding down... not so much like Spiderman. The advantage to this is that you don't need to control the direction of Mario while he's wall-jumping: he will automatically jump away from the wall he clings to. The downside is that, very few times before you realise how the system works, you will fail to grab a ledge only to cling right underneath it before falling into oblivion, or just falling. Either or, it happened to me. Luckily, Mario doesn't need to jump toward a ledge as he will automatically climb on it when you jump from underneath. The spin jump also allows Mario to land right on the platform.
Super Mario 64 was made famous for it's invention of the Mission system. Allowing you to play levels more than once, the mission system continued in videogame tradition for the ages and even until now. But one thing that made Super Mario 64 so great is how well the mission system was pulled off, something Mario could not, and may never reach. Each of the 15 levels had 6 stars. Each of these stars was some sort of mission. Each level also had a 100 coin challange. Then, they put 15 secret stars around the Castle and it's secret rooms. In Sunshine, they screwed it up beyond comprehension. 240 blue coins get you 24 of the game's stars. Many of these blue coins cannot be obtained in specific levels making it even more ridiculous (not challanging, I mean ridiculous) to collect them all. Then, they decided that 15 levels was too much so they narrowed that down to 7, and put 8 mission stars per level and 2 hidden stars as well, and a 100 coin challange. The hidden stars were often red coin challanges in minigames, small levels with random platforms. The red coin challange was increasingly difficult because there was a time limit. Some levels gave you 1 miute to collect all 8 red coins as well! The main land was Delphino Plaza and it's adjacent Delphino Airstrip level. Both areas have 18 stars between them. 24 stars from blue coins, 18 from the mainland, and 77 from the levels. Plus, 1 star for beating Bowser.
Super Mario Galaxy fails to meet Super Mario 64's layout. There are 39 (not 40, not more than 40, just 39, I counted them from a list) levels. From that, the world explodes into mayhem. But one thing they didn't tell you is that 24 of these levels contain ONLY 1 STAR. Come ON! 1 Star. 1 freaking Star, per level, for 24 levels. SHEESH! Instead of finding 240 blue coins, you have to complete 24 levels to get those stars! Well actually, That's a good thing. Blue Coins suck. Levels rock! As for the other 15 levels, you get 6 stars each from them, 2 of the levels have 7 stars. There are 3 main stars per level, each one being a completelly different mission from the other, and each one requiring you to select the star before you can attempt to obtain it. Super Mario 64 let you get almost any star you want regardless of your selection. That kind of freedom went away with Sunshine and Galaxy followed. There are some hidden stars as well, and unlike in Super Mario Sunshine, you get to know which episode the hidden star can be obtained in. Then, there are prankster comets which add challange to one of those missions. For example, if there's a daredevil comet on a level (the comets come at random), you will face a boss and any hit kills you. If there's a cosmic comet on a level, you face a invisible version of yourself (it's actually yourself with maximum alpha for color and specularity, but you know, kind of invisible) in a race to the star. If there's a Purple comet, which only come after the game's completion of 60 stars and the defeat of Bowser as a Final Boss, you have to collect 100 purple coins (not just any coins, they have to be purple). Purple coins don't replenish health which adds difficulty, and the structure of the levels make the 100 coin challange in Super Mario Galaxy very difficult to complete. Those 15 galaxies I was talking about earlier each have their own 100 coin challange, and their own version of the mission: some galaxies require 100 out of 150 coins to be picked up. Some galaxies have a time limit. The comets add some spice to the traditional Mario mission layout, and they add difficulty to the game as a whole.
The first 60 stars are VERY easy to collect: 6 hours can spell game completion. However, the addition of co-op, prankster comets, and the 120 star ending all make the game have a variety of difficulties. If you are a non-gamer and want to play with your son/daughter/whoever, you can pick up a Wiimote and get a very easy control scheme to work with. Aiming collects stars, pressing the A button will shake bushes, stun enemies, and make mario jump, and pressing the B button will shoot the stars at enemies. Co-op has been described as "uneccessary" and "put just so they can say it has co-op." I disagree. Shrinking platforms will stop at your co-op partner's will, and collecting star bits is twice as easy as before. If you are new to Mario or see the "E" rating as "6+," then you can beat the game's 60 stars passing over prankster comets and without needing to stay on any particular level longer than what you need to. If you're a "real" gamer who wants a challange, try the prankster comets and doing the harder levels and getting the best record times you can. You can get all 120 stars and call it quits. However, if you're a hardcore Mario fan, and you want to squeeze every last bit of the game that you can, you get a chance to replay all 120 stars. I won't spoil how you do it, but if you do, you can unlock a final galaxy and get the 121st. star. See how it goes? Super Mario Galaxy is clearly a game for "E" because "E" can play it (if you aren't of ESRB orgin, E means everyone, and therefore, Super Mario Galaxy is for everyone). The game's path to 120 stars is still easy, once you know how to do it. 20 hours is all you really need to get all 120 stars, and while the difficulty of the game is far more than Super Mario 64, it's not as hard as the Super Mario Sunshine minigames... well, more or less. Really, more or less. Depends on the star.
The bosses are a minor disapointment from what we've seen from E3. There are a lot of them, a lot more than past Mario games, but most of them can be beaten quickly somewhat easily. Daredevil comets which make you do the whole thing with only 1 hit to death, don't add much difficulty to the bosses. Quite thankfully, the bosses are still unique. Disapointing, but unique.
The level structure, unlike previously in 3-D Mario games, is very loose and random. Glaxies are made up of very small planets. You travel from 1 planet to another, doing whatever it takes to get off of that planet first. Because of this, levels are often very broken. What I mean by this is that the level design, while very well put, doesn't really allow you to see what's coming up next. Take it however you want, all I know is that when you have no idea when a level will end and where it does, you think less about that and think more about how you're gonna GET to the end.
Gravity manipulation has been done very well in Super Mario Galaxy. It has been used before: Sonic Adventure 2 showed us that on the Dreamcast. However, Sonic Adventure 2 was known for it's horrible camera and controls, and gravity manipulation made that problem clear. Sonic Adventure 2 had 3 levels I know very well with gravity manipulation. The game was divided into 3 seperate gameplay formulas: Sonic's stage were about racing to the end. Tail's stages was centered around defeating enemies while getting to the end, and Knuckle's stages were about finding 3 pieces of the Master Emerald. Of course, each character has their own "Dark Side" and yada yada. Cosmic Wall was tail's version of gravity manipulation. However, it was less about changing the direction of gravity: you just hover a lot higher than usual. The addition of gravity manipulation allowed the level to be taller than most robot stages, but made the level very slow and boring. Sonic's stage was Crazy Gadget. During the stage, it was used merelly to walk on the wall and ceiling, but the stage's end featured one of the most confusing layouts in any Sonic game i know. It was used to travel from one block to the other without falling into space. The camera sucked horribly and almost never showed you were you were heading, and just walking was very confusing. This stage has a time limit mission which puts a 5 minute time limit on the entire level: anywhere from 1 and a half to 2 of those minutes are needed to pass this frustrating maze. But by far, the worst of the stages was Knuckle's version of collecting the Emerald: Mad Space.
Mad Space closely resembles Super Mario Galaxy's form of gravity manipulation by pulling you toward planets and jumping from one planet to the other. However, the camera never shows you what you need to see and the controls are equally confusing. You can't control the camera when you really need to, and the level layout is just as random as Super Mario Galaxy's. But even worse, you have to find a very small object that you can't see in this big mess. Super Mario Galaxy's camera is much better. It's very intelligent and presents the game in, almost, a movie like fashion. However, When you really need to change the camera angle to get a better view, you can't. Nintendo put camera controls for practically no good reason. The camera only needs to be fixed when Nintendo decides "let's make them all suffer!" and doesn't allow you to change the camera for whatever odd reason that may be, and puts the camera... not showing ALL of what you need to see. The camera otherwise is much better than what Sunshine and 64 offered despite having the challange of showing the best view when running upside down and on very odd shapes and figures.
When we first saw Super Mario Galaxy, many people said it looked very reminiscent of an Xbox 360 title, despite the lack of High Definition. There are a lot of factors that make Super Mario Galaxy look astounding: for one, it runs at a full 60 frames per second. Something that no console Mario game has ever achieved. The framerate also makes Super Mario Galaxy difficult to put on the internet in full. While there may be High Definition footage, a refresh rate of 60 frames per second would double the file size and download time while not helping the clarity of the video at all. To get the full Super Mario Galaxy experience, you need an HDTV. Not just a computer hooked up to an HDTV, I mean a Wii, a copy of the game, and an HDTV, to see the smoothness of the picture and animation. You simply MUST see this game in 480p. Any less just wouldn't do. The colors are very vibrant and shown in a wide range of shading. I'm not sure whether Super Mario Galaxy is shown in High Dynamic Range, but it sure looks like it.
Specular highlights are applied to virtually half the objects in the game. Metal, lumas, star bits, water, characters, grass, and even Mario himself all have some degree of specularity. Specularity has been taken to great heights with this game. Shading was well done in the game... but the textures go from amazing to bland very quickly. It all depends on the level. Polys are a downfall, despite what others say. Many parts of levels make you think the screenshot has no more than 100 or so polys. Up close, that is. Mario has a very well done character model, but the environments are something else. The environment in the honeyhive galaxy look very simple, bland, and unappealing because of this. Fur shading has been added to Mario's Bee outfit, the Queen Bee, and a pink Mole whose name doesn't come to mind at the moment. Fur shading looks great, but it's been done before. Let's look at the new stuff. Crystals have a great depth in the reflections: you can see yourself multiple times in each crystal, and despite the seemingly stressing demands this puts on hardware, it doesn't affect performance at all. The game's framerate drops mainly when zooming in and out very quickly. The camera prevents this from happening, but at times, particularly in the observatory which hosts platforms that zoom the camera out to show the whole observatory and then zooms back in to Mario in less than 3 seconds of time. The draw distance is incredible on planets: as long as a planet is IN the galaxy, it can be seen. Open galaxies like the Gusty Garden galaxy and Gusty Dune galaxy prove this. However, when you zoom in and out of the observatory, all the lumas, toads, bridge lights, and other objects will disapear. Star bits also "pop-in" when shooting from 1 planet to another. Because all you need to do to collect a star bit is aim the Wiimote at it, the pop-ins make it harder to collect extremelly distant star bits (from seperate planets, for example). Other than those anomolies, it looks wonderful and smooth. The game isn't in HD and it's not being played on a "supercomputer," but making that a negative point against the game is like saying "well, it seems like it's better, but technically, it isn't." This applies to the graphical and audio aspects of this game: I don't know, does it LOOK like it's as good as an Xbox 360 game? Does it SOUND as good as an Xbox 360 game? Isn't that all what really matters? Personally, I think Super Mario Galaxy is no Halo 3. Super Mario Galaxy isn't realistic, it's stylistic. But it does that style extremelly well. And that's all that really matters. Turning on the console to play the game will most likely send you out of this world.
The game's soundtrack is what holds everything however. The soundtrack would be appropriate for a movie, but instead it's used for a Mario game, and what a job they did on the soundtrack! The music always follows suit with the levels amazingly while at the same time not feeling as though it could be better. Sound channeling is great: sure, it's Dolby Pro Logic II, but that's like saying... you know.
Overall, Super Mario Galaxy plays and feels like a true Super Mario game, but once you start playing you'll realise it's not another Super Mario 64, it's something new. A new concept that stands on it's own and sticks to the great level design that makes Mario famous in the first place. But the real question is: is it a Super Mario 64 killer? The answer is no. Nintendo limited the true potential to Super Mario Galaxy to only 120 stars. Most of the levels (24) are dedicated to only 1 star. The level designs in those levels are fantastic, but simplistic. Almost a third of the stars are re-used for a comet version, or just reused. As such, the game only feels like Super Mario Galaxy some of the times. Other times, it just feels like something you already did. Super Mario 64 had each of the 6 main stars hold a different task. The only repeats I know of are the 8 red coin challanges, which can easily differ from level to level, and the 100 coin challange which is solely dependent on the enemies you beat and areas you go, so there is no downfall to that. Plus, the freedom is incredible. You can select the first mission in a level and get the last mission in a level. You can get the 100 coin challange at any time. Super Mario Galaxy could've replicated, or met with this level of ultimate freedom. But it didn't. Despite all this, it's definatelly at the top of the top Super Mario games out there: a title deemed impossible, even by Mario's own high standards, but Super Mario Galaxy definatelly reached it. We have finally recieved Super Mario 128. Just not in the form we thought it would come.
Controls: 9.5
It's not the use of the Wiimote that makes it: rather, the Wiimote kills it. The ever-so-few stars gained from holding the Wiimote in slightly uncomfortable ways only makes a difference because the analog stick or simple thinking could save it. Overworld controls are astounding, and the spin jump shouldn't have made it's debut so late.
Graphics: 9.5
60 FPS standard, specularity, wonderful backdrops, and the vibrant colors that Mario should always hold for generations to come. Low poly environments aren't immediatelly noticable, but they're there, and the draw distance is great, with minor pop-ins on objects and not the environment. Movie-like camera motions sum it all up: it looks like a great movie, and an even better game.
Gameplay: 9.5
10 means it's perfect. 9.5 means it has flaws because it was designed by a human being and not God. It's very fun and challanging and never feels out of place, except in the examples above with rolling on a ball and controlling a Manta Ray. The camera works, but on the times when it doesn't, you can't change it. Of course, fantastic level design and the such with my only major concern being on the mission layout, amazing how high I have to set my standards before I have a complaint. But the mission layout really kills it. It's not 39 levels folks, it's 15. The rest are really good minigames. The difficulty is also perfectly tailored unlike in 64 and Sunshine.
Audio: 10
...Yep. I really don't find a flaw with the audio at all. The Wiimote sounds don't pop as much as in Twilight Princess, sound effects are spot-on and placed when neccessary, and the soundtrack creates the perfect mood for any level. Dolby Pro Logic II doesn't matter in this case. Also, you may wind up finding 1... or 2 of these songs on your iPod. The standards for audio on the Wii have officially been raised. Let's see if people can start using real instruments now.
Length/Replay Value: 7
15 levels, and 24 really good minigames. However, the 100 coin challanges in each of the 15 levels are astoundingly difficult for a Mario game. Otherwise, the game can last 6, 20, or 40 hours depending on how long you want to go into it. However, you can beat the game throughouly in 20 hours. The mission layout forbids a mode which allows you to goof off after you're done beating it, but I encourage you to do so while you play it. It's fun! One other note: Super Smash Brothers is well known for having a huge length in the single and multiplayer mode due to it's trophies and multiplayer options. I use Melee as my standard of a game with a perfect length/replay value. If you want to play the game longer, as said before, goof off and play it twice.
Overall: 9.5
Super Smash Brothers Brawl Review
History:
Super Smash Brothers was originally a game built between Masahiro Sakurai and Satoru Iwata on their free time. It originally wasn't supposed to be a massive crossover. Development on the first game in series began in 1998 by HAL Laboratories, the guys responsible for the Kirby and lesser-known Earthbound/Mother series. After under a year of development, a very small budget, and only a single commercial and a Japan-only release, the game became incredibly popular and eventually released to the US, Australia, and Europe selling more than 5,000,000 copies, and as such making it the fifth best selling N64 game! However, single-player mode was very plain.
Two and a half years later comes the release of Super Smash Brother's sequal, Melee. Released just months after the Gamecube's debut, the game highlights many of the graphical improvements over the original including well-textured, animated models and good shading. Melee added tons of new modes including Events (special situation matches), the Home Run Contest (beat Sandbag for 10 seconds and knock him with the baseball bat), Multi-Man Melee (a fight with a ton of wireframe models), and an adventure mode. Melee boasted 25 characters over the original's 14, and a ton more items and stages. Melee's vital element was the trophy collection: a bunch of various key characters, objects, and places from the franchises. Trophies can be obtained through adventure mode randomly, through the lottery, or by unlocking them. You can get trophies from every [playable] mode in the game (except training).
Melee was an astounding hit for the Gamecube selling over 7,000,000 copies worldwide and being the highlight title for the Gamecube (it was also bundled in the later releases of the Gamecube). From 2001 we jump to E3 2006: the unveiling of Super Smash Brothers Brawl. It's hard to say that the world wasn't up in arms over the news. Nintendo's crossover hit was getting a sequal! This time around, third party characters were included (Snake and Sonic). We knew Pit, Snake, Wario, Meta Knight, and Zero Suit Samus would all be new playable characters, and that Battleship Halberd was a new stage. The game was also announced to go online worldwide.
Jump to 2007, and you'll get a lot more. Stages from Mariokart, Yoshi's Island, and Kid Icarus made it through, but the only new character announced was Fox. It was a big game of tease until the re-launch of the SSBB Dojo (Brawl's official website) where we got daily information about brawl... and more teasing. Stages, characters, music, game modes, etc. were revealed at a very slow pace. We eventually learned of a story mode (Subspace Emissary), Level Editor, the option to save replays of matches/target tests/home run contests and screenshots during pause times. The game's release date was suddenly set to December 3, 2007. Not bad? But with so much new modes, characters, items, stages, and the inclusion of a story mode, Brawl didn't meet it's December 3 date. Well, so much for getting Brawl on Christmas. A ton of gamestop gift cards later, and we all await the arrival of Brawl Febuary 10, 2008. Well, there were problems with manufacturing (or so they say...), and the date was moved to March 9. From October 2005 to March 9, 2008, this game seemed to test mankind's ability to make such a masterpiece.
2 years and 4 months later, Brawl hits Japanese shores and that's when we get a good look at the title. 35 playable characters, 41 stages... and everything the Subspace Emissary is about. A month later and the ultimate test arrives for Nintendo's internet servers. The game lagged like crazy due to the incredibly high demand for online Brawl matches, and the sub-par servers. The game still has yet to be released in Europe and Australia.
Brawl reveals itself as an incredibly compressed package as it's the first Wii game to utilize 2 data layers (some dirty laser readers caused the game to malfunction on some units). It's hard to pick a place to start. Why not the ever-crazed story-driven Adventure mode: the Subspace Emissary? To better visualize the Subspace Emissary, see the incredibly scientific flowchart below. 
The chart says a lot about what I have to say about this mode. The game follows through like a mix between platforming and fighting. Enemies all have health bars, and hitting them causes damage. It is very easy to mash buttons and beat the game even if your character sucks. The same goes for Boss Fights. The greater the difficulty, the more wild it gets and the harder it is to defeat enemies. Everyone develops a Godly Resistance and Superpowers in Intense difficulty which isn't how I hoped it would play out: instead of dying because the computer outsmarted you, you died because you handicapped yourself. The cutscenes pull character models from the game and renders them incredibly well in CGI, but it's overdramatic. Masahiro Sakurai (the director) and Kazushige Nojima (senario writer for Final Fantasy) made the plotline together. Masahiro wanted the plotline to be deeper and darker while Kazushige (how the heck do you pronounce it?!) made a plotline that would make Brawl look like The Adventures of Video Game Characters in Candyland. The cutscenes prove that Masahiro punched "the other guy" in the face and took over. Without any dialogue and with so much drama and action, the cutscenes were so confusing that Masahiro posted on his own website for the game things that were impossible to figure out. So we end up knowing the guy is a genius and a game that proves otherwise. Just a question for Masahiro: you know why you couldn't make the exact game that was in your mind? Because you DIDN'T want it to become reality! You'll hear a lot more dialogue in the average 2-minute online match than in all the hundreds of cutscenes in the Subspace Emissary put together.
Anyway, the stages are designed FOR the fighting controls and plays extremelly well, just not as well as standard platformers. The higher the difficulty, the more items and "character rockage" becomes important, and the game usually restricts you to a few characters and allows you to choose several to switch between for each level (you can't command a switch, you have to die). The sticker system was made to "power up" characters, and while it does a great job, it's not universal. You have to change the stickers for EACH character. Guess what happens when you remove a sticker? It gets lost forever. The sticker system had a lot going for it, but it failed because of how loose it is. Additionally, you have stickers that only work with a few characters! The system is very loose and feels like an ongoing sub-project with last-minute decisions. The SSE's end level, The Great Maze resembles a Kirby game very closely. The platform style and level design for the entire mode is very Kirby-like. Hal Laboratories developed the Kirby and Earthbound series which is why they get prominence over other more popular franchises like F-Zero and Starfox in the Subspace Emissary. The Battleship Halberd and the climax of the whole game is depended on Kirby characters, but the most notable is King Dedede's plan, which essentially turns the story around and gives the fighters a final chance for victory. But overall the mode is broken and for Brawl's highlight, it does a terrible job at representing the game.
The game gives important roles to the Kirby and Earthbound series while better known series are left in the dust.
Classic mode, the other Solo mode has been improved from Melee. Teams are chosen before hand to make sure youre fighting a functional, or at least sensual team. The first match is always someone from the Legend of Zelda series, either Link or Zelda. The second is a fight between Diddy Kong, Donkey Kong, and Yoshi. So far, I have fought the Donkey Kong team with Yoshi as my team mate and Giant Yoshi with Donkey and Diddy Kong fighting alongside me. New additions include 2 target test stages, a 1-on-1 giant match, and a 1-on-3 team match (for purpose of difficulty, so it doesn't get too hard, friendly fire is turned on). You fight Master Hand at the end, and then go to the roll call which lists all the characters, assist trophies, and just trophies that you unlocked. The more you hit, the more coins you earn from the game. The higher the difficulty, the more coins you'll win from each hit. The credits scene was moved to the Subspace Emissary, and doesn't include "name shooting."
Classic mode is much more boring than usual due to a combonation of the slowed speed and removal of special bonuses. The slower speed makes matches much less compelling and furious. Epic matches aren't found in Classic Mode anymore. The difficulty either overpowers or underpowers the computers, which can either be a cakewalk or frustrating as heck. The coin system makes it very easy to reach 9999 coins through Adventure Mode, and you only lose 10-100 of them when you continue. The game is much less cruel when you continue... if you continue on Easy difficulty, expect to lose some dignity with those 10 coins. The removal of Special Bonuses lead to an outcry among fans of the series. Melee was well known for having an inummerable supply of these bonuses which gave awards for staying in the center of the stage, using smash attacks a lot, when each hit contacts, not jumping, not using items, using a lot of items, and even a bonus for ending the match with the same damage you had 3 times! No more. Make way for the stupid stickers! Once you beat a match, the screen zooms out a little bit and cuts the left hand side to show you the coins you got and the useless score. The zooming has some glitches because of the 2-second slow-motion match endings. At one point, I was facing off Giant Pikachu with Jigglypuff on my side. Jigglypuff stood around doing nothing, and I managed to die at the same time (slightly after) Pikachu did, and the screen zoomed in to Jigglypuff. Now it seems useless to mention, but at the time, I felt screwed! Other times, the screen will be at an angle (or try to get the screenshot at an angle) and some part of the stage will block your view. Most of the times it catches you in an awkward position while your doing your taunt, or you'd be facing the other way. It's a small tidbit, but from the ANNOYING fanfare that plays to the screenshot messing up to the useless score and removal of special bonuses, half of everything wrong with Classic Mode is captured in the clear screen. You have to go through it several times before you finish the mode too.
Both Melee and Brawl's Classic Modes are similar, but Brawl's slowed speed and lack of special bonuses made the mode seem much more plain.
Brawl does have too many modes to count, but the favored has to be the standard Multiplayer mode, titled Melee mode in Melee and Brawl mode in Brawl. Brawl is simple: beat the daylights out of everyone that comes your way. The versatality of the matches makes them much more fulfilling. Due to Brawl's slowed speed, changes to the damage ratio (how far you go flying in relation to your damage) is seldom easy to realize. Brawl's slowed speed also means that timing is a great key factor. Smash Attacks have a higher delay, and it's possible to make KO's at 70% damage. As such, every hit is crucial. The items are just as overpowering as they were before, but this time around they're a lot more interesting. The Cracker Launcher deals 15% damage with each hit (and each hit explodes into a huge firework ball) and has 15 shots. However, any hit (even Luigi's kick taunt) would cause you to drop the launcher and give your opponent a chance for some fun. Smart Bombs can explode in mid air while you throw them, as soon as they hit someone, or they can be a dud and fail to explode, then explode 5 seconds later when everyone loses their guard. Ultimatelly, items are taken in a much lighter view in Brawl and instead of being overpowering useless weapons that don't take skill to handle, they're actually fun Mario Kart-like items. You won't lose because you got hit with a Bob-omb, but it will hurt, and you will always have a chance to take back victory.
Smash Balls are among the more popular of the items. Each character has their own Final Smash (with the exception of Fox, Falco, and Wolf who share the same one), which can be used in unique ways. For the most part, Final Smashes won't kill you at 0-30% damage and become increasingly dangerous as your damage goes higher. Final Smashes were basically made to end an ongoing Brawl in a quick way. Most Final Smashes can be avoided and have a downside. Even if they don't, you can always hit the Player with the Smash Ball hard enough to knock it out of them. I like the idea of each character having a special identifyable devastating move. The Final Smashes don't make people favor some characters over others because the Smash Ball is fair game. The most overpowering Final Smashes come from swordfighters Link, Marth, and Ike. Link will cause 80% damage and most of the time a K.O. Marth will K.O. whoever is closest to him when he unleashes the attack, even if the person is at 0% damage in one incredibly powerful blow. Ike will lift the player closest to him (horizontally) into the air and repeatedly hit them raising their damage level and then crashing down with a blow that covers a large portion of the stage. These attacks are intended to focus on one player in particular and while they can all be dodged, in the heat of a 1-on-1 battle, it can easily be considered cheating. Especially if you taunt [when online] right after with random letters that was meant to be annoying as heck.
The A.I. (which by the way isn't really artificial intelligence as much as it is a few key rules of thumb which the computer follows) is significantly improved in Brawl. In Melee, computer level 9's will walk towards you even if you're charging a smash attack, ignore items that can be used well, and are just flat out stupid as heck. In Brawl, the stupid as heck part is fixed. But the computer characters sometimes feel as though they haven't been optimized for each character individually. Some characters play better than others, but overall a computer match is garunteed to be exciting. The slowed speed of Brawl also saves up some resources reguarding the "A.I." and as such, duels against the computer are usually very epic. When you have more computer players, the "level of epicness" goes down. It's easier to face 3 computer level 9's than to face a single level 9. Maybe not entirely, but you can tell the computers get dumber as more enemies are shown onscreen, moreso than in Melee. Computers are however very dynamic characters being able to control 35 different movesets, and while not being able to take full advantage of all of them, the computer can tell the difference between Link's Arrows, Wind Boomerang, and Bomb throw. Computer players will use whatever item comes their way and they will steal stickers and CD's from you. Of course, any match against the computer will be faster than any match you can find online, unless you live in Europe. In which case you will still have to wait before you play Brawl.
Online Brawling has been well thought out. While the "With Anyone" option limits your match to a 2 minute time match and the stage is chosen random between your votes, the "With Friends" option allows you to customize the match to your liking (if you're hosting the room) and say short phrases through taunts. Your Friends list shows whether your friends are online or not, what they're doing online (Brawling, Seeking Brawl, With Anyone, Online, Offline), and the connection quality based off of your previous match. You can insert a small message and an icon to represent yourself, and you can have up to 64 people in your friends list. My suggestion: only put people who are awesome in your list!
With 12 stages from Melee, 29 new stages, and the ability to make your own stage or play stages your friends make, the variety of stages Brawl offers is incredible! While I can't go too deep into it, the majority of the stages that I thought would suck ended up being awesome and a lot of stages I thought I would love, I ended up hating. Lylat Cruise is too small of a stage for Brawl. Skyworld doesn't collapse entirely, it just breaks and allows you to fall through the platforms which makes no sense because breaking them takes forever and a new platform comes back in under 10 seconds. Battlefield is a much more playable stage than what was in Melee, and Final Destination removed the "underside sliding" kind of cheating part. Before, by jumping strait up, you could grab the edge and climb on top of the stage, so you didn't have to aim precisely on the edge to grab it. Now, if you don't aim presicely on the edge, you die. Many stages have been wonderfully crafted in 3-D and excellently shaded and textured, but some stages are just random and ill placed, like the original Mario Brothers or Hanenbow from Electroplankton on the DS. My favorites include Shadow Mosses Island with it's dynamic destructable walls and tub design, Port Town Aero Drive with it's awesome sights and destructable floor, and Bridge of Elden with it's destructable floor.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
You can make your own stages using the Stage Builder. Everyone says it's like Microsoft Paint, but I think the said program is even more advanced than the Stage Builder. The Builder lacks many obvious constructing functions like pointing at the grid with the Wiimote to place objects and the ability to customize things like the time it takes for a falling platform to fall or the speed of the moving platforms. What you see is literally what you get in the Stage Builder. A lot of platforms like ice and ladders feel very gimmicky as well. You can send the stages to your friends, but it doesn't go by your Brawl Friend Code, it goes by your Wii's internal Wiiconnect24, 16-digit Friend Code. You are permitted to send the same stage up to 8 people at a time, and you will get a point removed if you do so. The points were made to keep people from sending several stages to several hundred friends a day, and thus screwing up their servers and corrupting the path of life as we know it. You cannot play the stages online which is a real bummer, but at least it's a mode that they bothered to include.
In addition to the Stage Building, you can also take snapshots of anything from the Subspace Emissary, Target Test, Home Run Contest, Multi-Man Brawls, and standard multiplayer offline Brawls. You can also save entire matches up to 3 minutes in length (as well as Target Test runs and the Home Run Contest). Surprisingly, the screenshots don't take up much space: 10 pictures to racks up 1 MB, and match replays are also very small in terms of file size. You can easily fit all of the screenshots and replays you could ever care to take on the Wii's internal memory, but I like the SD cards. You can convert screenshots from Brawl into JPG files using bin2jpg (if you're screenshots were taken in widescreen mode, you would have to stretch them 133% horizontally or squash them 75% vertically for them to be proportional. You can do this in MS Paint very easily). What I question is why you couldn't save jpgs of the images on-the-spot, and why videos are limited to 3 minutes even if you have a 2 GB SD card.
All of the above can be submitted to Nintendo and distributed to everyone in the world. When you log in to Brawl for the first time, it will automatically delete the past images/replays/stages of the day and download the new ones. The download can take a minute while logging in afterward (or if you turned the service off) only takes 3-5 seconds. The idea of submitting things is great, but a lot of them seem to be completelly random. The stages you'll find over Brawl's daily content usually consists of a surplus of springs and gimmics, and if it doesn't, it has a very gimmicky design.
You can create stages, take screenshots, and capture video, then send it to Nintendo and they make it downloadable content.
The game uses Coins as a way of getting you to compete in standard Brawls. Not only do some trophies require playing multiplayer Brawls, but you can get trophies by using the coins you earn in a minigame titled "Coin Launcher." In Melee, Coins were used in the lottery in a vending machine fashion that yeilds trophies in a random pattern. The Coin Launcher will throw you trophies that need to be hit 2-5 times before you can obtain them, but puts enemies in the way. Enemies come in lines of 5-6 and you're expected to hit each one. Each time you hit a string, you get a sticker and a meter goes up. When the meter gets full, several trophies come onscreen and your launcher has rapid-fire capabilities (you can only shoot 2-3 coins in a second, but rapid-fire lets you shoot as fast as you can press the button). The minigame has many flaws like the random trophies that pop from no where and when you think 3 hits is enough, you find out you need 2 more to get the trophy, and by the time you realize it, the trophy's offscreen. Aside from the enemies, some traps like round obstacles that block your Coins and holes on the table your Coins fall through also come in the way, usually when a brand new and awesome trophy comes onscreen. The minigame can be very frustrating, and since you get coins by the hundreds in the Subspace Emissary and Classic Mode, you're pretty much forced into playing it.
The game's music and sound effects have been taken to great lengths in Brawl. The orchestrated music is simply brilliant, and many great classic themes are now brought to life. Some songs have also been pulled from the games without any arrangement at all. Total, there are 300+ quality pieces, and when you go to make your own stage, you can use any song you think fits. Because of the song surplus, not all the songs are availible from the beginning, and you can change how frequent songs appear on stages. If you think Kid Icarus's original theme meledy from the NES is annoying and you prefer the orchestrated version, you can make sure the said song would never be heard on that stage. Music in Brawl was NOT an afterthought. There are literally over 4 hours of music dedicated to the game, on top of the numerous sound effects. Now if only the voice acting was more obvious...
The trophy system is more flawed in Brawl. While the idea for having a list of items you unlocked with clues on how to unlock more is awesome, trophies are not valued in Brawl as much as they were in Melee.
Overall, the game does impress very well. It takes the Smash Brothers series to places people would have never dreamed it would go, but the game doesn't do more to impress. Instead of perfecting the numeral modes Melee contained, Sakurai wanted to simply add more, and focus all his attention to the core multiplayer mode, online, and the Subspace Emissary while he let the rest of the game fall to pieces. Some modes like Boss Battles and the Coin Launcher felt as though they were last minute decisions. Literally. "We made hundreds of cutscenes and spent 2 and a half years on making this Adventure Mode. Now on to the Coins and any other junk we can put in this game." There's even a list for every single game that is featured in Brawl, and many that aren't. There's a place where you can take pictures of your trophies and stickers. You can fight all the boss battles like you would in All Stars mode. There's a minigame for coins. There's a place to see every last object that can be unlocked from the game and it gives you clues on how to unlock them. They thought of everything and more than they should've in Brawl. For the hardcore fan, the extra junk is just what it is: junk. For those people who spend all day typing "Wii sucks because..." on message boards and then ending their speech with "but I'll get it just for Brawl," you have been warned: the game is a living breathing advertisement for Nintendo. Demos of Virtual Console titles, a list of every Nintendo-developed game that ever existed, detailed descriptions for hundreds of incarnations of videogame characters and random stuff you most likely won't care about. Like a can of breath mints in a Garlic Festival, anyone who isn't a core Nintendo fan would probably hate the crossover-and-overdoing-it aspect of Super Smash Brothers Brawl. With online modes and the best local Multiplayer the Wii has to offer, no one should pass it up for that reason alone. If you buy a Wii, also make sure to try Twilight Princess, Super Mario Galaxy, and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and might as well stock up on Virtual Console games. No man can survive on Brawl alone, but I do blame the game for delaying my need for Mario Kart Wii: a fact I am angry with. The game is not without flaws, but it ultimatelly lives up as one of the greatest fighting titles of all time.
Controls: 10
You can use a Gamecube controller, Classic controller, Wiimote and Nunchuck, or the Wiimote on its side. The Wiimote and Nunchuck is my favorite option because of it's free handling. Then the Gamecube controller in second, followed by the ill-shaped and ill-designed Classic controller which was meant for Super Mario World, not Brawl, and finally the Wiimote on it's side which I found to be playable, but not practical. You can put buttons where you want and save this control scheme to your controller which you can take to your friend's house. The movement is fluid and the fighting happens so naturally that sometimes you forget that you're controlling the characters with 2 buttons and an analog stick (oh, and an extra one to dodge).
Graphics: 9.5
Brawl definatelly lives up to my expectations on the Wii. The custom shading is superb and character models are brilliantly animated and textured. Stages look dazzling and spectacular, and the particle effects are amazing. no matter how many explosions are happening onscreen or how complicated the lighting system gets (you can have many, many different light sources which are all combined and used for shading the characters), the game never ever drops below 60 frames per second: a refresh rate half that of Halo 3. The only one occurence I remembered a rate drop (in offline multiplayer) was when I was Mario doing my Final Smash on my created stage pictured above. The move draws particles of fire among random places horizontally, and since the stage required me to use as much space has I was given, the fire spread over a vast area on command, and it caused a rate drop to 30 for 1-2 seconds. I was fighting 3 computer level 9's at the time as well. The match continued normally.
Audio: 9.5
Brawl's music is in all aspects a key point to it's greatness. With 300+ songs, over 4 hours of music dedicated to the game from many various franchises including Sonic and Metal Gear Solid, Fire Emblem, Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, and more, it's hard to dethrone Brawl in terms of its soundtrack. The sound effects have been perfected, and the bass on punches is intense. Find a good subwoofer and get ready for your ribs to crack! The voice acting is minimalistic and is never heard in the Subspace Emissary's CGI cutscenes except one instance when Captain Falcon called his Blue Falcon for a quick escape. You'll hear more voice acting in one of Captain Falcon's taunts than in all the hundreds of Subspace Emissary CGI movies put together. Some of the voice acting is just completelly off, like Ike's "I fight for my friends" quote sometimes heard when he wins a match. Because of the lack of voice acting, even from characters like Fox that usually speak, the story in the Subspace Emissary couldn't be explained until Sakurai posted the explanations on his website himself.
Comming Soon!