When I started this blog in 2008, Super Smash Bros. Brawl was huge for me. Sadly I have deleted most of the post from the time, because they were more of a backlogging nature, but they showed my excitement for the game. I invested about 300 hours into Brawl, collected all stickers and nearly all trophies, created many stages and overall had a lot of fun with it. It's probably my favorite game on the Wii next to the Metroid Prime Trilogy.
Now we got this:
I could not replicate the same excitement this year with Super Smash Bros. 4, which just recycled Brawl in many ways (lots of stages, music, almost all characters), but also lacked some of the good parts like most stage editor elements, the Subspace Emissary or the stickers. Overall it feels all very lazy and that should not be of surprise, when the director of the game publicly states that he doesn't want to work on Smash anymore.
It's still a quality game and the gameplay certainly has improved over Brawl, for me it's the best gameplay and controls in the series. But while the core is great, the package feels entirely inferior to Brawl. One of the reasons might be the development of the 3DS version, which probably cut the resources in half. If they didn't make a 3DS version and put all their efforts into the Wii U game, it probably would have a lot more going for it.
Another big reason is Hyrule Warriors, where Zelda finally got its own allstar game. Ghirahim or Midna might not be "worthy" enough to be playable in Smash, but they sure are in Hyrule Warriors. And Koei Tecmo's character design is just absolutely splendid and beautiful, they did such a great job with this game that it's very easy to ignore the new Smash as a Zelda fan.
Now we got this:
I could not replicate the same excitement this year with Super Smash Bros. 4, which just recycled Brawl in many ways (lots of stages, music, almost all characters), but also lacked some of the good parts like most stage editor elements, the Subspace Emissary or the stickers. Overall it feels all very lazy and that should not be of surprise, when the director of the game publicly states that he doesn't want to work on Smash anymore.
It's still a quality game and the gameplay certainly has improved over Brawl, for me it's the best gameplay and controls in the series. But while the core is great, the package feels entirely inferior to Brawl. One of the reasons might be the development of the 3DS version, which probably cut the resources in half. If they didn't make a 3DS version and put all their efforts into the Wii U game, it probably would have a lot more going for it.
Another big reason is Hyrule Warriors, where Zelda finally got its own allstar game. Ghirahim or Midna might not be "worthy" enough to be playable in Smash, but they sure are in Hyrule Warriors. And Koei Tecmo's character design is just absolutely splendid and beautiful, they did such a great job with this game that it's very easy to ignore the new Smash as a Zelda fan.
And to think many people said Brawl was inferior to melee.
ReplyDeleteIs the series really declining? I was thinking about getting the game, is it still worth it?
I never really enjoyed Melee, the controls were absolutely aweful. Some prefer the faster gameplay and Brawl had some issues like tripping, but in general I think that Brawl was the superior game in nearly every aspect.
ReplyDeleteFrom a core perspective Smash 4 is also the superior game. It has better gameplay, more characters and stages. It's just that compared to Brawl it doesn't generate the same level of excitement. About 50% of Brawl was recycled, while ironically they dropped most of the good parts.
To answer your question: if you own Brawl and only play Smash casually, I don't think it's worth it, unless you really, really need the HD upgrade.
ReplyDelete