I quit my job, my girlfriend left me, so I go to a bar and my pal hands me a Nintendo 3DS. We play Smash Bros.
I come from a nest of friends where one of us has a Wii, there are two gamecube controllers between everyone and all of our Melee’s have gone missing. But we each have a Nintendo 64 and mad controllers.
This isn’t to say I didn’t grow up with Melee. I did. But it didn’t stick around during those mid-college crisis years where you just needed some drugs and a cop-out. I needed a game to fall in love with so I started going steady with Smash 64.
There is this humble flow to the first Super Smash Bros title. The game plays in this linear fashion where you’re not overwhelmed by real-life-fighting stimulator effects you would find in Melee or Brawl (fucking tripping? REALLY?). It felt like I was actually playing a game instead of hanging out in high-speed, epileptic sword fights with flying falcon punches on Big Blue. Smash 64 was definitely a little derky, though. Smash 64 is quality. But the year is 2014. Smash 64 an old game now.
On the other hand, Smash Bros 3DS is the god-damn bomb-diggity. Smash 64 got old because of those aforementioned derk qualities. I’d have to rotate 64 between Melee and maybe going outside or something dumb like that. But with Smash 3DS, though, you don’t need to do anything else in your life. You’ve got smash runs, classic 4-player matches of you-vs.-coms, friends or fucking anybody because the 3DS has WiFi. Hell, I can even play with my friends online (how easily do we forget Brawl’s random-only online play). I can now play a social video game and never have to see my friends ever again. It’s awesome.
Smash Bros on the go brings the fight to everywhere because anyone in their right mind has a 3DS with Smash Bros on it.
I ponder at the time where your squad had to stand facing one another in a little 2 by 2 square feet with those dingley little system-links—playing some half-assed Mario Kart while breathing in one another’s spit moisture.
Nintendo has made the handheld continue the legacy of the world’s greatest fighting game ever in the world, ever. Literally name one game better than Smash. You can’t.
The game holds awkward at first because A (smash), B (special) and Y/X (jump) are slightly rotated from the N64 controller. On N64, B would be on the left side of a four-point circle, and A is at the bottom. With 3DS, the A is the right point of the same four-point circle chart, and B is at the bottom. The handling is pretty much the same for the 3DS and Gamecube controller. So I had to be even more of a baller to master this game, unlike those who played Melee all the time.
And if you’re hard-of-seeing or a wuss that can’t handle tiny 3DS screens, when Smash for Wii U is released, you can rig up your 3DS to that and play on the big screen. It’s just one small step before we have Smash Bros holograms in the eventual technological fate of humankind’s peak of ingenuity; Smash 4DS.
There are no motion-sickness inducing Melee speeds. No trip and float dumb fucking Brawl. And you’re not bound by the derk of 90’s 64-bit.
Through my life in Smash, I held down my boy Link real tight. In Smash 3DS, I kept to those Hylian roots. And entangled in those roots is my arch-nemesis: Captain Falcon (long story (Captain Falcon’s a bitch)).
I spawned in game zoomed in on Link and the first thing I think is: “WHERE THE HELL IS CAPTAIN FALCON?!?” Then the time countdown reaches start and the camera zooms out, there he is, flying his Falcon-foot at me. You roll with the R trigger, and grab with the L. So I dodge a Falcon-foot and then get grabbed. He tosses me to the other side of the map: Green Hill Zone we’re fighting on (which has the piercing tone of the soundtrack on point). I run back at him and hold A to give him the ol’ sliding-sword attack.
Then something crazy happens. I do a running-jump sword slash.
That’s new. What. Fuck. That’s cool. I think importantly enough to cite in this review.
Anyways long-story-short; I beat the fuck out of Captain Falcon and win every game. That’s because I’m the man.
What I think the secret ingredient is to making Smash 3DS the best Smash title (and any other title) is the smoothness, especially the way you can control the rise-and-fall of your jumps. Instead of jumping in fear of the so-common fate of missing your landing and going of crashing off the map, you fall with precision for land. The jumping in Smash 3DS is so smooth it makes me feel like Miles Davis.
Cameron Trentalange, Co-President of SVA Versus; a video game tournament club at the School of Visual Arts says, “every character has been rebalanced, even if slightly, from Brawl.” Though it is hard to determine if there is any character who reigns supreme over all others, there so-far doesn’t seem to be any character who is clearly broken. “With Brawl, it was pretty evident who was on top since the beginning,” Cameron indicates.
Smash Bros is a perfectionist industry fueled by hype at this point. This is all directly related to Smash 3DS. There’s a moving-train fight map (Spirit Tracks), ten-million Zelda songs, fuckin’ Fierce Diety Link costume (Majora’s Mask), and some cool stuff from other Nintendo games, too. (Sumia costume Lucina!!!)
It also managed to make the once dreaded mobile-maps (ie: Icicle Mountain, Mushroomy Kingdom) to be super-fun chase fights. I don’t mean to brag but I can kite like ten Captain Falcons across Golden Planes.
All in all, Smash Bros 3DS gets 100 out of 5 stars.
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