The Super Smash Brother Series by Benito Rodriguez

Super Smash Bros is a well-known game, known for its action and fighting. The game series started in the famous Nintendo 64 in the year 1999(IGN Staff). The game started off as a little brawl and evolved in our community and all over the world. Now the fourth generation has been released as of October 3^rd for the 3DS, and on November 21^st the Wii U edition of the game came out. In this review I’m going to talk about the Super Smash Bros franchise from the 90’s to present time and the characters along with the developers and gameplay.

            The series originally started with 12 character,s 8 given from the start and 4 hidden characters consisting from all Nintendo originals. Super Smash Bros (SSMB) in its now modern era consists of over 50 characters in its newest title for the 3DS and Wii U. Characters from all over the Nintendo company get together to fight and brawl. Games that players would have never thought of seeing the light of day with other of its company’s brethren joined together, like for example Pokémon, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Star Fox, Kirby, Kid Icarus, Earth Bound, Fire Emblem and many more. It’s a brilliant collaboration that cannot be pulled off by just any set of characters because there has to be a fair line of characters therefore some are overpowered and uber and must be specially analyzed and tested so one cannot be in a whole different league than the others.

 SSMB for the Wii u and 3DS was worked on with other creators than just the Nintendo Company. They co-developed the game with Bandai Namco and Sora Ltd (Drake). The main developer was HAL Laboratory since 1988 when the first prototype of the game came into existence (Slider). The game was meant to be a Japan-only game with little advertisement, but the game became a huge, and it was decided to be brought over to the west and with success. HAL Laboratory has created all of the Smash Bros except for the latest one which was done by two other companies mentioned above.

Games like these are very competitive and bring out the fighting monster inside of everyone, including myself. I’ve personally been in a couple of competitions, and it has been intense so I can personally vouch for that. Big tournaments have been sponsored in the United States like at E3 in California within the San Francisco area. People all over the country gather around to see what all companies have to offer game wise and game console but some just go for the tournaments and one of the main tournaments was the Smash Bros and the entries went out in mere minutes. But you don’t need to go out of state to find a competition there are plenty in the area. You might have to scout, but nonetheless, the competition is never dull.

            As of the year 2014, there has been 4 SSMB games, meaning there are 4 generations. When the 1999 SSMB came out it was good but was lacking characters and stages (IGN Staff). Then in the next era of consoles the second Smash Bros was released on the Nintendo GameCube. Some would argue to be the best in the series to date. The 3^rd came out for the Nintendo Wii. People called it child’s play and claimed it was mediocre due to the unbalanced powers in the characters, but the final smashes made the game worthwhile to play, and its huge variety of characters. And the latest one in the series for the Wii U and 3DS blew people’s minds away on how beautiful the graphics are and the wide variety of characters from Pac-Man to the F-Zero series.

            They also have recently adapted new figurines called Amiibo that use NFC chips that send and transmit waves of information the figurine to the Nintendo consoles. At launch, there were 12 Amiibo figurines. These Amiibo figurines are special because you can customize their stats and their moves to your liking, which is the first time they tried to innovate and change the way of combat because of the stat changer. This changes the whole game because people won’t have the same repetitive characters with their default moves. I myself have tried this and I think this a step in the right direction and according Nintendo they could be used for future games as well (Schmidt).

            To wrap things up, I feel this game series is like a work of art. It gets a 99/100 in my book. No other game could be like this one in the slightest of way because this game is a sheer work of art and there is none like it so its unique to the Nintendo company that cannot be offered anywhere else.