Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii, 2008)

There are video games that try to make you cry. There are games that gross you out. There are games that tell a sweeping story. There are games that make you think seriously about the world around you.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which was released by Nintendo this week, is none of those. Brawl is about one thing: simple fun. And that’s good enough. In fact, it’s so good that Brawl will almost surely be one of the top-selling games of 2008 and may become the best-selling game yet for Nintendo’s popular Wii console.

It is certainly the most anticipated game released this year (at least until Grand Theft Auto IV comes out next month, but G.T.A. is aimed at an entirely different audience). Thousands of fans, disappointed after the game missed its original release date in December, have flocked to advance tournaments and demonstrations in recent months. Last Sunday, GameStop, the major game retailer, held Brawl tournaments at thousands of its stores. (The regional finals are this weekend, with the national finals next month in San Jose, Calif.)

In some ways, Brawl is a throwback, a gamer’s game. The successor to the original 1999 Super Smash Bros. and 2001’s Super Smash Bros. Melee (which has sold more than seven million copies for Nintendo’s GameCube), Brawl is all about jumping, spinning and unleashing various attacks to knock your opponent — whether human- or machine-controlled — off the screen.

The secret sauce in the Smash Bros. formula has always been its diverse range of characters taken from other game franchises. Even companies outside Nintendo have seen the value of licensing their famous characters to the Brawl series. If you like console games, Brawl is like having Luke Skywalker, James Bond and Indiana Jones all in one (impossibly improbable) movie.

Brawl’s roster reads like a Who’s Who of Japanese console stars. It includes Mario, Princess Peach, Zelda, Link, Donkey Kong, Pikachu (from the Pokémon series) and Samus Aran (Metroid). Perhaps most interesting, it also includes major characters from outside Nintendo, like Sonic the Hedgehog (from Sega) and Solid Snake (from Konami’s Metal Gear series).

In their own games, these characters are central and often engaged in deep stories. In Brawl, they are reduced to slightly different packages of teenager-friendly combat moves. It’s a bit like seeing Gandalf as a sword-and-staff-swinging melee machine (as he has been in some Lord of the Rings action games) rather than as the driver of a sweeping plotline.

But on its own terms, as a relatively easy-to-play fighting game that is ultimately no more gory or violent than Saturday morning cartoons, as a game with no larger point than trash-talking friends or relatives on the couch as you bop their character off the next ledge, it’s great. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Overall Rating: I give it a 9 out of 10