origamiiii

As a kid, this was the coolest thing ever. As an adult, it’s still pretty cool. But as a video game, it’s not good at all. The music is phenomenal and the characters are quirky and fun. You can get that from any Sonic game, though. Unfortunately for Shadow the Hedgehog, that’s all it really has. Many of the levels are unfavorably designed and often rip you out of the immersion with poor design. It’s easy to fall off the map or lose yourself in the environment—and that’s also thanks to the faulty controls. The camera is awful to control, the game is paced strangely in its movement, and the combat is not particularly fun. The only thing this game really has going for it is aesthetics, if you can stomach an older looking, severely outdated game.

I had recently played through the story mode for this game. Just as I enjoyed it a decade ago as a child, I thoroughly had a blast as an adult. To start, it’s definitely not Smash at its best in terms of gameplay. The floaty feeling it has compared to the series’ successor, Ultimate, is difficult to find riveting. Naturally, some may prefer this—I much prefer my Smash game to be fast paced. But I can forgive all of that, seeing as Ultimate was definitely a build on, and Brawl is significantly older. The real draw of Brawl is its story mode: Subspace Emissary. In no other game can you find a story as mesmerizing as this. Watching such iconic, colorful characters from all different genres of video games come together to create an expansive world is something so special. To see them interact, too, is even better. It’s clear that Ultimate’s World of Light wanted to recreate this magical feeling, but it fell short in its lack of expressive storytelling. Subspace doesn’t feel like a Smash game, and that’s to its benefit. It feels like something that took the acclaimed Smash formula, and built a platformer around it to create a story that is expressed in ways other than words. Brawl is a gem. One of the standouts on the Wii, and in the Smash catalogue. If you ever want a taste of what Smash used to be, or are in the mood for a story based around its universe, Brawl is the quintessential Smash.