Review #220: Super Smash Bros. for 3DS

 Just what I expected. Sorta.

 What started as a humble mascot fighter back on the Nintendo 64 is, nowadays, an event. Whenever a new Smash Bros is announced, people get hyped and hungry for any sort of leak on the final roster. If one thing's for sure, is that Smash is yet to disappoint... Unless you are into competitive Smash, but that's a can of worms I'm not willing to open.

 Well, I'm gonna start with the menu because it bears mentioning... it's a bit of a mess. Upon starting the game you are greeted with buttons of different shapes and sizes that lead you to 'Smash', 'Smash Run' and 'Games and More'... and it's in 'Games and more' where 'classic' lays hidden. Frankly, the menus are cluttered and a mess, why hide Classic, arguably the game's main single player component, under a sub menu? like, really. Once you learn to navigate the menus, you'll have access to these modes: Classic, Smash(Online/Offline), Smash Run, Street Smash, Training, Customization and Stadium, where Multi-man melee, Destroy the Targets and hit the bag reside. Where to start with? Classic has been redesigned, no longer do you follow a straight path, but rather, it features branching paths, that all end up against a Mii army and later the Master/Crazy Hand boss. The difficulty selection has also been tweaked a bit, it defaults at 2.0, but you can raise it up to 9.0 by betting coins... or spend coins to lower it below 2.0. You can't change your life stocks, but you start each fight with 2 lives, regardless if you died previously or not. Dying forcefully drops the difficulty setting and lowers the rewards, heck, you may even lose some rewards. All in all, Classic Mode is... it's alright, I much prefer the older set-up, but it's not bad by any means.

 Hit the Bag works just as it did before, pummel on the sand bag and then hit it with the Homerun bat trying to send it as far as you can. Target Blast is no longer an individual challenge depending on which character you choose, but rather a generic mini-game inspired by Angry Birds and the sort. As for Multi-Man Smash it features 10-man, 100-man, 3 min, Endless and Cruel variations, alongside a new 'Rival Smash' in which you must defeat more enemies than an enemy CPU. Smash Run is a weird mode... You've 5 minutes to traverse a medium-sized stage, and defeat as many enemies as you can, featuring NPC enemies from the many Nintendo franchises, although mostly from Kid Icarus Uprising, and collect power ups, so that you have better stats to face another 3 players in a random challenge. It can be a race, or just a run-of-the mill Smash battle. Hilariously, while every player goes through the same map, and can interfere with the other players by using 'powers', you can't actually interact with them directly. Honestly, it's a terrible successor to Sub-Space Emissary, and while it can be fun the first couple of times, and even though the enemies vary between playthroughs, you always go through the same map and it gets very repetitive, very fast. I understand why Sakurai, the director, did away with the Sub-Space Emissary, but I don't agree with it. Heck, even Melee's Adventure Mode was much more interesting than Smash Run.

 Then we have the Normal Smash game, that can be fought either in Stock or Time-based matches against CPUs, Offline or Online against other players. On the plus side, there's an 'Omega' form to every single stage in the game, so that tournament players can fight on t boring, plain and obstacle-less versions of the stages. Heck, you can play 'For Glory' online in order to fight without items and on the Omega Stages, to accommodate for them! As per usual, you can individual items on or off, but... you can't change the frequency. They are either On or Off, and there's probably an explanation for it.... the 3DS' processor probably couldn't handle having the Frequency on high, since it'd imply having a lot of stuff going on at the same time. Then there's Street Smash, a Street-pass based mode, although you can train against CPUs, which has you sliding a puck around, with the touchscreen, trying to through the other pucks outside the platform. It's dull and boring, and I don't understand why there's about 3 challenges surrounding them. Oh, yes, Challenges are back. Think of them as trophies, there's 105 of them, and they are fun...ish. You see, they can get, nay, they will get long in the tooth as a lot of them require finishing X mode with all 40+ characters. Needless to say, Challenges are best enjoyed as something that you clear slowly, rather than trying to clear them all as soon as possible. Hilariously, there's a couple of them that are quite... arbitrary, to say the least, like say... 'play 3 smash matches as Samus', which feel a bit like filler.

 In All-Star Mode you must defeat all fighter, which appear in the order in which they made their first appearance. But the last mode, and the more interesting one, is Customization. Playing through the many modes will earn you three type of rewards: Coins, Trophies and Customization items. Customization items range from costumes, to passive items to moves. Costumes are equipped on the Miis, yes, you can create Miis, there's three archetypes: Brawler, Swordfighter and Gunner, they have derivative movesets(Mario, Link, Samus), but they get their own unique moves, it's pretty neat! The Passive items can be equipped on the Miis or on the normal characters, and they raise and decrease different stats. Lastly there's the Customization Moves, every character gets two different variations to each of their special moves. It is true that not all Custom moves where made equal, some share the same animations and only change the properties of the move, while others like... Kid Icarus' Palutena gets 12 possible different moves altogether. Still, it's a really cool twist, and something I hope they keep for future installments.

 Now I want to talk about the roster... Firstly, there were cuts. Ice Climbers, due to the 3DS' poor processor, Wolf, Lucas, Snake, Squirtle and Ivysaur. Charizard, Zelda, Sheik, Samus and Zero Suit Samus were reworked into individual characters. The 'Gliding' mechanic that only some characters had is gone completely. Every character now gets at least 8 colors, and in some cases, these colors feel more like costumes. Now then, as far as the returning characters go, everyone feels new. Not only thanks to the new engine, but you'll notice at least one or two new animations on every returning character, in some cases there's new attacks. Sadly, while some characters that didn't need a new Ultimate Smash got one, like Kirby, others like Peach and Jigglypuff keep their useless Ultimate Smashes. I absolutely loved all the new comers, minus one I will elaborate upon shortly, it feels as if every new character has something, some new mechanic that makes him completely unique to the rest of the cast. Like Robin having 'ammo' on his specials and smashes, the Villager having a Down Special that changes depending on the tree he plants or Megaman having projectiles as his basic attack. I feel like this is not only the largest, but the best roster that Smash has ever had. Clones are a necessary evil, they allow you to have more characters, but spend less time and money of them, both developers and players win. I could rant about Ganon keeping his cloned moveset from Captain Falcon, but I won't, instead I will rant about Dark Pit. Y'see, I don't mind clones because we get different characters, in this game we get Lucina, we get Doctor Mario, these have different models than the characters they are cloned from. They add variety. Dark Pit looks exactly like Pit, he is nothing but a glorified 8 extra colors for Pit. I even dare say that having Dark Pit in the game cheapens the roster. Look at Alph, he shares a slot with Olimar, yet they have different models... but Dark Pit gets his very own slot? Really?

 I will digress a bit, but you will indulge me, since this is my blog. Before the game's release, people were accusing Sakurai of having bias towards Kid Icarus Uprising, the last game he released before Smash. Palutena made it into the game, and I didn't care, Kid Icarus had a new game recently, Palutena was fine. A lot of weapons and enemies from Uprising were recycled for Smash Run, once again, I didn't really care. But Dark Pit? Why... why would you give him his own slot? I'd rather get Roy back. Pichu. Wolf. Lucas. Anyone but Dark Pit. Anyone but a glorified extra 8 colors for Pit. Mind you, I don't like the game any less due to Dark Pit's presence, nor did it affect my enjoyment of the game in any way, but that doesn't mean I don't get to hate the fact that he is in the game over other, more worthy clones.

 Now with that out of the way, how did I feel about the game? Well, it is Smash through and through, and on the go to boot! The game does feel faster than Brawl, which I like, but not as fast as melee, which I don't mind, and they got rid of tripping. Thank god. Ledges have been reworked, so that if you get on an edge on which an enemy is holding on to... you will push him out of it. It will certainly change how the game is played, as edge-guarding is no longer an option. I liked Edge-Guarding, it could provide some very exciting moments, but this is different, and different is not necessarily bad. The controls are a bit... they aren't terrible, but the 3DS' nub isn't up to snuff. I don't think anyone will take competitive 3DS Smash too seriously as to care for it though. On the bright side, controls can be customized almost entirely, however, the Digital Pad has to do the taunts and the analog stick has to be used for movement. It would've been nice to be able to map movement to the digital pad, but that would mean losing the tilt attacks, so I understand why they did it. As for the gameplay, they managed to keep frame drops to a minimum. If you play without items, you won't get any frame drops at all, and when items come into the equation... it takes for a very crowded scenario for the framerate to drop.

 As well as the game runs, it does have some issues... The game is a bit of a handful on the 3DS' processor, you can tell simply by how long it takes for the OS to restart after closing the game. But there's another tell... in my 20-hour experience with the game, it crashed twice on me. No other 3DS game has EVER crashed on me. I did some research, and it seems I'm not the only one that had the game crash. It's rare enough as not to be an annoyance, but it's still worth a mention. The game does include a lot of content though. There's a lot of music tracks, over 40 characters, a ton of stages(Both new and returning from previous installments), alternate Special moves for every character, a ton, and I do mean a ton of trophies with their own colorful descriptions.... This is a game that can potentially soak up a lot of time, and it doesn't feel like a grind. Unless you are an idiot like me and try to get all the challenges in a short period of time. Do not do that, or the game will get repetitive and even slightly boring.

 The visual presentation is absolutely gorgeous. I dare say that it looks even better than Melee. There were a few concessions made in order to get it looking so good... while the game runs at 60 FPS, secondary NPCs, like Pokemon or Assist Trophies, move at 30 FPS. It's a tad jarring, but nothing too bad. The music... It's Nintendo, and it features tons of classic tunes from the many franchises featured in the game, there's absolutely no way to dislike the soundtrack. Unless, y'know, you have a different taste. But whatevs'

 So, Smash Bros on the 3DS... it's exactly what I wanted. A portable version of Smash Bros. I like how it feels like an in-between Melee and Brawl, it's not too much like either game(Although it tilts towards Brawl), and I like it for that. I loved 99% of the new comers, I loved the new stages and am pretty OK with the ones they chose to make a return. Some of the Challenges could've been better thought-out, and the fact that it can crash is a bit scary, but the game saves often enough as to make it a non-issue. All in all, I liked it. It's not the system seller I thought it would be, but I can't say that I didn't get flippin' Smash on the flippin' go.
 8.5 out of 10.