Super Smash Bros. Brawl facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Super Smash Bros. Brawl |
|
|---|---|
North American and European box art
|
|
| Developer(s) | Sora Ltd. Game Arts |
| Publisher(s) | Nintendo |
| Director(s) | Masahiro Sakurai |
| Producer(s) |
|
| Writer(s) |
|
| Composer(s) |
|
| Series | Super Smash Bros. |
| Platform(s) | Wii |
| Release date(s) |
|
| Genre(s) | Fighting |
| Mode(s) | Single-player, multiplayer |
Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a popular fighting game released in 2008 for the Wii console. It's the third game in the exciting Super Smash Bros. series. In this game, famous characters from different video game worlds come together to battle!
Nintendo announced the game in 2005, and Masahiro Sakurai, who directed the earlier games, led the team again. The game took a few years to make and was released around the world in 2008.
Brawl has more playable characters than the previous game, Super Smash Bros. Melee. It was also the first game in the series to include characters from companies other than Nintendo. The main goal is to hit your opponents until they fly off the screen. Unlike other fighting games, it has simple controls and focuses on knocking players out of the arena.
The game also has a big story mode called "The Subspace Emissary." This mode is like a side-scrolling adventure with cool animated movies. You can play Brawl with up to four players, and it was the first Smash Bros. game to let you play online using Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. You can even use four different types of controllers to play!
Super Smash Bros. Brawl was a huge hit. People loved how fun it was, even with some loading times. The music, created by 38 different video game composers, was also highly praised. It won "Fighting Game of the Year" and is considered one of the best video games ever made. As of 2023, it's the eighth best-selling Wii game with over 13 million copies sold worldwide.
Contents
How to Play Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Brawl is a unique fighting game where characters try to knock each other off platforms. You pick from many characters, like Mario or Pikachu, and fight on different stages.
Instead of a health bar, characters start at 0%. As they get hit, this number goes up. The higher the percentage, the further they fly when hit! If a character gets knocked off the screen, they lose a life or a point, depending on the game mode. You can even create your own player profile and set up your favorite controls.
Characters use different attacks. You can do basic moves by pressing a button and tilting the control stick. There are also "smash attacks" which are more powerful. Each character has four special moves that do unique things. Brawl also introduced "Final Smashes," which are super powerful attacks. You can use a Final Smash by breaking a special floating orb called a Smash Ball.
You can also use items during battles, from things you throw to weapons. Many items from older Smash Bros. games are back, and new ones have been added. Some items, like Assist Trophies and Poké Balls, temporarily bring in other characters or Pokémon to help you.
Game Stages and Arenas
The stages in Brawl are usually based on different Nintendo game worlds. They can be simple platforms or moving areas where you have to stay inside the boundaries. If you go outside the boundary, you get "KO'd" and lose a life or point.
Brawl has 41 stages to choose from, with 29 available at the start. Many stages change during battles, like going from day to night or through different seasons. One stage, based on Animal Crossing, even has special events depending on the real-world date and time! Some stages can be broken, and characters can float in certain areas. Unlike older Smash Bros. games, Brawl includes stages from other companies' games, like Shadow Moses Island from Metal Gear Solid. It also brings back 10 stages from Super Smash Bros. Melee.
Brawl lets you create your own stages in a mode called Stage Builder. You can save your stages to an SD card or the Wii's memory. You could even share your creations with friends or send them to Nintendo through Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.
Playing with Friends: Multiplayer Modes
Besides regular multiplayer, Brawl has other fun ways to play with friends. "Special Brawl" lets you set up unique rules for your matches, like making characters giant or invisible. You can now combine many special rules for one match.
"Tourney mode" lets you set up a tournament for up to 32 players, either human or computer-controlled. A "Rotation" feature allows up to sixteen players to take turns, with winners or losers switching out after each round.
Playing Alone: Single-Player Modes
Super Smash Bros. Brawl has many modes for one player. In "Classic Mode," you fight different characters in a set order. Each fight might be in an arena or against opponents from a specific game series, like The Legend of Zelda or Pokémon. Some matches have special conditions, like fighting metal opponents or two-on-two battles. Similar to Classic mode are "All Star Mode" and "Boss Battles," where you have only one life to defeat all playable characters or all bosses.
Brawl also has "Events," which are matches with special goals, like beating opponents within a time limit. There are 41 single-player Events, each with three difficulty levels. There are also 21 Events you can play with two players.
"Stadium mode" offers fun minigames. "Target Smash!" is back, where you break ten targets as fast as you can. In "Home-Run Contest," you hit a Sandbag to do as much damage as possible in 10 seconds, then launch it with a Home-Run Bat. All Stadium mode minigames can be played cooperatively or competitively.
Adventure Mode: The Subspace Emissary Story
Super Smash Bros. Brawl has a brand new Adventure mode called "The Subspace Emissary" (SSE). This mode has its own story with many side-scrolling levels, boss fights, and animated movies that tell the tale.
In this story, a group of bad guys called the Subspace Army appears, led by the mysterious Ancient Minister. Some enemies are from other Nintendo games, like Petey Piranha from Mario. Others are new, like the robotic unicycle Roader or the one-eyed Bytan. Even though it's mostly a single-player mode, you can play it with a friend. In SSE, you can collect stickers to make your characters stronger.
Unlike other modes, SSE has a team system. You start with a few characters, and more join your team as you play. Eventually, all the different groups of characters come together to form one big team. If you're playing with a friend and one player loses a life, the other player can take their place until you run out of lives.
The creator, Masahiro Sakurai, wanted this story mode to be much bigger than the single-player modes in previous Smash Bros. games. He worked with Kazushige Nojima, a writer famous for the Final Fantasy series, to create the story.
Playing Online: Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection
Brawl allowed players to battle against others far away using the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. You could play with friends you registered or with random players. You could also send short preset messages to friends during games. There was even a "Spectator mode" where you could watch other players' matches and bet coins on who would win.
You could take pictures during battles or in other modes and send them to friends or Nintendo. You could also save video replays of your fights. Nintendo would even pick some of the best pictures, stages, and replays submitted by players and share them with everyone through the "Smash Service." However, the Smash Service stopped accepting new content in 2009, and the Nintendo Wi-Fi service for Brawl was completely shut down in May 2014.
The Vault: Collectibles and More
Just like in Melee, Brawl has trophies. These are statues of video game characters and items that tell you a bit about them. You can get trophies by playing a minigame called the Coin Launcher, where you shoot coins at them. You can also get special trophies in The Subspace Emissary by using an item called the Trophy Stand on weakened enemies.
Besides trophies, you can also collect stickers of video game artwork. You can put stickers and trophies onto virtual backgrounds and take pictures. Stickers can also be used to power up your characters in The Subspace Emissary.
There's a "Challenges menu" that shows you all the things you can unlock in the game, like stickers and trophies. It also tells you how to unlock them.
Brawl also includes "Masterpieces," which are demo versions of older Nintendo games featuring characters from Brawl. These demos let you play a short part of the original game. There's also a "Chronicles" section, which is a library of past Nintendo games. New games appear in this list as you unlock characters, trophies, or stickers related to them.
Story of The Subspace Emissary
In the Adventure mode, "The Subspace Emissary," Mario and Kirby are fighting in a stadium. In this world, when a fighter is defeated, they turn into a trophy. Another active fighter can revive them by touching the trophy's base.
Suddenly, a giant battleship called the Halberd appears. It releases purple particles called Shadow Bugs, which form the soldiers of the Subspace Army. The Ancient Minister, the army's leader, arrives and sets off a Subspace Bomb. These bombs can only be set off by sacrificing two R.O.B. units. The bomb pulls the stadium into Subspace, a different dimension where the Subspace Army lives.
The fighters realize they need to team up to stop this threat. Meanwhile, villain characters like Ganondorf, Bowser, and Wario are using powerful weapons to turn allied fighters into trophies. They also use the Shadow Bugs to create evil copies of some fighters. King Dedede starts secretly collecting some of the fallen fighters and putting special golden brooches on them.
It turns out the Ancient Minister is actually the main R.O.B. unit! It turns against Ganondorf when Ganondorf blows up its home, the Isle of the Ancients, to create a huge opening to Subspace. The three main groups of heroes come together and use the Halberd to fight the Subspace Army's giant warship. Even though the Halberd is destroyed, all the heroes escape. Ganondorf and Bowser retreat after Kirby destroys the warship.
Ganondorf then betrays Bowser and discovers that Master Hand was being controlled by the true leader of the army, Tabuu. Tabuu is the embodiment of Subspace itself. Tabuu easily defeats Ganondorf and Master Hand.
The fighters confront Tabuu, but he uses a powerful attack called "Off Waves" that turns them all into trophies and scatters them across his dimension. Dedede's brooches are then revealed to be a secret way to protect against Tabuu's Off Waves! They revive Luigi, Dedede, Ness, and Kirby. These heroes rescue the other fighters and navigate a giant maze made of all the areas pulled into Subspace.
Just as Tabuu is about to use his Off Waves again, Sonic attacks him, weakening him. The fighters then defeat Tabuu and save the day! In the end, the fighters look at a bright cross where the Isle of the Ancients used to be.
Playable Characters in Brawl
Brawl lets you pick from 39 different characters to play as. 25 of them are available from the very beginning. Some characters are brand new, while others return from Melee but with updated looks or fighting styles. For example, Link and Fox have designs from their newer games, and Samus can now change into Zero Suit Samus. Some characters from Melee, like Mewtwo, were not included in Brawl.
Many popular game series have new characters joining the fight. Diddy Kong from Donkey Kong, Ike from Fire Emblem, and Lucas from Mother 3 all make their first appearance in the Smash Bros. series. Other new characters are the first to represent their own game series. These include Pit from Kid Icarus, Olimar from Pikmin, and Wario from the WarioWare games.
Brawl also made history by including the first characters from companies other than Nintendo! These are Solid Snake, the hero from Konami's Metal Gear games, and Sonic the Hedgehog from Sega.
Game Development
Nintendo announced in 2005 that a new Super Smash Bros. game was being made for the Wii, and it would have online play. This was a surprise to Masahiro Sakurai, who had left his old company. But Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata, asked Sakurai to be the director again, and he agreed.
Development started in October 2005. Nintendo even opened a new office in Tokyo just for this game. Many different studios helped, with Game Arts being a main team early on. About 100 people worked full-time on Brawl. They even had access to all the original materials from making Melee.
Nintendo officially showed Super Smash Bros. Brawl in May 2006 with its first trailer. Sakurai said that they might not use too many motion controls because it could make the game harder to play. He also said that online play was a big reason why Brawl was created. From May 2007 to April 2008, the game's official website had daily updates, showing new characters, stages, items, and music.
Brawl was first planned to be released in December 2007 in the Americas. However, the team needed more time to make the game perfect. So, the release was delayed to January 2008 in Japan and March 2008 in North America. It finally came out in Europe and Australia in June 2008.
Music in Brawl
Masahiro Sakurai announced that 36 musicians helped create the music for the game. He asked famous composers like Koji Kondo and Nobuo Uematsu to arrange some of their favorite Nintendo songs.
The game's stages have many different music tracks. You can even choose how often each song plays using the "My Music" feature. Some songs are taken directly from other games, while others are new arrangements. You can unlock more music by collecting CDs in the game. The main theme song for Brawl was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, who is famous for his work on the Final Fantasy series. The main theme has Latin lyrics that talk about fighting for glory and rivals becoming friends.
Choosing Characters
Sakurai first said he didn't want to focus on characters only known in Japan. But after seeing how popular Marth and Roy from Fire Emblem became, he became more interested in adding characters from Japan-only games. He also said there would only be two third-party characters, besides Snake.
Solid Snake was included because Hideo Kojima, his creator, really wanted him in Melee, but it was too late to add him then. So, he appeared in Brawl instead. Also, Lucas from Mother 3 was supposed to be in Melee, but that game was delayed and then canceled.
Japanese fans were asked to suggest characters and music for the game. The most requested third-party character was Sonic the Hedgehog from Sega. He was announced for Brawl in October 2007. Sonic's co-creator, Yuji Naka, had also asked for Sonic to be in Melee, but there wasn't enough time.
During Brawl's development, Sakurai thought about adding Miis as playable fighters. But he worried they wouldn't be interesting enough and that people might use them to be mean online. So, he decided against it. Miis were later added as playable characters in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U.
Game's Impact
Brawl is special because it's very easy to change or "mod" for a console game. This is thanks to a trick found in the game's stage builder when loading stages from an SD card. This trick allowed fans to create their own changes to the game. These changes could be simple, like new character costumes, or more complex, like adding whole new characters or stages.
In 2011, a group of competitive Super Smash Bros. players started making a mod for Brawl called Project M. They wanted Brawl to feel more like its older brother, Super Smash Bros. Melee. They changed the game's physics, made it faster, and brought back characters like Mewtwo and Roy who were in Melee but not Brawl. Many people loved this mod, and it was downloaded over 300,000 times by 2014. The project stopped being developed in 2015.
In 2019, a new team of developers created Project+, which is like a new version of Project M.
See also
In Spanish: Super Smash Bros. Brawl para niños
