Zelda > Mario > Sonic.
Cartoon Ratings: Zelda >>> Mario and I refuse to believe Sonic had a cartoon. You can't Fairy Tale me.
Ed is moving up the PW rankings with that Mega Man love.
Embarrassing question time: What's the deal with Super Smash Brothers? I know nothing. Somebody chat me up.
Alright deep dive on Smash Bros....
In the mid to late 90s, the creator of Kirby got this idea of a casual fighting game after feeling bad for absolutely destroying somebody at King of Fighters. He envisioned a fighting game that was friendly to newcomers and came up with a concept where players could use weapons and had to knock their opponents off-screen instead of dwindling down an HP bar. After working on the game for a few months he showed a prototype to a colleague who liked the idea but knew it wouldn't sell without marketable characters. His suggestion was to keep developing the game but use famous Nintendo characters and when the game was 'good' show it to the head honchos at Nintendo HQ.
It obviously got over and the game was rushed out to market. You'd think a game that featured both Mario and Link would be hyped for months if not years but it was only announced a few weeks before it's launch in Japan with no announcement for a western release.
The game was so well received, it was eventually released Statesides around mid-99 with this fun little ad.
The original game had a roster of twelve characters each with their signature attacks from their various series. Every major Nintendo IP was represented including lesser known star Ness from Earthbound. Smash was actually Ness' introduction to PAL audiences and when I played through the game originally I thought he was an original character.
The game also contained a few oddities like a paper fan and a light sabre which AFAIK had no prior affiliation to Nintendo.
The first Smash was largely a nice proof of concept, but it seemed like they could do so much more with the series.
Two years later, Masahiro Sakurai the aforementioned Kirby creator would come up with Super Smash Bros Melee.
Melee is a phenomenon in a gaming that still thrives to this day. There is still a competitive scene made up of relatively well-known players who have had multiple documentaries (one of which is four hours long) on their community. To say Melee took the concept and ran with it is understating it, because it's 20 years later and it's still going.
Melee included not one but three campaigns, a trophy collection system that represented even more video game characters and series, more mini-games, a challenge system, more stages and get a look at these characters.
That's over twice the amount of characters and while a few of them were merely palette swaps of other characters with a few changes it was still impressive. It became the definitive game of the console and Smash became one of the prestige series in all of gaming.
Fans couldn't wait to see what would happen next so when this dropped at E3 2006...
...fans were no longer making fun of buying a Nintendo Wii. The lead up to Brawl was incredibly exciting with Sakurai's team constantly posting daily updates on their website with some huge reveals. The biggest of all was after years of anticipation, Sonic The Hedgehog was going to make his way over into Smash. On top of that you had an entire story mode where characters teamed up and played through a beat-em up like campaign, assist trophies where you could summon up famous characters, online mode, stage builder, demos of most characters in the game, smash moves that worked as final moves among others.
When the game was released players had access to a roster of:
The game came out to a ton of fanfare...but then it evaporated really quickly. The game had been notoriously slowed down and a few exploits that had actually improved Melee were removed and instead they added mechanics that prevented players from being too dominant. The competitive scene was also dominated by Meta Knight to the point where they had to ban the character out-right for being too broken and the whole thing was disappointing. It was a great game, but not a great Smash game.
Fans went straight back to Melee and while a few mods like Other M were made to make it more like Melee fans would have to wait until the next Smash.
E3 2013 Nintendo would reveal the next entry for Smash.
The big change was that Smash would be released on both the home console Wii U and the 3DS handheld each with their own unique modes and features. I'd say the biggest legacy of the game was the character reveal trailers and how they really got fans excited for upcoming characters.
And of course...
The game cut a couple of features out from Brawl - the expansive story campaign was cut but it still largely had the same features as before. The big gimmick of the game was the inclusion of amiibos, little figuries you'd scan into the game that you could help train and take part in certain modes. They also had a create-a-character mode in the form of Mii's who you could dress up and give custom moves to.
Then at 2018 E3 awards, they would unveil Smash Ultimate which was kind of like a 4.5 edition. The game included new and returning characters as well as stages. The game also had a new campaign mode that was built like a board game where you'd go through various worlds, unlock fighters and collect 'spirits' which would give your character special properties based off the character that was represented.
They were similar to trophies but with more utility.
Smash Ultimate was the definitive Smash experience and while Smash 4 was well received by the competitive scene, I think Ultimate may have usurped Melee (I'm not that familiar beyond watching those aforementioned docos).
Again the character reveals helped build a tremendous hype and when the game was first released players had a roster of:
The biggest reveals at the time were Ridley and King K Rool who had been requested for years since a lot of series had both the protaganist and antagonist of their respective series. Solid Snake, Ice Climbers and Pokemon Trainers were also welcome returning characters while Pichu the babyform of Pikachu was most certainly not.
And then with the first DLC pack they got
Second DLC they got...
That final character turned out to be...
Sora from Kingdom Hearts aka the Square-Enix/Disney cross-over game. Conspicuous by their absence was Donald and Goofy...
Oh and the Piranha Plant was also a DLC character you got as an early adopter...of course my code expired and I had to pay for him as well.
...but what is Smash?
A party fighter made up of video game characters where the object is to smash them off the stage. Either you have to dwindle the amount of lives they have or get the most amount of eliminations/least amount of deaths before the time expires.
And yes...there's a stack of Fire Emblem and Pokemon characters in the game.
