In games, as with many other media with any kind of sequel or follow-up, a sequel’s initial commercial performance is generally a reflection of its predecessor as much as its own merits. Super Smash Bros. Brawl’s big first week reflected not just the success of the Wii console it was released on, but the ascendance of Super Smash Bros. Melee to one of the GameCube’s most popular and essential games. Further back than that, it owed a lot to the strength of the whole genesis of the series and its in-built potential for expandability.
Crossovers were no new thing to video games, never mind more widely, when the original Super Smash Bros. came out in 1999. Ten years earlier, Bandai released Famicom Jump: Hero Retsuden (ファミコンジャンプ 英雄列伝), an RPG which brought together the heroes of sixteen different manga series featured in the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine. It didn’t just top the sales charts in Japan, but went on to sell more than a million copies. More specifically within the world of fighting games featuring video game crossovers, the long collaboration between Capcom and Marvel (we’ll come back to them) brought X-Men vs. Street Fighter in arcades in 1996 ahead of a series of increasingly wide-ranging Marvel vs. Capcom match-ups.
Nintendo brought a few interlinked and unique strengths to Super Smash Bros.. One was a conception of the fighting game that was particularly open-ended, with strong platforming elements and space for four fighters and a lot else besides. Moving the focus away from the immediate head-to-head grappling also allowed for a simplified and easy to grasp control scheme that doesn’t rely on combos, while still working across characters through broad theming (e.g. up + B moves being ways of achieving upwards movement).
Added to that, there was the simple fact of putting that together with a roster of fighters who were from games themselves, not comics or anything else, and that therefore they were not adaptations in the same way, but something more like transpositions. In the series, characters’ movesets are carefully recreated, with their origins and those guiding principles fitting together. Playing as Mario in a Super Smash Bros. game is not the same as playing as Mario in a Mario game, but it shares a substantial amount with it. Finally, there was the fact of being Nintendo, with an unmatched set of loved characters to do it with. Even in the UK, where Nintendo’s place in our video game history is a lot less central, Mario versus Pikachu could be widely understood as a delicious concept.
The simple and flexible appeal at the centre of the series allowed for all kinds of complications to be brought in through stage elements and items, as well as presenting an obvious route for extension through adding more characters to the mix. Super Smash Bros. Melee did all of those things to chaotic success, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl could once again be more. There are some stages which take even more of an active part in proceedings, like the WarioWare one handing out power-ups and -downs based on its microgames. It also introduces the concept of Final Smashes, overpowered attacks which are gained by destroying a floating Smash Ball that occasionally appears, introducing one more element of competitive chaos to proceedings.
As for new characters, they include Wario and his motorbike and fart attacks, and Pikmin star Olimar, a rare chance to introduce a character Nintendo had come up with since the original Super Smash Bros.. The implementation within the moveset structure of his abilities to pull up pikmin and attack with them is ingenious, and a perfect example of the impressive variety that lets the game be so far ranging and deep. Brawl also finds no shortage of vintage Nintendo series to dig further into, bringing in Pit from Kid Icarus, NES accessory R.O.B., and a huge number more Pokémon, not just in the exchangeable starter three under Pokémon Trainer but in Pokéballs that you can open for a whole host of extra assistance.
Another big expansion since the last game is the expanded single player (or two player co-op) mode, with the story mode The Subspace Emissary offering a kind of roving beat-’em-up interspersed with high-production-value cutscenes. Truthfully, the loose character movement which lends itself to the elastic main event is not a good fit for this kind of brawling, but it’s a neat sideshow that makes the most of the opportunity to play up absurd character matchups in situations just serious enough to push into tongue-in-cheek. I completed it, but all of my best memories of Brawl instead come from me and my brother playing brawls against each other with the game’s entire range of characters (Toon Link being my strongest, always). The whole game is a grand excessive toy box though, so why not Subspace Emissary as one more way to play with those toys?
That excess, the panoply of options and references, is built right through how Brawl works. All of its different modes and ideas interlink to provide a constant drip of new things happening, new challenges and achievements and rewards and trophies, the Gran Turismo 2 model of sequel turned up to 11 and above. New characters are withheld to suddenly pop up as challengers approaching at set triggers, the game’s mix-and-match something to unwrap and savour over time. It wasn’t yet tied to the kind of real-time and real-money driven rollout that is commonplace in live service games today, but its model still feels very modern for 2008.
That goes even more so for a part of its promotion that I remember well: a daily update on some aspect of the forthcoming game. Sometimes it was something minor, and sometimes it really wasn’t, the better to keep you coming back just in case. The biggest announcements were those of two of the new characters that I haven’t mentioned yet, because Super Smash Bros. Brawl is not just a Nintendo toy box. It adds both Sonic the Hedgehog, a move which by the time it was announced felt like an inevitability in the wake of Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, and Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid, a move which didn’t feel like any kind of inevitability at all. They have two more inventive movesets, and two more lovingly recreated stages, even before getting into the full fan service of Snake’s codec calls getting briefings from his support crew on each of his opponents. They are delightful additions which fit in as well as anyone else and make the game’s world feel even more open and full of possibility.
From today, though, their inclusion feels a bit different. The game’s kind of crossover is not so much a known phenomenon as one of the dominant forces in culture. Super Smash Bros. Brawl reached the UK the month after the release of the film Iron Man, the first entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that has sprawled out across popular culture in the decade and a half since. In games we now get Goku in Fortnite and Snoop Dogg in Call of Duty: Warzone. And the modern Super Smash Bros has turned itself over to eking out an ever-more-vast array of additions from other games across years-long speculation which sometimes appears a more popular pursuit than actually playing the game. Super Smash Bros. Brawl can’t be blamed for all of that, but when you start by putting everything on increasing excess, there is only really one way to go from there.
Top of the charts for week ending 28 June 2008:
Top of the charts for week ending 5 July 2008:
