This is Nintendo at it's best!
The main reason I play this game is because of Roy, but that’s not all. As I said before, the game’s loaded to the bursting point. In single player mode, you can play regular match, which holds classic, adventure, and (when you unlock it) all-star modes. In classic, you go through 11 stages fighting various characters and playing different special stages for points and trophies, and then fighting the classic Master Hand (and Crazy Hand if you meet the right conditions). Personally, I think classic mode’s easier to do. It’s shorter and more to the point. However, it’s also random, so you’re never running through the same crap twice [except on the last level against the Hand Bro(s).], which is good. You can/will unlock a lot through classic mode, so you’ll end up playing it eventually.
Adventure takes you through the “story” of the game. You always run through the same levels (though there is a bit of mixing up in this mode to make things more interesting) through to the end, where you fight Giant Bowser. Like classic, if you meet certain requirements, you get something special in the last level. In this case, it’s a new character, Giga Bowser. Fighting Giga Bowser is hell, by the way, but if you beat him without dying a game over and continuing, you get his trophy, so you’ll probably want to fight him at some point. Again, there’s things to unlock and discover in adventure, so you won’t be able to avoid it.
All-star is the same way as far as unlocking stuff is. You’ll end up playing through it to see what you can unlock. There’s a lot of trophies to gain in all-star mode, though eventually you’ll find trophies you’ve already collected. The game is good about that. Making sure you have to try all the modes out in order to unlock everything. I’d praise the person who could unlock, collect, and complete everything there is in this game. Then you’ve got the event matches, which puts you in different situations where certain goals must be met, and the odds are usually against you, so these are very challenging. This follows the same rule as the other modes. You have to play it to get something. Events are actually a lot of fun to play, ‘cause each one is different and they’re all hard, so mastering these is a great way to boost your confidence if you’re ever feeling low. Or, it could be a good excuse to throw things and cuss your head off.
Then you’ve got the stadium which features three modes: target test, home run contest, and multi-man melee. All three of these things hold something for you to unlock, and they’re all kind of fun. In the home run contest, you get to smack a sandbag around for a while and then you get to give it your most powerful attack and watch it fly. You get to set records and challenge your friends to see whose record’s the highest and things like that. In target test, you’re set in an area with ten targets scattered around the area and you have to break them. Target test is fun, but it can also be hell. You’ll come across this in classic mode. Multi-man melee is not a very interesting feature. The things you get out of it are very good things, but to get them, it’s hell. Not much fun, not very interesting, and barely worth the stress.
There’s even training, which allows you to practice under any circumstances, using whatever you need. Even the training could use an improvement. There’s been one time when I wanted to test Roy’s counter against a full bucket of Mr. Game & Watch’s oil panic, and I couldn’t do anything because there’s no way to add projectiles to the bucket, so it’d be nice if there was a way to get more then two different characters in the training grounds. That would’ve been a nice feature that we can live without. I’m just saying it would be nice.
VS. mode is the real meat of the game. There are so many different ways to play in VS. mode. You can do a time battle where you set a certain time and you fight for that amount of time, trying to have the most points. You get 1 for KOing an opponent and you lose 1 if you’re KOed and you might lose 2 if you kill yourself. But, who’d really want to kill themselves?
Then there’s the stock matches. You can set the number of lives anywhere between 1-99 and then you battle to be the last one standing. Personally, I play stock matches when I play VS. mode. VS. mode is the best part of the game, so you won’t have a hard time unlocking the things in it. It’s actually easy. Very easy.
I never play coin or bonus matches, but I’m sure they’re cool to in some way.
There’s special melees too. You’ve got camera, super sudden death, stamina, giant, tiny, fixed camera, single button, etc., etc. The special melees aren’t that interesting. Often, playing the giant or tiny melees isn’t much fun, since the voices become very annoying (though they can be a bit funny in tiny melee). Camera mode's more of a pain in the ass then anything, and since you use extra slots in your memory card to do it, and there’s so much precaution surrounding it, it’s not worth pissing around with. Especially when you think about how jumpy GameCube memory cards can be and just saving SSBM data can be a risk.
You’ll probably think of the trophies as nothing more then an absolutely obsessive hobby. Collecting trophies in SSBM is more interesting then skydiving off the Eiffel Tower. There are 290 trophies to get in the game. Actually, there’s 293 trophies. The three trophies are Mario & Yoshi, Samus Unmasked, and Tamagon. They can all be unlocked using an action replay in the NTSC version, but in the PAL, you can’t get Tamagon at all. Tamagon was removed just because the game it’s from has references to demons and devils. As far as I’m concerned, parents need to stop being so damn strict. I don’t think we’re all going to hell because there’s a Tamagon trophy in the game. Adults **** way too much. Some lucky people in Japan had the Mario & Yoshi and Samus Unmasked trophies written to their memory cards as a reward for winning a promo contest. I think that’s fair. They won the contest, they got the reward, but they should’ve had an event like that in America too, in order to give us a chance to get the trophies. I’m glad that they gave us action replay codes to unlock them, though.
You can do a trophy lottery to win trophies for your collection, which is the way you’ll generally build your collection. Then you’ve got a trophy room where you can look at all your trophies on a table sitting in the middle of a kid’s room, which is evidence to back the theory that the Hand Bros. are two different hands of the same kid up. Part of the fun of the game is looking at the kids stuff in the back round. It’s so cool back there. If you switch the language to Japanese, you can see a lot of differences. Yeah, trophies are awesome.
You can even check your records to see how long you’ve been playing, learn how to collect every bonus point, and watch two movies that come with the game.
Every game has its flaws. SSBM definitely doesn’t come short of it. Some of the stuff you have to unlock is ridiculously hard to get. Getting Mewtwo is so hard to do. Some levels also require you to play up to 200 VS. matches without stopping. That’s a dumb, unnecessary pain in the ass. Marth and Roy from Fire Emblem don’t have home arenas, which isn’t fair. They should have home arenas just like every other secret character. Also, in the introduction, they should add to it as you unlock characters to include those characters. It wouldn’t be that hard. When the machine reads your memory cards and sees the characters you have, the game displays an intro to include those characters. I suppose this is something you can live without, but the secret characters are missing big publicity. They were never in the ads for the game, they don’t appear in the special movie, and they’re just not treated as big deals of the game. I’d say the best part of any game is the characters you can unlock. And in adventuire mode, after you fight Fox, you'll sometimes fight Falco instead of Fox. I think that once you unlock Falco, you should always fight him after Fox, to include him in the adventure mode. They did it with the Metal Bros., so why not Falco?
Despite the problems of the game, it’s still part of the SSB series, which means it’s the best game you can own till the next SSB game comes out. Don’t miss a chance to get it. I recommend you buy a GameCube Memory Card 1019 to save data on it though, because a friend of mine’s data is always disappearing because she doesn’t have a large enough memory card for it.