The Basics

Super Smash Bros. Brawl, like previous games in the Smash series, is all about fighting. It fits most neatly into the fighting genre of games, but unlike most games in the genre, such as Street Fighter or Soul Calibur, it's very free-form. Perhaps the biggest change is that characters don't automatically die after taking a set amount of damage; rather, the goal is to knock your opponents off the screen.

Finishing An Opponent Off

In order to defeat your opponents, you'll need to knock them off one side of the screen. You can finish off an opponent by knocking them upwards off the top, off of either side, or off the bottom of the screen. Getting them off the screen can be difficult, however (assuming they don't accidentally fall into a pit or something themselves). Enemies are heavy and resistant to damage. You can knock your enemies around more by using smash attacks. (See the General Moves chapter for more details.) Some enemies are heavier than others, however, and will be even harder to knock around. Luckily for you, there's a little gadget called the damage meter that will help you out…

Knocking your opponents far enough offscreen will result in them being KOed.

The Damage Meter

The damage meter in Brawl indicates how much damage your character has taken. It might confuse you if you've never played a Super Smash Bros. game, but this meter can exceed 100%, sometimes by a large amount. The damage meter doesn't measure how much life your character has remaining, though. Instead, it determines how far your opponent will fly when you knock him backwards with a powerful attack.

The higher your foe's damage meter gets, the farther they'll fly. As it gets past 100%, you should start looking for a knockout blow with one of your smash attacks. The damage meter can go awfully high before the round ends, and you can even damage some opponents up to the point where their meter is 250% or more without finishing them off. This is only possible if you use a succession of weak, normal attacks, though; at around 150% damage, almost any smash attack will finish off your foe, or at least knock them so far off the screen that they can't recover.

Using Items

One of the unique aspects of Smash Bros. are the items. In most game modes, you'll constantly be running across items that fall from the sky. These items range from the relatively innocuous, like food items that restore small amounts of health, to the very powerful, such as the home-run bat that can often instantly KO an enemy, even if they're at full health.

In most high-level competitive versus games, items are turned off; they're too random and create something of an uneven playing field. However, in Classic or Adventure mode, you're going to need to get used to the items in the game and use them to full effect. Items will often simply drop from the sky in most of the game modes, although they can also be knocked away from an opposing player. If you want to nab an item, stand on top of it and press your attack button; that'll pick it up. If an item can be held and used, the regular attack button will often be what you use to activate it. So, if you pick up a gun, press the attack button to fire it, or if you have a fire flower, hold down the attack button to shoot flames with it. Some items, like bombs, are meant to be thrown at your foes; this will also be done with the normal attack button.

Each item will have different effects, so you'll need to experiment a bit with each one to figure out what it does. (The training mode in the Solo menu can help, as it will let you spawn any item you wish at any time.) If you have an item that you don't want (such as a gun that's run out of ammo), you can always drop it by pressing the Grab button on your controller. Alternately, if your foe is in front of you, you can attempt to throw the item by moving your movement stick towards them and tapping the Grab button. (Again, if it's an object that's meant to be thrown anyway, like a bomb, the attack button will also throw the item.) This will send the item rocketing towards your foe, causing a bit of damage if it hits.

Pick a Character and Stick To It

One piece of general advice is to try and pick a character and stick with it as you start playing Brawl. Although some characters play fairly similarly (such as Ness and Lucas or Ike and Marth), most of the characters in Brawl will have very different styles of play. Some will be big and slow and powerful, while others will be light, quick, and stylish, while others will be a happy medium between the two extremes.

Bringing a character out for a full-on brawl will be the best way to get your sea legs under you.

The thing to keep in mind here, as a new player of Brawl, is that it's easy to get overwhelmed by the number of characters in the game, especially if you dip into multiple characters one after another. Each one will have different moves and different timings that you'll need to get used to. Although the basic moveset is similar for every character, you can never be too sure what the buttons you're pressing will do, especially when it comes to attacks. Thus, if you're just starting out, you'll want to probably try a few of your favorite characters out, pick the one that feels the best to you, then concentrate on mastering that character (or at least getting pretty good at it) before moving on to the next one.

Previous PageNext: General Moves »