Brawl is one of the best games I've ever played... Now, I say that with only certain circumstances i.e.  playing with friends. Me and my friends can brawl it out for hours. So much fun playing with others locally.

Playing it alone the game is a bore.

You see, these are the arguments that are constantly brought up, and their impact on the game is often exaggerated to such a spectacular degree, and people seem to like ignoring the fact that many of these problems actually have existed since the first game, yet no one brings them up regarding the first two installments. These games are so similar that to say one of them is mediocre or bad while the other is simply amazing is just incorrect. Not one of these Smash titles are great without the rest of them being great because their core gameplay is so compelling. Now on to the excuses for Brawl being bad...

Tripping and it's impact is probably the most exaggerated negative of the game. Not to mention it is an extremely poor excuse to pan the game at that. It is such an obscure occurrence, one that will not happen most matches, and will most likely not have any significant impact on the match that I do not know how people are still calling on this. It does not have some adverse effect on you that ruins your fun, it will at most be two seconds of an ugh moment, and that's it.

Online play isn't great. It's too difficult to play properly online for sure, and it is a real shame because the game could have had such a strong online community. However, online isn't so important that the game is ruined or brought down because of it's weak online support, playing Smash with friends with you is still the most popular way to play. Melee and 64 got by without online just fine, that feature is not make-or-break for Smash, it never has been and it never will be because of the way this game plays. I do agree though, that it would be nice to have a good online structure for Smash.

The game's tempo may feel a bit slow for you. Fair enough. This isn't really a negative though, as the physics changes were brought to deal with a number of issues many people had with Melee and 64, and allow the integration of new mechanics that would not work well at all with Melee's physics. The tempo decrease is also exaggerated, Melee isn't even much faster, but a number of mechanics, including hitstun, gravity and the way the games physics are easily exploited during play (with advanced techniques such as Wavedashing and L-Cancelling) simply give the illusion that its a million times faster since everybody must play in such a way to be good. Brawl is faster paced than Smash 64 by the way, that is a fact.

Balance. Smash has never been known for it's character balance, but I must say even this is exaggerated. All three games suffer from lock-downs, chaingrabs, absolute re-grabs, and death combo's. To single out Brawl for these things is simply unfair, as Melee and 64 are absolutely no better in this department. I'm starting to sound like a broken record now, but the Meta Knight scenario is once again, exaggerated. Melee actually had to be re-balanced for the PAL release, with multiple versions going on out to retail in US markets before it was even released in PAL territories, to fix numerous glitches, errors and complaints. Even after this, the game was still far from perfect, there are still lock-downs, chaingrabs and the like. Don't even get me started on Smash 64, competitive play consisted almost entirely of true death combo's, with the only two characters without such abilities, Link and Samus, being considered un viable for competitive play. 

I hear people constantly crying foul for Meta Knight and Snake, but just how badly do these characters impede your enjoyment from the game? I mean seriously. Do all the people you play with just use Meta Knight on you and nobody else? I find this hard to believe. If you don't even play the game at a competitive level then why does this bother you at all? A lot of ignorant haters like to tout these things because of what they've picked up online, but if you don't play the game on a serious competitive level it should not bother in the slightest.

All fighters have over-powered characters, so why is it only Brawl must be ragged on for something that has been plaguing fighting games since the dawn of time? And in case you were wondering, Meta Knight and Snake don't even dominate the tournament scene anywhere, especially the latter. Europe is infamous for having such a small number of Meta Knight and Snake players (the most common top tier characters here being Marth, Falco and Diddy Kong), while having an oddly large number of lower characters such as Peach, Ike and Yoshi. Japan players on the other hand have such a different and unique style of play that Meta Knight users rarely even win tournaments over there, they have players using characters like Sheik and Pit getting constant top placements. America is mostly notorious for having the large number of Meta Knight players, but not even their best MK has been taking away tournaments indefinitely.

If you ask me, these are all just reasons thought up to mask one thing and one thing alone: People don't like change. Especially in a fighting game, or any game played competitively for that matter. Never mind the reasons, if something is changed, it is automatically for the bad, and some people just have no intent to adapt, all they wan't is their old game back, just with more characters, because they think their game is perfect, when in reality, from years of playing they have subconsciously accepted all of the games flaws because they have played it so much. The same thing happened with Street Fighter in the transition to IV. Hell even Halo 3 got the same treatment, as do each iteration of Call of Duty. Even Mario Kart is treated this way. MARIO KART. The problems are very rarely the game, but the backward, closed-minded thinking of the people who play them, and their total inability to accept change.

Prices are kept high because of the excess demand for certain games (NSMBWii, MKWii, etc).  Nintendo has probably kept the wholesale price for those games the same, but retailers won't reduce their prices because they are continuing to sell.  Even if Nintendo sold those games to the retailers at half the current price, very little if any of that would be felt by consumers as the excess demand still exists for such games, therefore keeping prices at that level.  I utterly detest the free market,  but that's how it works.

Wow 10M?!?! that's awesome!! :D

I remember a long time ago, looking at it's sales at 8M and thinking it won't ever reach to 10M, glad I was wrong :p

I remember it being pretty close to SMG, what happened to it? I'll check...

It's at 9.17M - - - can it reach 10M too?? That'd be GREAT!

Nintendo also lowers the production of certain games to a point to where the supply is low enough to keep the price high. It has always been that way. They keep the prices high. It's in a thread around here, I'll look for it.

You'd think that the later in the generation a game is released, the more it will sell. It's not like that on the Wii or DS, or generally on long-legged consoles (as in, consoles that have games with long legs, not consoles that sell for a long time).

The reason for this is pretty much that the user habits of people are

Year 1 - Buy 4 games
Year 2 - Buy 3 games
Year 3 - Buy 2 games
Year 4  - Buy 1 game
Year 5 - Buy 0.5 games

This is an oversimplification, and I might even be quoting it slightly incorrectly. The Source is my source on this one.

Now, let's look at the Wii. (2007 is year 1). And yes, I'm aware that the software numbers for the years are a bit off, that's because I'm slightly misusing the data. The "Year 1" is from each person who buys it. I'm counting a person buying a Wii in November 2007 as having owned it a year by the start of 2008. That doesn't really mean anything for the main point of this, though.

Year 1 - 16 million buy 4 games = 64 million
Year 2 -  24 million buy 4 games 16 million buy 3 games = 144 million
Year 3 - 22 million buy 4 games 24 million buy 3 games 16 million buy 2 games = 192 million
Year 4 - 17 million buy 4 games 22 million buy 3 games 24 million buy 2 games 16 million buy one game = 198 million
Year 5 (Future, so a prediction) - 16 million buy 4 games 17 million buy 3 games 22 million buy 2 games 24 million buy one game 16 million buy half a game to one game = 190 million
Year 6 - 16 million buy 4 games 16 million buy 3 games 17 million buy 2 games 22 million buy one game 24 million buy half a game 16 million buy half a game = 188 million

You might wonder what the point of this is. The point is that the Wii software numbers are going to even out at roughly the levels they are now. We're not going to see the Wii sell more software next year.

The Wii has long legged games. This means that whichever games release in Year 5 are going to have to fight the games from year 3 and 4 for the sales.

In 2008, games had to fight against all of the newly released big-hitters of the year.

In 2009, the new games had to fight all of the newly released big-hitters of the year, but also Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii.

In 2010, they had to fight all of the newly released big-hitters of the year, but also Wii Fit Plus, Just Dance, Wii Sports Resort and Mario Kart Wii.

In 2011, they'll have to fight all of the newly released big-hitters of the year, but also Wii Fit Plus, Mario Kart Wii, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Just Dance 2, Donkey Kong Returns and Wii Sports Resort.

If you have 5 people fighting over 100 cakes, they'll each get 15-25 cakes. If you have 10 people fighting over 100 cakes, they'll each get 5-15 cakes. If you have 15 people fighting over 100 cakes, they'll each get 4-9 cakes. If you have 20 people fighting over 100 cakes, they'll each get 3-7 cakes.

That's  how the Wii is developing. Each year we'll see fewer and fewer mega hitters.

(PS: Some people have been upset that I sound so confident when I say stuff, like everything is the truth. It's just my expectations for the future, so apologies if I sound too much like I'm correct)

Oh, I see what you did there. By replacing Sony and Nintendo with some obscure 3rd parties, you avoided getting banned.

That was a slightly longer response than I expected, :P. I guess that makes sense, though I actually expect a lot of older titles (SMG, for example) to hit 10m -- generally, Wii users will only pay the substantial $50 for titles they know are gonna be good because of word of mouth, convincing advertisements and such. Eventually, around 2012 to keep Wii strong with the Bii onslaught, I expect, Nintendo's gonna cut the price of all their software. In that year, I believe, all the Wii users who should be buying only a quarter of a game for the year will be buying about 1 game. That's when I think that a lot of surprise 10m sellers will pop up since the older owners will try to get the titles they knew a little bit about, but weren't adventurous enough to fork out $50 for.

Also, the cake analogy connects with my initial hypothesis pretty well, actually. Rather than selling 20m as the 2007/8 titles did, they'll sell barely over 10m. I expect the newer titles to compete well enough with the older titles to sell a little over 10m, but they'll have much shorter legs because the giants will eat up the part of the base that's buying older titles. So if each year is a lake, there'll be just a couple of enormous old whales (NSMB, MK) having some of the food with a lot of small, new fish (titles released in the same year) eating food as well, but very few middle aged fish (titles released last year) from now on.

P.S. Why the heck do people get upset by your confidence, :P? When you're making a point, you're doing something wrong if you don't sound like you're sure, xD.

Thanks for making me feel stupid, ;P.