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.

So we went to a local gamestop at about 10, waited until 12, then got the game finally at 12:20.
By 12:35 we were back at my place playing the game, the four of us playing free for all 4 minute matches to try every character.

Then came 1 AM, still playing, getting a feel for the game.

2 AM came and went.
4 AM.
8 AM.
11 AM.

Now keep in mind that our goal was twofold: first, to play enough matches to unlock every character as fast as possible, and second, to make sure we all got a feel for each character and the game iteself. We ended up with just under 160 matches played, (the number to unlock R.O.B.) and 12 hours of play under our belts.
By 9 AM, when i decided we needed to go buy bagels before we starved to death, we were alternating 3 people playing our signature 1v1 rotation setup (sometime we’ll explain it, it’s relatively simple) and the fourth person would sleep for 4 rounds, or 16 minutes. Then the next person would sit out for 16 minutes. It was tiring.

I thought that before a large video post (we will upload match videos possibly tomorrow, but as soon as I can if not) there would be a few posts about initial impressions of the game. Coming from our professional-scene SSBM past and jaded by reports of Brawl being a ‘dumbed-down melee’ smash game, I for one was a tad upset or skeptical going in.

FIRST. AND MOST IMPORTANTLY.

I have NO IDEA where anyone gets off saying that this game is not tournament-grade, competition-level, or pandering too much to casual players.
The game is a masterpiece, and yes, it is DIFFERENT from the intense speed-oriented style of Melee, but that does not make it BAD in any sense of the word.

Nintendo continues to please, as far as i am concerned. The changes to air-dodging (which i will discuss later) which therefore eliminated wavedashing and wavelanding fit into the flow of the game completely. There is still immense speed and linkable or chainable combos to obsess over, and the depth of the game (because of some of the much more diverse movesets) has become more profound. Most professional smashers will have no problem agreeing with the fact that we ought to wait 2+ years until true advanced play evolves by necessity, and for now it is safe to say that we should all practice 8 hours a day and read and watch everything we can to get better at Brawl.

My initial reactions I have summarized to avoid another wall of text:

1. Standardized falling speeds and ‘floatiness’ given to characters is different, but after 12 hours of straight play, you get used to it and appreciate the game.

2. There is a LOT of room for improvisation. Traditional combos as we know them in Melee not only fall apart here, but are impossible because of the multitude of different character matchups and stage hazards. The key to stringing together 0% -> death combos is in using virtually all of the moves at your disposal before landing a killing blow. (See point 3)

3. Diminishing returns, or move damage degradation, is one of the most noticable changes in Brawl versus Melee. Traditionally, in Melee, damage was easily racked up by certain characters using the same move that they would use as a killing blow, such as peach using d-smash, marth using f-smash, or shiek with f-air. These moves were simply good enough to damage someone with, and then use again to kill. In brawl, there is a steep curve down the damage chart of any one move after it has been repeatedly used on an opponent. It winds up being more beneficial to give the damage with smaller, oftentimes more ‘clever’ moves while saving the (for example) f-smash with for last and the greatest effect, or else you risk using a half-as-powerful final blow that won’t finish the combo.

4. Some characters are so open to interpretation as far as playing style that I suspect that there will not be a conclusive strategy developed for them for over 2 years. Briefly: Consider the way that ice climbers were played in Melee before the discovery of de-synching. There are some characters that still feel bread-and-butter smash, such as mario and samus, but the inclusion of characters who can glide, the introduction of non-locking up+b recoveries (character does not go into helpless falling mode) and wall-cling-abilities  are obviously going to introduce many many new advanced techniques into high-level play.

5. Some characters are enormous. That’s okay. Everyone’s initial reaction is to think that a large character suffers from what we might call bowser SSBM syndrome, but Nintendo fixed a lot of potential problems– Donkey Kong is more zippy and has less lag with better moves, Dedede has half of his moveset come out nearly instantly and the other half slow and strong a la bowser.

6. No one in the world is good at this game yet. I’m sorry, but the idea of having tournaments this early is almost pathetic– bragging about skill here and there when the game was just born is pointless, especially if you knew anything about some of the well-respected Melee pro players, who took 7 years to learn how to play well.
In a few months we should start seeing some really really nice videos, but for now I think that instructional and critique videos are what will advance the game’s development. Just my opinion. I think that learning how each move and character functions, for the sake of playing well,  is more important than the dangling carrot of a tournament prize.

tl;dr

Brawl is good. Videos soon.

Hello, everyone! This is the first post of many, on a daily basis by myself and three crewmates. Although we have no readers now, this post is filed under general, which is generally site-wide announcements and the like.
I’m mooplet, after which this blog is titled, but that’s just because we chose my pre-existing domain name as the place to put it. The other three members of our crew are probably going to wind up contributing the same or more than i do as far as blog content.
Each of the four of us will have a subdirectory, steelkangaroo, rigapeen, and torrent are my best friends and co-authors of this blog, but some will contribute more than others in different ways. These personal blogs will contain bio info and might not have to do with brawl, but will definitely have email contact and Wii Friend Codes that you can add to play with us on wifi.

Allow me to talk for a bit about the conception of this blog. Because we started playing melee professionally in late 2004, there was already a huge community of well-seasoned vets and we followed daily the excellent community of smashboards, learning as we went to tournaments and watched videos. However, i realized that when SSBB hit the states (march 9) there would be massive opportunity to teach as well as learn. If you consider that we plan on being professional players, there ought to be some crowd out there that would read a blog written by us daily, about advanced and tournament-level play and strategy. Composed of short FAQs, guides, and videos of each of us playing and critiquing our own videos, the site will both follow our own development as advanced players and serve as a good resource for aspiring competition-level players to read.

I want to have at least one post per day, and if a post is an embedded video with commentary, it will be mirrored on my youtube page and magnify page, if it is a guide or an FAQ about a technique or character then i will mirror it on smashboards and backlink to here. There is a lot of work to do on this blog, and with the release date coming up in 5 days (midnight) all of us will be working to style these pages and change a lot.

I’m still not sure anyone is reading this except google bots, if that.

Edit: We are attending midnight release and will put up pictures and initial reactions in the morning, if we have enough energy left.