In many ways the following post has a lot of similarities to a recent one I did on Pokemon. We’ll be talking about a franchise that is, unbeknownst perhaps to some who know me, incredibly important to my childhood and a strong favorite. Not only that, but it’s a franchise that has boasted success since the 90s and which tons of people expect to see soon in one form or another for the Nintendo Switch. The difference with Smash Brothers is that a significant portion of the interest lies not only in a sequel but the possibility of a remake.
Smash Brothers also presents its complications, in that everybody seems to have a rather strong opinion on what makes Smash Brothers great. What makes me most certain I will write something that someone out there will heavily dislike is that I also expect to talk about a lot of issues I’ve had with how the games have been directed, by series director Masahiro Sakurai. Don’t get me wrong, I respect the man. But respect aside, Smash Brothers as it is now is riddled with so much bulk that it’s hard not to pick it apart.
Given this bulk, I’ve also realized during the initial planning phase for this post that there is A LOT to talk about when it comes to Smash Brothers. With that in mind, my intent is to isolate in this post two main things I believe are important to the success of Smash, and look at the different titles through those two factors. To start isolating them, let’s first talk about the original Super Smash Brothers, for the Nintendo 64.
Launching the Franchise
This commercial is the first memory I have of Smash Brothers, and it nailed the reason why most kids at the time found themselves instantly enamored with the concept. Just the idea of having all of Nintendo’s star characters in the same game was exciting, and that’s ignoring the factor where you get to beat up your friend’s favorite character with your own. Pikachu appearing in the commercial and the box art was also particularly inspired in early 1999, well into the peak of the 90s pokemon craze outside of Japan.
This is the first main thing that needs to be hammered about what makes Smash Brothers a strong series: character power. Mechanics and game design aside, what makes this game work is that it promises to bring in characters people love, and it delivers on that promise by maintaining a high level of fidelity towards those characters. Every character moves and handles exactly as you would expect them to from how they feel in their own respective games, the artistic direction of the stages nails the environment and feel of the different game environments, and even all the items tie back to expectations that have been developed from other games.
What then gives the franchise further strength and staying power is the second factor through which I will be looking at the other games: combat mechanics. While we may all have bought Super Smash Brothers solely with the purpose to beat up Pikachu and others, the reason we get to still talk about it today is the fact that the design of the game was a fantastic mix of fighting, platforming and all-around chaos that kept an entire generation engaged and wanting more. The focus on movement and spacing, the exchange of life bars with percentage values that increase upon damage, the focus on tossing opponents off the stage, the ability to have four players fighting at the same time… all of these factors combined to give Smash Brothers a unique fighting feel that multiple other developers have been trying to replicate since. Toss in the brilliance of having stage-specific hazards and items and you give a specifically Nintendo feel to the package that manages to replicate the casual-friendly formula of games like Mario Party and Super Mario Kart, while retaining skill-focused players with its layers of mechanical complexity.
Before moving on to how this formula would grow across the years, I want to briefly mention the single player features of this game, which are barely there at all. The main single player experience involves a classic mode, essentially an arcade experience where you fight all characters in order before confronting the final boss. Outside of that, there’s two bonus modes in Break the Targets and Board the Platforms, both of which have character-specific challenges that test a player’s knowledge of each individual fighter. Last thing worth mentioning is four unlockable characters, a staple of classic fighting games, which ensures the player keeps exploring the game until they obtain the entirety of the content.
A simple, highly-focused game with two great roots to its success. Now let’s begin looking at the sequels and how they figured to follow up on this winning formula.
Building Upon Greatness
I want to be instantly up-front about this one: Super Smash Bros. Melee is the perfect sequel to Super Smash Bros., and as a result it winds up being a fantastic game as well. Not a perfect game, of course, but as a continuation it escalates the Smash formula perfectly. Mechanically, the game increased the complexity of the platform fighter by adding simple things like air dodging and variety in throws and rolling, while also allowing for a physics engine that would in time set up multiple advance techniques that the hardcore players would soon flourish with, such as what is now known as wavedashing. While it could be argued that these did lead Melee to become a highly more competitive title than a casual one, the presence of a greater variety of items and more diversity of stages allowed casual play to remain as engaging and chaotic as in the original title.
In terms of character power, this game built up Smash Brothers from being a quirky all-star mix-up to an outright living museum of Nintendo history. This was done through the inclusion of trophies, which are collectables obtained through exploring the game’s different features and build up, over time, a gallery rich in Nintendo history. Not only that but the game significantly improved the single player experience by adding an adventure mode more focused on exploring the different areas of Nintendo’s lore, an experience that was admittedly shallow but a solid improvement on the blander arcade of the first game (which returned as well.) As an introductory title to the Nintendo Gamecube, the message of Smash Brothers was clear in proving that while other companies had stronger hardware, Nintendo still had the power of its characters to please its fans and generations to come.
Given the success of Melee, expectations were nothing short of high when Super Smash Bros. Brawl was announced for the Nintendo Wii. What made things more feverish was the drip-feed of information from Sakurai for months before release, including contextually historical moments such as the reveal of Sonic the Hedgehog as a playable character. Overall, the hype was met with an actually all-around great package, with near-endless collectibles, several new characters to play as, and a game bursting at the seams with Nintendo lore and content. Given the topic of this post, however, here’s where I expect to be more critical, despite it also being Brawl that first prompted my question of “how do you possibly follow up on this?”
The first highly significant thing to note is how Brawl is for all intents and purposes a game split in two. One half is the fighter we all knew and loved, while the other half was known as the Subspace Emissary: a single-player action-platforming experience featuring epic cutscenes and interaction between the characters in the game. Here is where that distinction I made comes into play, as this game winds up split between following up on its combat roots and following up on making a franchise-heavy mascot meet-up. It’s also why despite the great energy and enthusiasm with which people received Subspace Emissary, it falls flat in that it fails to actually focus the player on the combat-centric features present in the rest of the game that previous single-player experiences were fantastic at doing.
Because that’s the other issue that arose. Beginning with Brawl you start seeing what I think of as Sakurai Bloat: the trademark of Sakurai as a director where he stuffs his games with so many mechanics, features and side-games to the point where one successful part of the game is drowned by the lack of impact of others. While it works for some experiences, such as Kirby Super Star for the SNES, I would say that in later titles it has only harmed the cohesion of a package, and in doing so probably also diverted development time and funds from more fruitful endeavors.
To tie this back to Brawl, consider how it brought in the entirety of Subspace Emissary, but at the same time it also brought back pretty much every other single player experience from Melee aside from Adventure mode. What’s more, because it’s Sakurai, he also brought in the boss rush feature from Kirby games. Which for a fan is of course great in the amount of diversity and content it offers, until you start to notice that things like Break the Targets are simply not as strong as they used to be. Whereas the first games contained single-player content that worked to improve knowledge of the mechanics vital to the MAIN game (i.e. the fighting), the content in Brawl is where it first began to become more blatantly about collection and achievements (through an achievement wall that Sakurai has, since Kirby Air Ride, copied and pasted into every game he’s done since).
By the time we get to Super Smash Brothers for 3DS and Super Smash Brothers for Wii U this practice has gotten to a point where it’s rather hard to not pick at it. It’s already bad enough to consider how much of the game’s development time was split by the practice of making it for both a portable system and a home console, and then you see all the many little modes that are extremely inconsequential. Just to name a few: a token pushing mini-game for Streetpass, an Angry Birds clone that replaces what used to be Break the Targets, the awful board game attempt known as Smash Tour, and some weird box-breaking mini-game on 3DS for collecting custom moves. So again, like in Brawl but in escalation, a hodge-podge of mini-games and content that exist for the sole purpose to grant players collectibles. Which, in my opinion, is particularly grating in this one given that collectibles are not just memorabilia for a Nintendo virtual museum, but custom moves that can be used in multiplayer.
Which is when we get back to the main two focus points in relation to these last Smash games. The character power is evidently there in greater force than before. So much so that for years before the game’s release each new character was hyped in fancy cutscenes released to the public during Nintendo’s own method of sharing information, the Nintendo Direct. More so than with Brawl, this Smash set up its own success by ensuring a constant stream of interaction with consumers, and it worked manifold for Nintendo too since it directed their branding and merchandising opportunity for years to come. It’s because of this Smash Brothers entry that something like amiibo was possible in the first place. Nevertheless, it is interesting looking at comments about the game in current times and realizing how many people actively want a return of something like Subspace Emissary. It makes sense too, given how friendly crossovers have expanded from being just in Smash to also series like Mario Kart.
When looking at the base mechanics of a fighting game, I do think Smash 4 (the colloquial name for the Wii U and 3DS versions combined) is leagues better than Brawl. The general understanding is that Brawl tipped too far into the casual realm after Sakurai saw how wavedashing and other tactics increased the skill ceiling for Melee, hence random mechanics like tripping and floatier physics to encourage air movement. Personally, I played and enjoyed Brawl enough to where I could overlook some of these issues, and as a result I did not mind. Nevertheless, the lack of tripping and the faster nature of Smash 4 does wonders for its roster.
It’s in the roster where I feel this bloat situation can negatively impact the series. This is probably where I expect most controversy to arise, but with Smash 4 steering past the 50 character point it is easy to start wondering about how exactly resources are being spent at managing a sense of balance in these games. Additionally, the amount of characters conceivably tightens development to a point where new innovations to the fighting formula haven’t really occurred. When Melee came about, it brought with it special Melee options for added silliness: Coin and Bonus as alternate victory conditions. While Smash 4 and Brawl added things like a Final Smash, new unique items and the ability to play with 8 people at the same time, the fighting itself has remained stagnant under the same rulesets and variations since Melee. It stands as a nitpick until you realize how easy it can be to add twists to deepen the combat formula. Combined with the fact that single player modes have become less about teaching good habits and more about filling up achievement blocks and getting collectibles, it becomes disappointing to realize how stagnant Smash has remained.
What Comes Next?
When it came to thinking up how Pokemon could follow onwards I did my best to limit myself to considerations of what the Switch is, what has come about recently and how the devs might be thinking right now. With Smash I do wish to consider current times and games from this moment and their mechanics, but a lot of what I say and suggest here are things I do NOT expect to happen. More than anything because a lot of it compromises Nintendo’s interests in Smash as a franchise-fueled marketing monster.
The first main thing is doing what most other series are doing and just going back to the roots. In this case, I would suggest not the original one but Melee, since that stands as the clear fan-favorite and source of greatest nostalgia. To clarify, I don’t mean necessarily just a return to wavedashing and the like, but also the simplicity of the package. Two main things should happen:
First, Single-player activities that focus on improvement of character use and fighting mechanics. This means letting go of all the Sakurai Bloat, including particularly things like Smash Tour, and designing CPU difficulty levels that are more difficult from skill and not simply from getting artificial health, strength and defense buffs. This gives value back to the experience of things like Classic mode and Event mode.
More importantly, a smaller roster should be an active pursuit of this game. This is a weird one for me to type, since I am always the first person in line to speculate on which new characters Smash could bring about. But even then, even with a heart that bleeds fanaticism towards this franchise, it is not difficult to realize that balancing 58 different characters is not something that can be taken lightly, and when you consider also the attempt made at customizable movesets, the concept of such a large roster is titanic. It makes sense that custom movesets were so poorly executed in Smash 4 when you realize probably no one had the time to balance them or give them thought outside of “wouldn’t it be fun if…? “
This is where I expect my readers to see why I don’t find this viable given the interests of Nintendo. It makes sense to assume Nintendo to want specific characters in the game to boost the popularity of specific upcoming games, and with that in mind a smaller roster just means sacrificing unique and beloved characters at the expense of business. We already had that when a mechanically interesting character, the Ice Climbers, ceased to exist thanks to the limitations of the 3DS and the stipulation that characters had to be the same across versions.
My personal approach would be to consider the models of titles like Splatoon and Overwatch, where characters are released at a slow pace and balanced accordingly in-house, and in the case of Overwatch with a select group of players, before being launched to the general public for free. This way you can present a title with less content than its predecessor while also providing the promise of content for an extended period of time at no cost to the player, also enabling the developers to react to player wants and expectations regarding what characters they desire most and balancing that fan desire with the balance needs of the game. If custom movesets are really something the developers desire, that’s another area of content that is a perfect candidate for drip feed updates, much in the same way Splatoon introduces old weapons with new sets to give the weapon new life and purpose.
Outside of character roster, there are also obvious battle opportunities that could be explored. Initially my goal was to write a bunch of my ideas, such as fights where you can have multiple characters and each take up a specific amount of stocks (thus allowing you to use multiple characters in one fight!)… until I realized a YouTube video beat me to the punch with some rather solid ideas… and others I don’t agree with, but credit where credit is due:
I do want to elaborate a bit more on one of those ideas in this video. The reason I haven’t brought up Smash Run is that I also feel it was one of the more inspired ideas, just trapped in the less popular version that less people in the west would be capable of playing with friends. When they mention the concept of mixing Smash Run with mechanics like the ones in Player Unknown: Battlegrounds though, I actually was excited at the possibilities. What Smash Tour failed at was introducing a different, more casual-friendly mode that promoted a different sort of adaptability while using the Smash characters as currency. A Smash Run + Battle Royale mix would be a perfect way to bring in casual competitors given the possible diversity of stages that could exist (randomly generated please?) and the amount of possible metagames that could develop. Throw in something for losing players to do (maybe roam around as clones of the enemies that finished them off?), a larger number of enemies and creatures from Nintendo games, and the right amount of nonsense chaos, and you have yourself a seriously addicting mode that could be highly enjoyable for players online seeking a different Smash experience.
The last main thing I would recommend involves the issue of character power. While Smash holds a piece of history as that Nintendo game that successfully bridged the gap between worlds and made current Nintendo a reality, it makes sense to still want Smash to be the franchise that carries all this character power into fruition in a story mode with cut-scenes and epic moments. Frankly though, I don’t think this fits anymore with Smash as it is right now, and as a result we should not expect it. Personally, I feel it would be more acceptable is if Nintendo developed those interests in a separate game, perhaps along the lines of Super Mario RPG, Nintendo-fying a story-focused genre to fit in characters and worlds from all across Nintendo. In short, the sort of story that Subspace Emissary wanted to tell should be a different game, and genre, altogether. Realistically, I don’t expect this to happen unless we are all very very lucky and Nintendo does it, but I felt it necessary to mention this given that I offer no other design compromise to those who wish for a Subspace Emissary-like experience to return. Smash Brothers cannot and should not split itself down the middle anymore, whether it’s from within by being split between a fighter and a story and collectibles-focused platformer, or from outside by having to exist on two different platforms at the same time.
Again, all of these are design considerations that ideally take place in order to bring the next Smash to a sustainable level, as there is currently so much content in these games that it’s hard to imagine it possible to make another Smash game within a reasonable development time. Not to mention that how it is right now it will be impossible to please everyone. Of course, it remains to be seen whether we even hear of a new Smash happening, and whether Sakurai will even return to do it. It’s entirely possible all of this is moot as a potential Super Smash Brothers for Nintendo Switch instead brings Smash 4 into the Switch and turns it into a live service, or we get what the fans want and Nintendo makes a Melee HD port. Whatever happens, I fully expect to succumb to the hype as always and forget entirely that less characters should exist.
Stray Notes
- I realize I sound critical of Sakurai, but I assure you the man is nothing short of a legend. Particularly because of how many of my favorite games the man has made possible. Oftentimes at the expense of his health. Certainly he’s a figure that has earned the respect his fans have for him.
- Another way this game could mirror current practices is one I personally don’t like, but it’s worth mentioning: can you imagine how well skin loot boxes for this game would sell, if they contained skins of characters NOT in the game?
- This one took me a while to type out given how much I had to edit out. There is a lot of things I love about Smash and it gets difficult to not want to talk about them, particularly character-wise. If this post frustrates you because I missed something you are passionate about, I apologize.
- Like with pokemon, for my own fan wishes I don’t expect fulfilled: return of original movesets like Ice Climbers; enable custom movesets without connecting their use to gear that alters stats; allow for the removal of hazards and bosses from stages; make the custom stage editor actually contain objects and aesthetics from different franchises.
- This hope is separate due to its importance: Nintendo needs to start supporting competitive scenes. It’s already flaky with Splatoon 2 trying to be competitive without servers and with limited support from Nintendo, but Smash Brothers in particular has clearly been for years Nintendo real entry-way into supporting competition. Development of patches and the like should actually begin involving community involvement and that effort could use being more transparent than it is now.