On a purely conceptual level, Super Smash Bros. Brawl for Wii is something that everybody should hate. Ten years ago, somewhere in a high-rise office building wallpapered with money in Kyoto, Nintendo executives came up with the absolutely diabolical idea of putting every single franchise mascot character they had come up with into one big pot and stirring. This resulted in the party favorite platformer-fighter hybrid we have today.
So just when you think you’ve “grown up,” completely escaped the grip of your childhood favorites, and moved on to more serious fighting games like Virtua Fighter and Soul Calibur, Nintendo pulls you back in with their deceptively cute, innocent idea. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with seeing Metroid’s Samus kick the crap out of Mario’s Princess Peach, is there? It’s like a prepubescent dream come true, and like a predatory bird swooping down on unsuspecting mice, Nintendo is a hawk that preys on man-children.
Patronizing and shamelessly nostalgic, Super Smash Bros. is a game that you can’t pull yourself away from, despite any initial objections you may have. Now with Brawl, Smash Bros. is deeper than ever and has more blatant fan service than you can possibly digest in one sitting—and damn, if it isn’t the most enjoyable romp through your embarrassing younger years you can possibly get for $50.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the third iteration in the series that started off on the Nintendo 64. Smash Bros., which was massively successful in Japan, was not planned for release in America until one innocent-minded journalist suggested to Nintendo’s American branch that America was in fact full of Nintendo man-children who still slept in footy pajamas with images of Princess Peach all over them—much like Star Wars man-children have pajamas with Princess Leia in her gold bikini. Smash Bros., which is somewhere near sextuple platinum, proved once and for all that on the inside, everybody is a Nintendo kid.
The concept is so appealing that you really can’t fault Nintendo for pressing its own license to print money—throw in every single Nintendo character you can possibly imagine—including, for the first time ever, non-Nintendo mascots like Konami’s Solid Snake and Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog—and put them on a 2-D plane. Everyone from toddlers to grannies can understand how to play—it consists primarily of players whacking the crap out of each other. It’s sort of like playing with action figures, except the action figures are all treasured icons from video games that your parents used to play before they were stuck raising you.
Everybody loves Smash Bros. because the fan service is layered on so incredibly thick—there are levels shaped like the stages from Donkey Kong, and ones that scroll like the original Super Mario Bros. Even my Mom, who hasn’t touched a game since 1993, couldn’t help put poke her head in and see why the hell Donkey Kong was taking on Luigi.
Sure, there’s the technical nitty-gritty to discuss—the graphics have marginally improved since the GameCube iteration, the music has all been rearranged by an all-star list of Japanese composers that you neither know nor care about, and there’s finally an online mode so that you can go on the web and battle other man-children without them having to leave the comfort of their parents’ basements.
There’s also an embarrassing adventure mode called the Subspace Emissary which was written by the same guy who wrote the story for Final Fantasy VII and Kingdom Hearts, two complex stories layered with emotion and drama. Replace all of that with Nintendo characters and remove all dialogue. Yeah, it’s pretty throwaway.
In the end, though, nobody cares—and Nintendo knows this. Smash Bros. isn’t about a narrative onscreen, it’s about the narrative in your head—Peach hates Zelda because she’s jealous and wants Link badly. Luigi is beating on Mario because he’s been relegated to second fiddle for years. Sonic has been in so many bad games that he needs to take revenge on better characters. Whatever the case, if you picked up Smash Bros., it’s probably not because you are interested in competitive tournament play or because you know that Yasunori Mitsuda rearranged the World Theme 2 from Pikmin 2. It’s all true, of course, but you’ve got better things to worry about—like settling the age old dispute between Pikachu and Squirtle. Nope, I don’t want to grow up either.