I guess even Wii-fans are too frustrated to simply laugh this one off, what a shame, I thought at least the "winners" could be more relaxed.

The characters are like the icing on the cake. The "ZOMG EVERY CHARACTER EVER!" worked on me when Super Mario Kart came out on the SNES when I was 9. It hasn't worked since. I keep coming back for the gameplay.

After Brawl, I'm seriously going to buy anything Sakurai touches, no matter who's in it. If he somehow makes a 360 or PS3 game, then I'm going to buy it for a friend with one of those, and play it at their house.

The typical parry for this criticism has been that the person just isn't good at the game. "You don't understand the game because you suck at it." This is ( If you are the intended audience for whom the game has been balanced, then you would not suck at it.

No, the schism between liking and disliking Brawl isn't based on skill but aesthetics. In short, Brawl, like its predecessors, is a game that panders and basely titillates the players (add coma) who (change to "that") greedily drink in every absurd frame of animation and all of the go-for-broke explosions and special effects. Brawl, more so than any previous Smash game(add coma) is a fantasia of pure whimsy (add coma) disconnected from any (add coma) deeper meaning.

---> Why all the complicated words? This shouldn't be Shakespeare. It's hard to understand anything. It turns reading into a chore. Now I understand the words, but it wasn't work having to take out the dictionary every five seconds.

As for the animation lag, if there was no lag, one could pull off too many combos, and kick your ass instantly, and that would further ruin the fun.

Fuzzmosis said: I only read part. Complaint 1: Frame input. So, his complaint is he hits A 4 times and wants 4 reactions. That happens in brawl as much as it does other fighting game. It's called weak attacks. When complaining about in comparison to other fighting games, this is pants on head retarded. When he argues the fun portion, seeing as that applies to every single video game since Pong, what the fuck kind of argument is that? This seems like a 17 year old freshman talking for the first time in Philosophy class, smug look on his face as he rattles off psuedo intellectualism a 6 year old could find holes in. Oddly, Leo-J did not. (Welcome back leo)

Your post is the best for me. Maybe it is because I had to deal with these kind of people every week during University days. If someone can not get to the point in single paragraph them fuck it. There is nothing that pisses me off more in a game reviewer trying to prove something - like his vast vocabulary or that he was did graduate in journalism. Pseudo-intelectuals hate objectivism, for them its like the words itself are magical they have some kind of secret harmony. So by saying that "game X can stablish a perennial semi concordance between the intrinsic contradictions of the human nature" he sounds really smart.

I think ZenfoldorVGI has nailed the "house of cards reinforced by piles of bullshit" nature of the OP overall, and several individuals have pointed out the ridiculous and wrong nature of key specific assertions.

Notably, Grey Acumen gave a positive refutation of the "SSBB style sux vs. traditional fighters" argument (showing SSBB's depth-in-simplicity), while Renar (among others) gave a negative refutation of the same (showing that the OP was wrong to equate complexity with depth).

Now, a refutation or two of my own:

Onyxmeth said: It's hard to imagine anyone toting this fighting game as their favorite ever if Nintendo mascots weren't your playable characters. Without a shadow of a doubt, this would have been a nice bottom feeder fighter like Power Stone and would have been forgotten quickly. This is a game built off the strength of it's cast as opposed to the strength of it's gameplay. I'm not saying the game plays bad at all, because on the contrary I find it very fun the short amount of time I've played this series. It's just that, there's a reason no one cares about Power Stone and Small Arms but eat up Smash Bros. and Jump Superstars, and it ain't the gameplay.

Hm, BenKenobi88 has already taken his shot while I was working on this, I see, but I think I'll still take a run at it.

I think that what you misunderstand here is that the strength of the cast is not just that they are stars of beloved games but that they are individualized fighters, each with very distinctive styles, personalities, characteristics, etc.  There is so much moaning when there are a few characters out of DOZENS which are not radically different from all the others.  The forgettable games you mention -- well, I'm not familiar with them, but I would wager that they do not have any such remarkably individualized fighters.  And even more importantly...

Onyxmeth said: If you slap the cast of Square Enix against the gameplay of Ehrgeiz, i'll put good money that a lot of people will claim it legendary, regardless of the awfully designed engine powering the game. I've noticed many people on this site proclaim that they don't like fighting games but love Smash Bros. and consider it one of the greatest games ever. They are the people he is speaking about in his article. It's hard to like a game in a given genre and not like the genre it was built from, unless your reasons for it have nothing to do with the the gameplay.

On the contrary, the gameplay of the Super Smash Bros. games is a vital part of its success.  Seriously, I should NOT have to explain this.  It's a well-known fact that the SSB games have practically created a whole new fighting game genre unto themselves.  The entire OP article is based on the OP author being unable to deal with the massive success of the SSB series as opposed to the traditional fighters and their combo-memorization-based gameplay.  I'm sure that many people buy SSB games due to the fanservice and Nintendo name, but if they truly didn't like the gameplay they wouldn't play the game for very long now would they?  And yet used copies of SSBM fly out of stores as soon as they come in.  If it was truly the power of the Nintendo brand duping these people into buying SSB games in a genre they hate then we would fully expect Melee to be clotting these places like Madden games.

Woot I was right finally some negative article

IGN are so totally crap. I hope that Michael Thomson person gets knifed.

Lafiel said: I guess even Wii-fans are too frustrated to simply laugh this one off, what a shame, I thought at least the "winners" could be more relaxed.

Actually, I have no problems with someone bashing or picking apart Smash Bros Brawl. What I take issues with are glaring innacuracies in what are supposed to be observations, but are merely blindly hypothesized erroneous postulates about what makes a game enjoyable. I do this both for a game that is being bashed or praised, and whether the game is popular or not. I don't see why I should give this vomit of falsities a pass simply because I and everyone else alive knows that he's wrong.

If anything, there are actually two purposes that I am aiming for in my response:

1) that eventually, however unlikely it is, the guy who wrote that article will come across my post and rgoes "wow, I totally get it now" obviously that last part is even more unlikely than him finding my response to begin with, but if you never put out the true information to be found, then all people are left with is the false information.

2) this is also a mental test for myself. Many people go through life going "well, I like this, and I hate that, because the first thing is good and teh other thing is bad" and that's teh furthest their mental exploration over teh issue goes. They never try to understand their own reasoning and it is this type of reasoning that results in bigotry and an easily influenced general populace.

By refuting the claims the articel writer makes, it allows us to clarify the reasons why we enjoy the game ourselves. In many ways that understanding of why we like the game helps us find and identify other good games and filter out games that we might initially think are similar, but end up lacking a critical piece that makes it enjoyable. Understanding why we enjoy a game also allows us to enjoy that game even more completely. 

Is it me or is IGN completely biased against anything Nintendo-related?

The sum up this article in one sentence would be: For games to appeal to the masses games has a more "dumb down" feel to them. I find this true with even many PC games. As I get older I'm realize more and more games are no long aimed toward those like me who been a long time PC gamer. Even the Total war series seems to get a little more "dumb down" as the series continues. Thankfully for many pc games there are mods.

I still find more complex and hardcore games on the first PS than any other console. It's sadden me for example that games like Vagrant Story was too much for most gamers to handle so there wouldn't be another one to follow.