This review is going
to a bit more informal than usual; originally I wasn’t even going to call this
a review, but more just a “thoughts and impressions” kind of thing. I’m not
going to explain or cover everything in Super
Smash Bros. for Wii U in detail and am going to assume the reader (i.e.
you) already has some knowledge of the game and the game’s content in this
case. Above all else, this is mainly just about the aspects of the game that particularly
stood out to me. With that out of the way, here are my thoughts on the newest Smash experience.
My experience with Super
Smash Bros. dates back to the original game on Nintendo 64, which I fondly
remember playing after school when it first released and also with friends many
other times. It was such a surprising and novel game back then, and even though
at the time I had never played a Metroid game
and certainly had no idea who the hell Captain Falcon was, I had a blast
nonetheless playing as Kirby and Samus Aran, unlocking everything, and doing
all those “Break the Targets” and “Board the Platforms” levels. Later on Super Smash Bros. Melee cranked the
series up to 11 and established the mold that the franchise would take the form
of from then on. Super Smash Bros. Brawl
built on what Melee established, not
quite being another huge leap forward, but simply cramming more into what Melee had while also adding several new
elements. Now, with Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, it’s pretty much that same game again, except stuffed with more
characters, more stages, more music, new modes and uber-polished gameplay that
merges Brawl’s casual party game
approach with Melee’s more technical
skill-based approach. The result is…well, Super
Smash Bros., now with the Duck Hunt Dog and Mega Man. That is to say, it’s
one part polished, unorthodox fighting game crammed with stuff that is best
enjoyed with friends and one part Nintendo museum. I think for me at least,
however, the novelty of this series has worn off. I was excited about the game when
gameplay was first shown off and loved every second of those character reveal trailers and all the speculation that went along with the game’s pre-release
hype, but as the game’s launch got closer and closer, I found myself a bit
apathetic. I was going to pick it up day one, but wasn’t necessarily overly
excited for it and honestly sort of got sick of hearing about it after a while.
Personally, I get much more excited for a new Metroid or Zelda game
than for a big crossover that aims to make me nostalgic for those experiences.
There’s just not much mystery when it comes to Smash anymore, especially thanks to the wonder (and the bane) that
is the leaky internet. But I digress. While Smash
Wii U has certainly had less of an impact on me than any of its predecessors,
it’s still certainly a well-made game with a lot that I admire about it and a
lot that I am fond of (and not so fond of) within it.
Multiplayer is still one of the
most important aspects of Smash Bros.
and thanks to the inclusion of up to eight-player battles, the game is now more
a party pleaser than ever before. Online works better than in Brawl (honestly, this is mainly going by
the word on the street since I barely used Brawl’s
online, but I’m aware that most unanimously agree that it was shit), but
unfortunately every single mode barring For Glory 1v1 was met with varying
degrees of lag when I tried it all out, some of it hilariously unplayable and
some of it manageable but still far from ideal. Unfortunately, if just one person
has a bad connection, it ruins it for everyone. Luckily, 1v1 works mostly great
and I’ve been able to get in a hundred matches here, mostly getting my ass
kicked, but also winning a passable amount and having some fun encounters with
strangers I will likely never encounter again. Although I should mention that,
weirdly, my most recent 1v1 session was met with lag in almost every match I
played; I don’t think this was on my end since I have a wired connection, but
it’d also be a weird coincidence. But luckily and most importantly, online with
friends in my experience works flawlessly as of this writing. I play with two
friends and we all have good connections and I can recall maybe one instance of
brief stuttering but otherwise every match has run as smoothly as if we were in
the same room (it should be noted that every match we’ve played has been a
stock battle with all items turned off). It’s great to be able to jump into a
match with friends and not have to always gather together (because who wants to
see their friend’s stupid faces, amiright? I kid, I kid).
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| Chaos! |
As for everything else in Smash U…sigh…ok, I’m not going to go
over it all in detail, but mainly just point out the stuff I notably like and
dislike, because there’s a lot of stuff here. First off, and this should go
without saying, the character roster is massive and it is spectacular. Besides being
able to have a sparring match between Mario, Sonic, Mega Man and PAC-MAN, all
the newcomers are excellent additions to the roster and each is as unique as
the last. Villager and Wii Fit Trainer are hilarious and creative inclusions,
and others like Little Mac, Bowser Jr.+ the Koopalings, Palutena, and Rosalina and Luma are all great additions that make sense. Having a little known
character like Shulk will hopefully increase exposure to the hard-to-find Wii
gem Xenoblade Chronicles (which is
getting a port to the New 3DS later this year, although I’d still recommend
playing that game on a big screen, which suits the game’s epic scope more) and
Duck Hunt is the craziest, funnest surprise character the series has seen yet.
As for the stages, I generally like all the new ones, which are vibrant,
detailed and meticulously crafted fighting arenas. There do seem to be too many
overly gimmicky stages, however, and an
option to simply turn off hazards like the Yellow Devil of Mega Man fame on the
Wily Castle stage would have been ideal (the option to choose a flat final
destination variant of each stage is a nice, if imperfect, compromise though). Disappointingly,
there are less brand new stages here than in Brawl and more returning stages than ever before. I wouldn’t have
as much of a problem with this (it’s not only about always having more) if it
weren’t for my other problems with the stage selection. This is my personal
taste, but some of the choices for returning stages here are…eh. I would have gladly
seen creative and memorable stages like the Wind
Waker Pirate Ship from Brawl (which would have made perfect sense, since The Wind Waker HD just came out on Wii U a little over a year
ago) return instead of the bland Mario Circuit stage from Brawl (which feels out of place next to its shiny new replacement
one from Mario Kart 8), two nearly identical Animal Crossing stages, and that Kid Icarus level from Brawl that nobody likes. There’s more
stages than ever before, but the selection feels smaller than in Brawl somehow, thanks to the prevalence
of returning stages but also because there’s a lot of “sameiness” in the stage
selection (two Skyworld stages, two Animal
Crossing ones with a near-identical aesthetic, two Mario Kart ones, two lava Metroid
stages, two Wuhu Island-based ones, etc.). However, I do love the variety
that stages such as Gaur Plain from Xenoblade
Chronicles and the Duck Hunt
arena add to the selection. Ultimately, I feel that Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS is a culprit here, as I would
have loved to have gotten some of that version’s new stages in HD and also some
of its returning ones.
I haven’t mentioned it yet, but I
passed on the 3DS version and wish it never existed (I did spend a good chunk
of time with the 3DS version’s demo though). All it seems to have done is rob
the Wii U version of content and I hate having this newest Smash’s content split between two versions. It makes Smash Wii U feel less comprehensive due to
its general lack of Nintendo’s handheld history, and I like Nintendo’s handheld
history, I like it a lot in fact…but I don’t want to have to buy a watered-down
version with an inferior control system to celebrate it. This is a selfish
choice and I recognize that many who don’t own a Wii U appreciate the handheld
version and I can understand its portability appeal, but for me personally, I’d
rather Smash Bros. stay as a single home
console release.
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| Characters! |
The next main point for me to hit
on is the game’s soundtrack, which is a massive 400+ plus songs, with a great
number returning from previous Smash
titles, but also with a wealth of new remixes, new original songs, and “new” unremixed
songs that weren’t in past Smash
games as well. Similar to stages, there seems to be less new music remixes here
than there were in Brawl, but with
nearly 150 new remixes and plenty of other great music it’s harder to complain
here than with the stage selection. Still, it does seem like a lot of content
in this game has been reused from past titles, which makes this newest Smash Bros. inherently feel a little
less new than past titles, and less like its own game and more like a huge
expansion on what came before. That said, I love the overall comprehensive
nature of the soundtrack and have had a blast just listening to the in-game
sound test and editing my music favorites list and fiddling with the My Music
feature, which lets players set how often songs play on every stage (all of which
is very, very appreciated). Several of the new remixes rock: some of my favorites
include the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time “Gerudo Valley” remix and Spirit
Tracks “Full Steam Ahead” remix, the “Duck Hunt Medley”, every single Mega Man remix, and just about
everything Yoko Shimomura, Yasunori Mitsuda, and Yuzo Koshiro worked on. Other
remixes are not so much my cup of sleepytime herbal tea with a touch of milk
and sugar. I admire artists being creative here but I think a bit too many liberties were taken with some
songs, and in some cases wish the original track was included instead (luckily,
in many cases both a remix and the original track are included, which I appreciate). Truth be told, even if I can
appreciate a good remix, I almost always prefer original songs to their remixes
and this couldn’t be more true in cases such as the “Try, Try Again” remix from
Mario and Luigi: Dream Team, which
isn’t necessarily bad, just much inferior to the original in my opinion (Shimomura’s only blemish here, and for
my money probably ever, so we’ll let it slide). When it comes to song selection
in an individual series, there seems to be a lack of variety in many cases,
with an overwhelming focus on endlessly remixing the most iconic themes from
each game. It makes sense to remix the most recognizable theme from a series
for Smash Bros., but as someone who
is very intimate with the likes of Zelda
and Kirby, it pains me to know of all
the other fantastic tracks that are being ignored in favor of yet another Legend of Zelda “Main Theme” cover or “Green Greens” remix (as good as these remixes often are). But nowhere is this more
apparent or annoying than in the tiring seven
remixes of the freakin’ Donkey Kong
Country “Jungle Hijinx” theme that’s we’ve all heard one zillion trillion
times before. This wouldn’t be so offensive to me if these three hundred versions
of the same damn song didn’t take the place of the countless other possible
inclusions or remixes from the varied and fantastic soundtracks of the Donkey Kong Country games (sure, we get
a couple of other songs, but most are just taken from Brawl and even then there are not a lot). Three of these “Hijinx”
remixes are from past Smash games, so
those can be excused, but the other four being included at the expense of
something new cannot be. Most face-palm worthy for me personally is the fact
that two songs were chosen from the sublime masterpiece that is the Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze
soundtrack and one of them is the goddamn
“Jungle Hijinx” remix again, which only appears as basically an Easter Egg
in like three bonus levels in Tropical
Freeze. This…just makes me cry; like, it literally hurts me inside. All
right, all right, I’ll stop being overdramatically whiny. There’s tons of awesome
music here and I also haven’t mentioned how many smaller and lesser known games
are represented in the soundtrack, many with new remixes, which is really cool
and will hopefully make some people curious about these underappreciated
titles.
I’ll try to run down my thoughts on the rest of the main modes really quickly. Master Orders and Crazy Orders are excellent new additions, great for a quick play session and both with their perks and I hope they stick around for the inevitable sequel. Event Match mode is back and still a blast, with even more events than in the previous games and a new grid-like progression system which I approve of. Then there are the 140 varied “Challenges” to tackle for various rewards, which can be an addicting task, at least until you reach the later, super difficult tasks, most of which I don’t even care to attempt. Stadium mode is back with all the Multi-Man Smash stuff and Home Run Contest, both of which are a nice distraction as always. There’s also a new Target Blast mode in Stadium that can actually be kind of fun if you give it a chance, but it’s no replacement for the “Break the Targets” mini-game in the past Smash titles, especially in the original Smash and Melee, where every character had their own individual target level which took advantage of each fighter’s unique skillset. But with an ever-increasing character roster, I can understand why they stopped doing this in Brawl (which just had five target levels used by all of the fighters) and in Smash Wii U. I’ve perhaps spent the most of my time with Smash U in the Vault portion of the game: perusing trophies, setting up my own special matches in the versus mode using CPUs and saving replays and screenshots in the Vault (Samus vs. her Dark Samus color alt., an epic battle between Mario and Bowser, a nostalgia-fueled throwdown between a bunch of NES veterans, etc.), listening to the game’s extensive soundtrack, and sampling all of the “masterpieces”: brief, timed samplings of many of the classic games that the fighters come from (even if I’ve personally played most of these titles already, I enjoy the inclusion of these demos and think their existence makes a lot of sense). Finally, there’s the new board game mode, Smash Tour, which is inoffensive to me but a party mode in what can already be a riotously fun party game depending on how you play it feels a little redundant and unnecessary.
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| Menus! |
There are two more things that I
want to give particular attention to. The first is the game’s Classic mode, of
all things, which hasn’t seen much change since the N64 original until now and
honestly that’s how something called “Classic” should stay in this case. To be
blunt, I’m not a fan of Classic mode in this game, which has seen a massive
overall. It’s frustrating and it’s just kind of dull. I don’t like having to
bother to slowly move my character’s trophy between matches to choose my next
fight; this is just tedious and doesn’t add anything to the experience for me.
I hate how there is such a focus on five to eight-fighter battles as well. For
starters, this limits the amount of stages one is going to see; oh yeah, I
forgot to mention that playing in matches with above four fighters cuts the
stage selection down to about a third of what it normally is, with the
selection becoming more limited the more fighters there are, which is quite
unfortunate…but thanks to a patch being released as I write this, more stages
are apparently being unlocked for eight-player Smash, which is excellent news!
Besides this, while eight-player battles can be fun with a group of intelligent
human players, playing against random CPUs with items cranked up and Pokémon
flying everywhere is just a mess and I almost never had any fun in these
situations. But above all, I don’t like the difficulty system in Classic mode
for the same reason I didn’t like it in Kid Icarus: Uprising (Smash U
director Masahiro Sakurai’s previous game, which pioneered the same difficulty system).
If you haven’t played either game, basically there is a difficulty scale (in Smash U’s case, literally a scale) that
goes from 0.0 to 9.0, with the ability to set the difficulty to 0.1, 0.2, and
so on. You bet more gold for the higher difficulties but get better rewards for
completing matches. It’s a novel concept and I like the idea of risking a bunch
of gold for better rewards and then losing those rewards if I fall in battle. What
I don’t like is how if I get knocked out of a match, in addition to losing some
of the rewards I’ve acquired, the difficulty level gets knocked down five
points, so if I was trying to complete the game on the highest difficulty of
9.0, if I lose once, the game automatically bumps me down to 8.5 and then to 8.0
if I lose again and so on. What makes me not want to even bother going for the
rewards one receives on the higher difficulties is that the final boss comes
with a ridiculously unfair difficulty spike and like a gajillion forms that one
needs to learn the patterns of in order to get anywhere. But a player only
encounters certain forms on certain difficulty levels, so continued failure
means I have very little time to learn how to beat these phases. Basically, I
don’t stand a good chance at understanding how to properly defeat these foes
unless I replay Classic over and over on the highest difficulties, wasting time
and gold. And as I said, Classic is boring, so doing that is boring as well. I prefer the old Classic (preferably Melee’s variant): straight and to the
point, just fight after fight (and not a bunch of chaotic six to eight-fighter
bouts), with a few mini-games and twists thrown into the mix and a battle against
a fantasy incarnation of your twisted child creator’s hand (and perhaps its demented twin as well) at the end.
The other thing I wanted to give specific
attention to is the lack of a story or adventure mode here. I’m well aware of
why Sakurai chose not to include a story mode this time around (and in my opinion, his reasoning is...flawed, to say the least), but I loved the Adventure Mode in Melee and always hoped that it would
evolve in future games. I generally enjoyed The Subspace Emissary in Brawl but it was ultimately forgettable
thanks to an onslaught of mostly generic enemies instead of recognizable
Nintendo ones and likewise a bunch of mostly generic locations instead of ones
from Nintendo games. This is a crossover game, a game all about fan-service,
and I don’t want to fight generic puppet monsters in a bland forest; I want to
fight Stalfos’ in the Lost Woods. The cutscenes were cool though. But anyway, I
don’t necessarily need another giant adventure like The Subspace Emissary
(although something akin to it, just not so generic, could be grand), but just
something like Melee’s Adventure Mode
is great and nicely breaks up the single-player aspect of the game as well as adds
a lot to the Smash experience in my
opinion, so much so that Smash Wii U
feels inherently lacking and incomplete without some kind of adventure mode,
despite having probably more stuff to do than in any Smash game prior.
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| MEGA MAN! |
For the inevitable Smash 5 (whether Sakurai directs it or
not, and I certainly wouldn’t fault him if he chooses not to), I hope Classic
mode returns to form and an adventure mode of some kind returns. Besides new
characters, new stages, and new music there’s not much I can think of that they
can do with this series. It’s pretty much another Mario Kart at this point: Nintendo’s big money-maker that always
delivers a fun, polished experience, but doesn’t really evolve or change all
that much from game to game. I forgot to talk about the character customization
in the game and the Stage Builder by the way. In short, character customization
is a neat addition that is fun to play around with, but I’m not sure how
practical it all is since its usage online is limited and without a copy of the
3DS version, I don’t know of a way to bring my customized characters to
friends’ games. I do like the way this game handles the customizable Mii Fighters, but they too are limited in the same ways as I just mentioned. As for
the Stage Builder, it’s nice that it’s there and the ability to freely draw
landforms with the GamePad is neat, but the user interface here is incredibly
cumbersome, the options are extremely limited, and ultimately this feature is
still far, far from being all that it could be (also, similar to my complaints
with The Subspace Emissary, I’d rather have Nintendo game-themed items and
backgrounds than generic ones, please).
