Cruise Elroy

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is not about the gameplay.

If we were unlocking original music instead of nostalgic theme songs, collecting Xbox-style achievements instead of character trophies, and playing with a generic roster instead of with Nintendo’s characters, Brawl wouldn’t be getting half the praise that it is. It’s fun, but that’s not what’s driving its runaway success.

So what is? Well, if there’s a subtext to the Super Smash Bros. series, it’s Nintendo’s assertion of its dominance. The mob of familiar characters and stages reminds us of their successes; these are the guys who have published four of the top ten bestselling franchises, and all ten of the top ten bestselling games. (If you combine the sales of all the franchises represented in Sega Superstars Tennis, they’re dwarfed by the Mario series alone.) Here is a company that, more than any other, defines the gaming industry. No one else is in a position to make games like Super Smash Bros., and Nintendo has taken great care to point that out — using a game that’s ultimately another refinement of a decade-old concept.

In other words, Brawl‘s most significant achievement is not as a game, but as a gaming museum.

The thoroughness of the collection features makes this abundantly clear. Not only can you unlock over five hundred trophies, but you can rotate and view them from any angle (with various lighting options), arrange them in 3D space in different scenes, read their descriptions, and take pictures with a free-floating camera. There are also the stickers you collect for the single-player game, featuring even more characters, and unlockable music featuring original, remixed, and re-orchestrated tunes. It’s a staggering amount of material, packed with more information than many actual museums. The gameplay may have received only moderate enhancements since the original, but the extra features have grown by leaps and bounds.

Masterpieces mode is the interactive portion of the exhibit, providing demos of the games from whence these characters came. The intention is obviously to drive additional Virtual Console sales, but I think they’re also trying to expose younger and more casual gamers to Nintendo’s history. After all, the generation of gamers below mine did not grow up with the 8- and 16-bit systems, and the Wii and DS have expanded the audience with titles like Wii Sports and Nintendogs (both of which appear in Brawl, incidentally). It’s vital that Nintendo drum up interest in their core franchises to ensure their continued success.

As it is, though, the Masterpieces demos are laughably inadequate — you can’t distill Ocarina of Time into five minutes, or get a feel for Ice Climber in forty seconds — so perhaps they’re more of a symbolic inclusion than anything else. Still, the game demos, combined with the collectible trophies, stickers, and songs, all help play up the nostalgia-fest. Brawl is a resounding success on its own, but the reinforcement and perpetuation of Nintendo’s franchises could be even more valuable in the long run.

Notably absent from Masterpieces mode are Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem and EarthBound, both of which are featured in the Japanese version of Brawl. Fire Emblem, formerly a Japan-only RPG series, made it to the West in 2003 after two of its characters were featured in Super Smash Bros. Melee on the GameCube. Since then, all games in the series have seen American and PAL releases. Mystery of the Emblem was an earlier SNES release, though, and was never translated into English.

The absence of EarthBound (Mother 2 in Japan) is harder to explain. Main character Ness has been in the Super Smash Bros. series since the beginning, and Lucas, the main character from EarthBound’s Japan-only sequel, is featured in Brawl. EarthBound sold poorly as a SNES title 1995, but it has since gained a rabid following and has even garnered some retrospective critical acclaim. (IGN readers placed it 33rd in a list of the top 100 games ever, above even Super Mario World.) The Virtual Console would have been a risk-free way to give EarthBound another shot in the post-Smash Bros. era and test the demand for a potential US release of Mother 3. There’s certainly at least some demand for it — perhaps enough to collect the series on a DS cartridge — but Nintendo seems to have missed the opportunity.

What does all of this mean? Brawl is a success on several levels. It drenches long-time gamers in waves of nostalgia, it reinforces Nintendo as the preeminent creator of intellectual property, it exposes new gamers to the company’s history, and it’s a fun game to boot. The logical next step for Nintendo is to leverage Brawl’s success for its other franchises, as they did with the Fire Emblem series. If Nintendo announced a new Kid Icarus game tomorrow, they’d be able to generate hype for a series that’s been dormant for over fifteen years. There is incredible potential here, and it’ll be fun to see what Nintendo can do with it.

The real story that Super Smash Bros. Brawl tells isn’t the Subspace Emissary. It’s the story — and history — of Nintendo.