A very fair review of Super Smash Bros Brawl
Lets start off with the old, and there's a lot of it. Brawl has a good bunch of characters, but many have been in previous entries of the series. In fact, the entire cast of the original N64 title are in Brawl. Many of the characters who appeared in both the original Smash, and Melee have returned. This is a good thing and a bad thing. While your favorite character might be Luigi, you'll be glad to see him return and be able to pick him up right away due to the fact that many character's moves have been little changed from melee. On the bad side, you might not care for Ice Climbers, or Jiggly Puff at all, and would have rather had Nintendo replace a few old characters with more newcomers. Sadly, most of the newcomers are the ones featured on the site. Those fighters may be good, but a lot of old characters have to be unlocked and there weren't too many shockers. Also, since the older character's moves havn't changed since melee, you can jump in right away, but wouldn't it be great if your favorites from Melee have some new moves? Third party support is okay, and I'll leave it with that.
Now for the new. One thing you'll probably pick up quick is the side-scrolling action platforming story mode ( try saying that 3 times fast ) The Subspace Emissary. SSE's highlight wern't it's levels or co-op mode, but the great CG cut scenes that range from plain old silly to awesome. Pushing the Wii's graphical powers to the limit, the cut scenes were always fun to watch, and you can replay them anytime you want. Playing the Subspace Emissary, is okay. Minor platforming with a huge amount of arena based combat is playable, especially with a friend, but the SSE got really repetitive fast, even the music ( which seemed to follow the same tune through almost every song ). The only reason I completed it was for the cut scenes and the ability to unlock every character through the story, and not the other ways, some of the other ways to unlock characters are a bit too much. Extras are plentiful in Brawl. There are collectable trophies, stickers, and music tracks to find throughout the game ( I should mention that the Coin Launcher game is addictive ). Unfortunatly, collecting every one of these things does follow the game's main theme, TOO MUCH. Tons of trophies to collect, hundreds of stickers to find ( that I don't give a DAMN about, and 100+ music tracks ( CDs aren't so bad, until you start getting songs from Mach Rider and Panel De Pon (WTF?) ). I didn't even mention the gigantic board of things that you can unlock during the game... TOO MUCH CRAP! Stages are good, but completing Classic or All Star modes on Intense difficulty just to get a trophy, is a bit brutal ( ACHEIVEMENTS NINTENDO ACHEIVEMENTS! If you get everything on that board, I don't really care because half of the things on that god forsaken board are useless, and wont effect the way you play the game at all!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Stage editor is the only part of the game that dosen't feature TOO MUCH. First of, to get every stage part, you need to make up to 15 stages... lame. Building stages could be more diverse and Nintendo made it so you could not make any stages that would make the game crash or mad lag ( that's actually what I wanted to do with it! ). You can alter the music selection in each stage too, which is good, because you can turn all of the Crush 40 off/on the Sonic stage and just have the retro/ Crush 40 songs playing in the background.
Now to multiplayer, the best part. Kicking your friends butt never felt so good. A wide selection of stages ( which are suprisingly well thought out ) help make your experience more enjoyable. Online is a crying shame. Unless everyone of your friends/ random opponents have a T1 connection, it will LAG LIKE A TURTLE!!! Sometimes my entire matches freeze up for minutes.
All in all, Brawl is a good example that TOO MUCH of a good thing, is just plain old bad. You'll love it at first, but a few months later you'll want to have nothing to do with that game, or you'll discover MArio Kart Wii