What an amazing game.
Brawl was something special to me.
It was the year 2004, I was a six year old boy still in elementary. Every day, after school, my parents would still be working and they didn't really want me coming home by myself. The only console I owned was a GameBoy Advance.
So, after school for about three years, I would go to my local Boys and Girls Club and play video games. My favorite of these were Star Fox 64 and Super Smash Bros. Melee.
Me and my friends would play Melee for hours. I was a Fox main who didn't know what shine combos or wavedashing even was and most times I would just get my ass beat, but I still had a blast.
In 2005, I had first started to learn of these odd thing called "the internet." I remember getting about half an hour to get use the computers at the B&GC and spending them watching Smosh vids.
Soon, I started to delve deeper and found myself spending time on "The Old Place" and Screwattack. I started to really envelope myself in online gaming culture.
Two years of enveloping my childhood in Smash Bros and online gaming communities culminated in one moment; I soon starting hearing of murmurs of this thing called "E3."
And on the first particular E3 I happen to tune into, I see this in glorious 144p image quality.
Cue me absolutely losing my shit. For the first time ever, I had felt hype.
No memories of my child hood are more vivid to me than the years between Brawl's announcement and eventual release. I worked summer jobs mowing lawns just to save up for a Wii.
Now, instead of coming to the B&GC everyday to play Melee, I was coming back every day to check The Dojo.
https://www.smashbros.com/wii/en_us/index.html
I remember this pop-up being the best build-up to a reveal:
The game looked beautiful. Every character was so much more detailed. I weirdly enjoyed the bizarre hyper-realistic details on Mario's clothes.
As well as what still remains my favorite iteration of Battlefield. Something about that blue sky really speaks to me.
But most of all, this happened:
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This was monumental. This was one of the single most important things to happen to gaming. The canonization of most prevalent rivalry in the industry.
After this, nothing was gonna stop Brawl. It had everything it could going for it. And it delivered. In fact, it might have even over delivered.
There was so much game in this one package. The breadth of Brawl's seemingly endless content was overwhelming. Even eleven years later, putting in what must have been 150 hours into this game, I'm still not confident I've seen all this game has to offer.
More than any other sequel in the franchise, Brawl felt like the biggest upgrade. The stages were so widely varied and so creative, the WarioWare stage being a favorite.
The endless orchestral renditions of so much classic gaming music. The addition of Final Smashes, as well as a sprawling adventure mode.
Speaking of, holy shit, this adventure mode tho.
Subspace Emissary was a blast for me. Me and my little sister would play through the whole game together. This bizarre Kirby-esque mode was bloated with content. So many secrets there were to be discovered. I spent hours just replaying stages just to explore every little crevice I could find.
Nothing can ever make me feel the way this game made felt, not even the most recent Smash Bros. could rival what Brawl gave me. I never minded everyone's gripes with it. I didn't care about tripping, the speed, or even the wifi issues. Brawl wasn't just a game to me. It was the experience, it was the feeling of growth. Brawl remained my gateway drug into gaming culture and online, and I'll never forget the hype. To Masahiro Sakurai and the team at Sora Inc, Thank you for everything.
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