BulletPoints: Smash Bros 3DS: You Probably Already Bought It

I already did a first impressions from the demo and I know a review of the game is absolutely pointless. No matter what negative reviews exist for it, if you have a 3DS already or any inclination to play Smash Bros, regardless of platform or graphics, you will have already bought, beaten, and possibly even returned to Gamestop your copy of Super Smash Bros 3DS before this review has gone up. And while that is probably the case, my goal isn’t to review it and tell you that you shouldn’t buy it. Instead, this is more like a review explaining what I like and don’t like and why I’m ultimately more interesting in the WiiU offering scheduled for later this year. There’s your preface, now segway into the “review”. 

Unlike a review I had been planning to write (discussing the various game modes and their pros and cons as well as updates to the roster) I figure I’ll write about the few aspects I like and how the game does as little as possible to support what I feel are the best features of this game. What features do I like best? I’d say the two best features this game offers (surprisingly) are the custom characters and custom Mii Fighter features.

To elaborate, Mii Fighters are based on your Mii’s you have made and saved on your device. You can make them into one of three classes (brawler, swordsmen, or gunner) and each has three different options for their four different special moves. You can create a lot of fun variety with these Mii Fighters to make characters as close to what you want. And while I like most of that aspect, I have gripes with it as well that I’ll get into momentarily.

Custom Fighters take a similar approach except the customization aspect targets the actual characters of the game (Mario, Sonic, Ganondorf, etc). With exception to Palutena, you have to collect everyone else’s alternate special moves before you can try them out and equip them to your character. Again, functionally, I like the custom move options as it gives lots of replayability to the game as you experiment with different ways to improve on certain characters or make them different creatures entirely. But the problem here comes with unlocking these different skills.

You see, in order to unlock custom moves for the bulk of the fighters (and custom equipment which grants bonuses both positive and negative to certain stats) you have to play various solo-game modes. To me, that’s fine because I prefer playing games solo anyway. But I also have friends who want to play with me online. So the fact there’s no online method of collecting these customization options is a bit of a let-down because it means I have to isolate myself for hours at a time in the solo-game modes to collect these moves rather than play with friends and progress through the game that way. Sure I can unlock characters playing with friends but God Forbid I also unlock custom moves that way as well.

But the bigger issue is how you unlock the moves themselves. You don’t just beat a gamemode with, say, Bowser and get one or more of Bowser’s alternate moves (which seems like the reasonable way to do it). The ways to unlock the various are:

-          Collecting them in Classic Mode through their in-between fights roulette mini-game which has other less useful options on there and require luck (or exploits) to reliably collect.

-          Going into the Trophy Rush Mini-Game and having it POSSIBLY drop during a FEVER RUSH and at most I’ve ever gotten are three.

-          Finding them as enemy drops or chest rewards in Smash Run… which is a game mode so full of issues that I won’t get into here but this is one of the least efficient ways to get them.

-          Sometimes they randomly appear in Homerun Contest or Target Blast. But once you’ve done these with everyone you don’t really bother with them and these appearances aren’t reliable by any means.

-          Mew will sometimes drop them in fights. But you have to have items (specifically Pokeballs) on and you have to hope that the rarest Pokemon in the game will eventually show up and that the item it drops won’t fall off the stage (which has happened to me once of the two times I’ve seen him).

-          Beating some of the challenges, which are like achievements but with in-game rewards (so actually worth doing). But since you don’t know which challenges give you the rewards, this method takes a while and not all challenges are necessarily doable. That said, save your hammers (which just mark a challenge as complete) until challenge-sheet three. Don’t waste a damn one on the first page.

And here’s the other, more important aspect. Even when you do any one of these to unlock the custom moves, you aren’t guaranteed to unlock a new move for the character you’re currently playing (and presumably trying to get the moves for). I must have gotten Ganondorf’s Warlock Blade (his sword-variant of his punch attack) at least five times in the process of trying to unlock all his moves. While I get custom gear can be re-obtained because the values aren’t always the same, custom moves don’t have that variability and should be able to be re-obtained so easily (or at all). It’s even more annoying when I do a run through these modes as, say, Charizard and don’t unlock a single fucking custom move for him at all (oh, but I’ll get two for Marth, a character I haven’t touched since Melee).

But even if you get all the moves and gear for a character and your Mii Fighters, the biggest issue of these awesome customization options are you can’t play them online. You can play them online WITH FRIENDS ONLY. But I can’t just join a random game with my superior-Ganondorf or tweaked-Sonic and see how they compare to other random creations from other random players. This is something that I don’t think makes any sense for a couple of different reasons.

Assuming Sakurai and his team playtested this game as much as possible to find any bugs or exploits that need fixing (barring Peach’s turnip problem), there shouldn’t be any broken custom-move mechanic that would make them unreasonable for online play. And even if there was some kind of problem, since Nintendo has embraced the concept of online-networks, updating the game to fix any issues would be incredibly simple.

My bigger issue, however, is with the fact we have two non-friend gamemodes and neither allows for the custom characters or Mii Fighters. These are “For Fun,” which is an anything-goes ruleset with all stages and items on, and the “For Glory,” which is Final-Destination-only no-items and presumably everyone is probably playing as Fox McCloud (the last part is a joke). But the problem is both of these embrace the two extremes of the game without any more valuable middle-ground for players who like certain items or stages, but not others. This makes the online play less enjoyable because you’re forced into one of the two play-styles, neither of which appeals to me (and I imagine a good bulk of players as well since most of us aren’t extremists).

What strikes me as odd more than anything is that “For Fun” won’t allow custom characters or Mii Fighters in their “anything goes” ruleset. I get that “For Glory” wouldn’t allow good or fun features like that to exist, but why not “For Fun”? But forgetting that, why isn’t there a THIRD online option for Custom-Fighters only so players can test their creations against other players? Doing so could provide valuable information to the dev team or Nintendo in general as to how to make the characters for upcoming games. They’d see which moves or gear are being used most and see how it balances with the rest of the characters. Then they could apply those changes for later iterations or sequels. But by not doing so, that’s lots of valuable data collecting that is basically going to waste.

And not being able to use Mii Fighters, I feel is a HUGE waste of potential. If you’re goal (as Nintendo) is to make gaming a more social experience (which is why MiiVerse was created) then why are you not allowing us to put OURSELVES into the fights with other Mii Fighters? This would be a great way to promote social networking through MiiVerse and through Smash Bros by connecting players and their Miis together in fun fights. Plus, unlike the other fights, I imagine the Mii Fighter’s movesets were tested thoroughly otherwise why are they even in the game and have all their moves available from the start?

But now that we’re on the subject of MiiFighters, I want to complain about how limited they are in their abilities. We have Miis focused on punching, gunning, and swording and that’s it. And while that seems to give us a nice pick-n-mix, where are the Miis we can give hammers? Axes? Bows? Nunchakus? Magic? Super-natural powers like fire-breath or generating electricity? I understand that this being a new feature that some limitations have to be made at first to see if it can be a success with the initial product. But why not (at least cosmetically) give these options? I certainly hope this variety in weapons and skills can come into play at a later date (via DLC) because I see almost endless fun making armies of different Miis equipped with a variety of weapons. But I won’t gripe on that anymore… also we need Scythes.

So to sum things up, the best part of the game (the customization of characters and Miis) is something keeping me playing the game for more hours than I probably should. But the inability to get moves with friends online, get moves in a reliable way, or play with your custom creations online show that while this is a cool feature to be added, it isn’t something that was considered to be the main focus of the game, as it doesn’t seem supported as well as it could be. This is the Achilles’ heel of this game, which is a shame because there’s so much that could be done here to make these options more robust and fun beyond what they are already.

Do expect more discussion of the newest Smash Bros soon. But as far as my review is concerned, it’s a fine game that does the bare minimum a Smash Bros game needs to do in order to be successful and fun. It has certain game modes like Smash Run that offer great ideas mixed with some terrible ideas. It offers a larger cast of characters with some wonderfully welcome additions as well as lots of tweaks to returning characters that mostly work to their benefit. It’s best features (customization) are what make this game endlessly enjoyable but their inability to make a good online service outside of the friends-only battles hampers said features in ways that more traditional MatchMaking (ala Left 4 Dead  or Halo) could have resolved. In the end, it’s a perfectly serviceable version of Smash Bros and about as good as you could expect for a portable-version of the game. It will make a nice hold-over until the WiiU version is released and then we can play a real game. See ya next time.