Super Smash Brothers WiiU is the best game of 2014, and easily one of the best Nintendo games in the past decade. It will rank as the top fighting game of the 2010s, easily taking out Street Fighter 4 and Marvel vs. Capcom 3. It delivers in nearly every aspect you can imagine. And to add to this, the Smash franchise has once again lifted the bar on fighting games—we have come an extremely long way from just 8 players fighting each other (Street Fighter II: Turbo). Smash is the best of the business, there is no question about it.
However: Melee is still the best fighting game of all-time.
Even with everything offered in the WiiU version; from map and character creator, to a massive lineup of characters, stages, music, and options, Smash Brothers WiiU still couldn’t quite shake off the superiority of Melee’s playing style and some of the unmet potential. And also what hurts was the lack of pure surprises in the game, which was something Melee became notorious for. In a single day essentially you would be able to collect all the characters and nearly all the maps. It never felt like Smash Brothers WiiU tested and pushed the limits and capabilities of the hardware. It felt like some things were being held back, from characters to character enhancements to the map editor (The latter really pissed me off. That was quite a dropped ball).
With Smash Brothers Melee, it was a bundle of sheer mayhem that kept delivering the goods an excruciating long time after you first bought the game. You needed 20 hours of gaming just to get Mewtwo. One of my fondest memories in all of gaming was taking on Mewtwo the first time. In this installment, there wasn’t much work required to get the 8 hidden characters. There wasn’t much of an anticipation this time around. Even the hidden characters weren’t that memorable. No character in Smash U that was unlockable had anywhere of the awesome mystique of Mewtwo. No Knuckles. No Geno. No Mallow. No Golden Sun characters. No X. And although the inclusion of Pac-Man, Little Mac, and Mega Man was most appreciated, I feel like we could have done better than Wii Fit Trainer, Rosalina, and the rather pointless Dark Pit.
Melee still has the deepest fighting system in the franchise. Wavedashing contrary to popular belief is not a glitch, its taking advantage of the fast-paced physics established in the game. Melee’s speed forces you to be more skillful and more persistent to hang out with the big boys. Smash Brothers WiiU is the equivalent of the poker player revealing loudly his royal flush and then flipping over the table to announce his victory. Surely the player wins, but there was no build up, no anticipation, and the hype is quickly over. Melee was able to transcend gaming and became the equivalent of a sport because it was the gift that kept on giving. There were advanced techniques being discovered years after its launch. You couldn’t add anything else to Melee if you tried, in 2001 terms it was arguably the biggest game around.
Smash WiiU is good, and we all knew it was going to be good---it just never aimed to become legendary. No drastic gameplay upgrades, no attempts to cash in on the tournament subculture, no big surprises, no major overhaul of the map editor, not much depth in the character-enhancing system (and the suspect banning of it from online play), and just a lack of a feel that it’s a major step up from the previous installment. Smash Brothers Melee was as drastic a change as Super Mario World to Super Mario 64. The WiiU version is taking the franchise and keeping it on cruise control. Nintendo didn’t even have the gall to give it a proper title---just plastered the name and added the system name.
The game is enjoyable, and just might become one of the top games in the history of the WiiU. However, something still doesn’t feel quite right as what the game did was take Melee, remove speed, increase the amount of characters, and kept the gameplay mechanics intact and slightly watered-down to maintain its mainstream accessibility. No tournament mode to satisfy the hardcore fighters in the worldwide Smash community, no depth in the online functionality, no depth in the map creating, and extremely minimal tweaks to the formula. The game coasts to a nice secure B+, but didn’t gun for the A++ that gaming history has handed to Smash Brothers Melee.
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