Smash Brawl Blog

//EDIT: mooplet here, I guess the posts aren’t showing the author so ill fix that… in the mean time ill just put written by steelroo right here.

Having finally unlocked all the characters after spending 6 hours in Subspace (whose idea was it to have the last level be all the previous levels, only within a maze?) and playing upwards of 10 hours of versus matches, I feel like I’m finally ready to write some character discussion. This will be brief and won’t be terribly in depth, I may expand on this one or write a new one once I really get into a character.

Overall most characters seem better, aside from obvious nerfs (Sheik, Fox) and some characters still suck (Ness, Yoshi). Some characters really stood out as being interesting or different and I’m going to run through a few of those.

Pit- Pit seems to be really good. His arrows are spamable and it is easy to camp using them. All his aerials are good, fair and bair can KO at higher damage while nair and uair do good damage. He doesn’t kill as easily as other characters, but he can recover from anywhere on the stage and is fairly fast, so I expect to see him do well overall.

Snake- Snake looks to me like the Ice Climbers of Brawl. He plays extremley different from other characters, but looks like he has to potential to do some good damage. Once people work on understanding how his attacks work and how to combo with him, he looks like he will be a solid character.

Metaknight- Everyone seems to love him, but I don’t really see why. To me he’s just a worse Pit. No projectile, less jumps, less killing moves. Unless some crazy glide canceling stuff is discovered, I don’t see him being as good as Pit.

Olimar- He’s crazy. Very hard to read as all his attacks look the same. His fair and uair can juggle and can do 30+ dmg at once if you hit with a fire or electric pikmin. His tether recovery is better than most as it hits people (because otherwise you can gimp tether recovery by grabbing the ledge) and overall I think Olimar is pretty solid. He plays a lot differently than other characters so it might take a while for someone to figure him out completely

Diddy- I really like Diddy. He’s fast, and has two different projectiles. His peanut gun is pretty meh, but his bananas own. It seems a little stupid to think that the bananas actually trip people, but try it for yourself. When you knock someone over you can get a dash attack off at the very least, and when you dash attack your banana peels, you pick it up again. This way you can spam one or two peels while adding damage with dash attacks and any of Diddy’s decent aerials. His dair can spike and his aerials combo pretty well.

Pokemon Trainer- I’m still figuring out some of the nuances of PokeTrainer, but overall he seems pretty good. Charizard has great aerials, especially fair, and has good recovery. He is a little slow, but his power makes up for it IMO. Squirtle is very fast and has good aerials (very similar to Diddy’s). He is a good counterpoint to Charizard as his speed makes up for Charizard’s lack of speed. Ivysaur is probably the weirdest of the three, as he seems to be the mid range for both speed and power. His grab range is big and his fair and nair do good damage and are pretty easy to use. Uair and dair are powerful as well, but very situational. Ivy’s recovery is tether and pretty bad, so overall Ivy is my least favorite of the three (although Chillin and others really like him). This brings me to what I think is the best part of PT. He is very versatile and can be adapted for different situations. I find Charizard vs Dedede to be a hard match, but switch to Squirtle and you have a better chance at overwhelming him. With versatility comes the difficulty to master all elements of the character. Give us some time with the game and we’ll break PT- I’m sure of it.

Wario- Wario is one character I’m still undecided about. He is VERY floaty and just feels weird to me overall. His aerials are strong and his smashes KO easily, but trying to develop a strategy around them is tough. Right now I try to play him a little bit like Jigglypuff from melee: lots of aerials, forming a sort of wall of pain. It isn’t as effective as Jiggly from melee, but his waft can act as a sort of rest, on a longer timer. His recovery is pretty good, use side-b then jump and use up-b. Time will tell whether Wario will get better or just become worse as we develop advanced tactics for other characters.

Wow that was a lot of writing. I’ll stop here and write more when I come upon something interesting.