Review: Super Smash Bros. for Wii U

Let’s face it: you don’t need me to tell you to buy Super Smash Bros. (for Wii U).

Maybe you’re one of the many who bought Super Smash Bros. (for Nintendo 3DS) and you’ve decided you want the big-boy version. Maybe you just love Smash Bros. as a franchise. Maybe you want something to play on your Wii U. Maybe you want to try out the amiibos. There are twenty or so more scenarios I could paint here, but they all end in you buying Smash Bros.

Besides, you’ve probably already bought the damn game, haven’t you?

Of course you have.

Super Smash Bros. is best played with a group of friends. Con two of your mates into phoning Nintendo Australia and buying a GameCube adapter each. Hope that between you and your friends, you’ve got between 2-8 GameCube controllers.

Don’t be stupid like me and throw out the receiver for your shiny, awesome Wavebird wireless controller. Your friends will call you a moron like mine did. And rightly so.

Get some beers, grab some snacks, and then watch as twelve hours pass in the blink of an eye while you’re all piled on a single couch. Seriously. That happened, and I practically lost every single game the group of 5 of us played. I didn’t care. I was having a blast.

With Smash, it’s not about the characters you can play as, or the modes you can play in. Rather, it’s about wrapping yourself up in that warm blanket of old-school, couch-based, Nintendo-of-old. With 8-player, human-controlled games, things are chaotic, but they’re ridiculously fun. It’s all glorious. So glorious, in fact, that I’d almost call Super Smash Bros. perfect. Except for two things.

One:

That’s just wrong. #SmashBros

A video posted by Steve Wright (@stevivor) on Nov 11, 2014 at 9:18pm PST

That may be how you deal with defeat, Shulk, but do that in private.

Non-perfect thing number two: those damn amiibos.

Don’t get me wrong: the Mario that I now have — sitting on my shelf with Spider-Man, the Guardians of the Galaxy and Nov — is downright adorable. He’s high-quality, regardless of some of those initial reports, but I don’t understand his real purpose apart from being a collectable.

In Smash, amiibos will act as independent characters, fighting alongside or against you. You don’t need to place Mario down on the base to play as him, like in Skylanders or Disney Infinity, because he’s already in the game’s roster. Duh. The difference between it-Mario and you-Mario is that the amiibo apparently learns as you play.

In twelve hours of gameplay, our Mario went from level 1 to his cap of level 50. He was unstoppable, but I don’t really feel like he learned how we all played and adjusted his playstyle accordingly. To me, he was a CPU-controlled character – and you can set those to play against in-game without an amiibo, it needs to be said – that progressively had his difficulty increased as the night went on.

All up, amiibos don’t really serve a purpose to me. I got an amiibo Mario in the mail, and had him levelled up to his cap in just under two hours. Nintendo clearly wants you to buy them all and grind them all up to ridiculous levels; to me, that’s just a cash grab. If you want to buy the suckers, please do, but understand they’re quite limited. I feel this is something that needs to be specifically pointed out because many I’ve spoken with of late are confused about how amiibos actually are used, not only in Super Smash Bros. but in titles like Mario Kart 8 and even Hyrule Warriors. Blame Nintendo, blame other similar brands like Skylanders for functioning in a different way; it doesn’t matter, really, but this confusion needs to come to an end.

If you know what Super Smash Bros. is, you don’t need to be sold on it. If you somehow have lived under a rock for a good long while, just have a go at it with mates. You’l be incredibly happy you did.

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U was reviewed using a promotional copy of the game on Wii U, alongside a Mario amiibo, both provided by the publisher. The reviewer himself provided the GameCube controllers and adapter, friends and a boatload of beers.