What happens when you dump some of Nintendo's most beloved characters into a room with no way out? Chaos is assured.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl takes some of your most beloved characters of all time from Nintendo's diverse color pallete of personalities and turns them into total jack ***es. From your favorite Italian plumber Mario, to the eternally cheap Pit, to the lovable pink puffball Kirby, almost every Nintendo game, known and unknown, is represented here.
Super Smash Bros. takes allows up to four players to beat the crap out of each other in a fast paced smash to the death. The game does have a variety of single player modes and online, but the best part of Smash Bros. is playing multiplayer locally with your friends.
However, I'll get the bad out of the way. The "main feature", I guess you could call it, of single player is the Adventure Mode called Subspace Emissary. In this story told without words, almost every character in the game joins forces to take out some emo boss at the end of the game. The cutscenes are all really cool to watch, but the gameplay is bland. You go around beating up stupid enemies that look like they're from Kingdom Hearts. You'd think with all of the licensed games Nintendo has under its belt, they could use some licensed characters, like Goombas. However, the game pits you against a generic enemy. This enemy wants to blow everything up with nuke like bombs. We'll call them "Russia". However, they fail in the end because Sonic is apparently God. The worst part of this mode is that you're practically forced to play it to get all of the characters. You can always do x number of brawls to unlock characters, but do you really want to do 1,000 brawls to unlock Jigglypuff? Thankfully, I have a brother that is very easily amused who played through the entire thoroughfare for me.
Fleshing out the single player gamut is Classic mode and All-star mode. Classic let's you choose a character and go through a series of events to eventually reach the final boss, Master Hand (and sometimes Crazy Hand). All-star mode has you taking one character and beating every other character in the game on one life and three damage restores. Both are way more fun than the eight hour Adventure Mode and are much shorter.
Rounding out single player is Events and Training. Events has you completing different random events where you have to kill x number of character at exactly this time or taunting at just the right moment or... you get the idea. Training includes such popular events as multiman brawls (up to 500) and Homerun contest (poor punchingbag). Both of these features are nice little additions.
Now let's take about online multiplayer. It sucks, plain and simple. Playing with anybody reduces the frame rate to a healthy 5 fps (and that's not that much of an exaggeration). My friend jumped in the air once and came down about a minute later. You can bet on matches, but I advise not wasting your time trying to play online with anybody.
Playing with friends was noticeably better, probably just because I was playing with people who knew how to set up their router better. There's still more lag than is acceptable, but it's better than playing anybody. However, you have to get their friend code... AGAIN! Instead of just using their 16 digit Wii console code, you need ANOTHER 12 digit code for this game. It just shows how paranoid Nintendo is about their online service. Another major bain of the service is the lack of voice chat and messaging. The lack of ability to message each other makes it extremely difficult to set up a game. Also, since this is a game that really makes you want to scream at your friend, the further exclusion of voice chat from the Wii's online is frustrating. Thankfully my friends are all on Verizon, meaning we can just use our phones and use speaker without having to worry about our phone bills.
Well, not that I'm done tearing the bad parts of this game to shreds, let's talk about why I gave this game a 9.5. The local multiplayer is AMAZING! With 35 characters that can be played across 41 Developer made stages (that doesn't include all of the user created stages that are possible in the Stage Creator) and countless items, some of which have innumerable effects, your playtime is always assured to be unpredictable. Each character has their own special quirks, strengths, and weaknesses. Many times you have to find these on the fly, assuming you and your friends always play as different characters. While some of these items, characters, stages are either bad or boring, everybody will find at least a few of these they'll fall in love with. I'm currently rotating between Toon Link, Pikachu, and Mr. Game and Watch. You can't go wrong. This game is like Rock Band where you just have to get in a room with a bunch of your friends to really experience it. You're all yelling at each other, "Oh crap!" is shouted innumerous times, and everybody's just having a blast.
In conclusion, while my review was incredibly negative, this game is amazing just from that last paragraph. Be happy. I would have a longer review, but class is almost over. Keith loves you, that's what he said.