~ Estimated Reading Time: 9 min ~
Growing up with a used Gamecube, as a middle Gen Z-er surrounded by people who had Wiis; I have a weird relationship with this game. It didn't stick out to me at first, my childhood friends just happened to have Melee. But when I hit the age where I became an active poster online, I began to meet people who had a vendetta against my Smash game. Having the one that all the older vocally elitist people online liked, while all the teens my age got defensive about Brawl... I had accidentally ended up on the wrong side of a generational divide, passed down to me by Gamefaqs dorks. Those other kids were WRONG!!..about all the things they said about Melee, I don't remember most of it anymore. I can just so vaguely recall someone who believed that competitive Smash was blasphemy, until I showed them a video of Mewtwo tech, and they immediately swapped sides to hating the one they grew up with! It's all very silly in retrospect.
We had barely even defined language to help get our perspectives across to each other. I see myself as by no means a competitive player - I've never even gone to a tournament or anything - but I've poured time into Melee, because I simply love moving in a fast and slick 2D action game engine. This is often expressed by playing with "serious" rules - but most of my memories of playing like that are dominated by using it to pass time while giggling with friends. When you watch the thousands of people grinding out Rivals 2 - tournaments barely in mind, motivated primarily by Fun - I get the impression that my (for lack of a better term) casual-competitive approach to Smash as a series isn't even small, just one we don't have a great way to acknowledge. And it's a playstyle that's like water on oil to Brawl in particular; I remember thinking the game controlled like swimming through air when I finally got my chance to try it. Trust me when I say that enjoying the texture of serious play is not solely intertwined with taking it seriously; I've known people who ironically, can enjoy Brawl way more than me through embracing its techy side.
I'm not even sure if I think Brawl is a universally more fun party game than Melee. A lot of the new items serve to make the game more chaotic in un-interactive ways - which I get is the point, as to even the playing fields with uncontrollable elements. But you can't even hit Assist Trophies in this one!! And I dunno, are any of the new stages as good as any individual part of Temple? In this sense, I wonder what Brawl's general reputation will look like in 20+ years - as the nostalgic people who grew up with it fade into a lesser voice on the internet, in place of people who grew up with other, sharper platform fighters. Will they boot the game up once, think "why's it feel like this", and then turn it off?
Smash Ultimate is seen as a largely all-catching game to a general community - working wonders for someone like me, who just wanted a game that felt frenetic again. It's also a bit too good at teaching you how to play Smash. It'll turn anyone who binges it into a demon. If you made me play this with a kid I'm babysitting or something, no matter how many items they throw at me, I'll just instinctively catch them out of mid-air with zair. So I judge that Brawl is about how many extreme adjustments you have to make to truly break my muscle memory, to truly close the gap between family members. Now, making a game where Mew2King can be beaten by a 7-year old is still a futility... But Smash truly dedicating itself for once to actually focusing on a specific niche - especially now that in retrospect, genuinely good family games are much more inconsistent - is kinda valiant. As someone who doesn't go to enough parties to actually experience that skill gap frequently, I find myself quite removed from truly praising this element of it, I just get it.
Project M stands as a time capsule to where that niche intersection of ambiguous playstyles was at during the early 2010s. Everything soft about Brawl has been given a crunch, everything silly made snappy. You can tell when something in an indie platform fighter is PM-influenced - the character is either extraordinarily technical, or the mashiest dipshit fast big hitbox punch guy you've seen in your life. There is a common cynicism from onlookers, an assumption of artlessness maybe, that the project solely existed to serve tryhards who couldn't deal with change. And while some early decisions may come off as brash, it's obvious the team quickly found their passion in transforming the game into something of their own, something out of love. There are a lot of serious attempts to invent entirely new archetypes here - all of which will stand out as origin-points for a burgeoning microgenre. Many have attempted to fix up Brawl's rushed take on Sonic - make him cockier like the character he is - but none stand out as much as Project M turning him into a perpetual motion machine. He carries so much momentum from the ground into his jumps, that he can barely turn around after committing to something - embodying all that brashness you'd want him to have. And they got to the Sonic Battle reference forward air first! I could basically give a full review for every character like this. If I dwelled too much on something like, "ooh they made lucario a street fighter homage with TATSUMAKI AND SHORYUKEN, MAGIC SERIES, METER MANAGEMENT, and a SPIRIT BOMB", I'd lose track of saying anything.
Sometimes while playing it, I think its competitive worth is almost diminished by just how for-its-creators-own-fun it is; so many characters are just constantly moving with technical specials in a way that makes me feel like I'm flailing. But you get it, because movement feeling good to perform was the point for a lot of us! It 'feels like anime' (something my 12-yo self would say to friends to explain the appeal of Melee comp scenes).
Project M's dev team were a multifaceted bunch: working with professional composers to fill the silence on Hanenbow, making stages so three-dimensionally dense that you could explore their backgrounds like a world. If you thought they were never fun fun, the latest update by Project+'s skeleton crew was dedicated to adding 3D World's Double Cherry as an item (it does exactly what you think). Almost everyone who worked on it eventually got talent poached by a professional game developer. It is by all means its own game, one that will eventually be seen as one of the influential games of the 2010s.
But in retrospect, doesn't it all fit together neatly? Brawl was explicitly for someone, some specific group of people, and the people who didn't fit that 'someone' came together to make something kind of amazing. When everyone like me seems to be satisfied with something that ultimately owes its existence to Brawl, is there anything left to hold against it?
And when I'm able to step back, reconcile with my own baggage, and appreciate it as its own thing - there's a lot to love in Vanilla Brawl as well!! I adore how interestingly Smash made aesthetic compromises in order to make its cast blend together; it feels like a playable version of those sprite animations that tried to make Mario EPIC. The way it carries the remnants of the 7th gen trends of the time is so silly in a way I really do enjoy. Smash 4 is so much uglier than this game. It got here at the exact time to showcase a lot of Nintendo's most interesting publishing oeuvres; it blows my mind still that Electroplankton got such a big highlight, it's one of my favs. I think it's way cooler that all of Wario's poses animate choppily to simulate a WarioWare minigame, than if he was just the shoulder bash guy - so there's at least one example of me siding with the Smash team over PMDT.
Most of all, it's bittersweet going back to this, and seeing how many Lasts there are on display. It's where we saw a lot of the series' last attempts to officially design new archetypes; the removal of things like flight, tether recovery, and literally any one of Snake's moves only set Smash back in how much variety it had in its next entry. Its follow-ups have so much content that blends together, that it's hard to appreciate the little things - but everyone still remembers the Kyle Hyde trophy, right? Subspace in particular is the last time Smash got to develop its own voice, rather than existing to display things other than itself. Let alone elements that were already gone from the series forever; Melee's Target Test was the last time the series would ever try to leverage its multi-faceted movement to completely bend Smash's genre. Melee and Brawl were the final glimpses into Smash as a fluid, ever-growing set of mechanics.
After finishing Ico for the first time this year, I stumbled upon a Masahiro Sakurai interview while reading about the game's history. He speaks almost self-deprecatingly that Fumito Ueda's hyper-focused vision of scenic towerscapes made him feel insecure about his own work. Smash had always been a jumbled list of a million ideas. Melee had an emergent competitive playstyle because of the mindset that depth is good game design, so programming more depth would simply make his game more good-er. Brawl is a response to that - a recognition that depth has a time and place, and maybe that isn't always going to be here. Trip and fall over if you're playing a party game, sure. A million reads have been made into Brawl's anti-competitive nature as a spiteful move, but it's hard not to see it as another core element that they grimaced at the idea of removing. Alienating a chunk of its playerbase is just another consequence of a series that can't help itself from people-pleasing by trying to do everything. But that everything else Brawl does is the reason that a lot of people grew up with a deep attachment and loyalty to it, so that they can have their own version of my story of growing up with Melee. I should give Brawl credit for that. But maybe by even using that as a compliment, I'm repeating Smash's mistake - trying to make a catch-all - rather than truly appealing with a target in mind. It's not my game. But not everything should be