Ladies and gentlemen, the wait is finally over.

Last Saturday was quite possibly the longest day of my life. I woke up, ate some Cookie Crisp, and then drove out to the GameStore nearest to my university and waited. I knew they already had copies just waiting in the back room. I could feel them. Still, I had no choice but to sit in the coffee shop next door and endure the agonizing hours before the release of a game that I’ve been anticipating for a good 7 years now. I even threw down a few bucks to get that new God of War on PSP to make the wait seem more bearable. It helped, but I was still looking at my watch ever half-hour, wondering how those 30 minutes hadn’t been several hours.

Of course, I’m talking about Super Smash Bros. Brawl. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s that game where Nintendo mascots hit each other until someone falls off the stage. Sonic and Snake are in it, too. It’s a simple concept that has more depth than it lets on and I have to say, I’m pretty darn impressed.

I don’t even know where to begin this review, to be honest. Sakurai and the guys at Sora have packed so much content onto that dual-layered DVD that it would literally take a novel’s worth of writing to talk about everything. I guess I’ll just try to be as concise as possible.

Let’s begin with the most obvious aspect of this (and any) game: graphics. While the Wii is obviously the weakest of the three current-gen consoles in this department, we’ve still seen some gorgeous games on Nintendo’s little white box like Metroid Prime 3 and Mario Galaxy. In short, Brawl is definitely in the top bracket of awesome-looking Wii titles, but it’s not quite as smooth and polished looking as those two games I just mentioned. Polygons are easy to see on a lot of the Pokemon and assist trophies and even a few stages. I assume that not everything was given the same loving detail as the playable characters’ models so that there wouldn’t be any slowdown. Ok, for that, I can deal with a few jaggies here and there. Luckily this plan seemed to work just fine, since I haven’t noticed even the smallest of hiccups in offline play, even when pokeballs, assist trophies, and final smashes were all going off at the same time. Besides, who’s going to really notice little things like low-poly models in the heat of battle?

That’s really my only complaint, though. Everything else in the game was so pretty it made me go catatonic, unable to focus on anything except how excellent everything looked. It’s an even more impressive feat when you consider exactly how varied everything is. It’s amazing that a cartoony character like Luigi can still look good in the dim, gray lighting of Shadow Moses Island. Places like Yoshi’s Island and WarioWare look like they were ripped straight from their respective games, too. The characters themselves all look very smooth and well-drawn with high resolution texturing and are animated perfectly; i.e. Mario does his classic jump, Snake sneaks around, and Sonic’s feet become a blur when he’s at top speed. Obviously, these guys did their homework and the fans should be pleased with the result. Of course, there are plenty of neat lighting and particle effects peppered throughout the game to enjoy, too. In short, Brawl is so pretty that if it were a woman I would have no choice but to use my masculine wiles to lure her into bed.

While Brawl’s graphics obviously deserve high praise, the sound direction deserves even higher. Brawl has almost every song you can imagine from Nintendo’s history somewhere in its soundtrack; sometimes it’s remixed, sometimes it’s not. The main theme that was created specifically for Brawl is nothing short of epic. Heck, the entire flippin’ soundtrack from Melee is on the disk, too! The ability to change the frequency that certain songs will play on different levels is a truly awesome edition, since now I can set it so that the Emerald Hill Zone music from Sonic 2 will always play on Green Hill Zone, which is Sonic’s stage. The only gripe I can even think of is that some of the music might be a little too slow for a fighting game (pretty much everything from Pikmin comes to mind) but really, it’s hard to complain about when there’s so much else coming out of your speakers.

Speaking of which, sound effects are superb. I smiled when I first found out that Mario’s little “sproing” sound he made when he jumped in the old 2D games was making a return. Sonic’s jump does the same kind of thing, too. Grunts and other sound effects all suit their characters nicely… which should be the case, since they managed to nab a majority of the original voice actors for each character. The only real oddities in my opinion are Fox and Falco, who now have American voice actors. I got so used to Fox’s “mishon comprete!” voice from Melee that having him speak in plain, clear English was kind of strange. Falco now has what I believe to be the voice actor that plays Raphael from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so that’s just bizarre in its own right.

Of course, the Smash series has never necessarily focused on graphics or sound. It’s always been about gameplay, and Brawl has that in spades. There’s so much to do that at first it seems a little overwhelming. The classic multiplayer element is still completely intact. In fact, it’s been improved upon with more options than ever before. Want to play a stamina match? Well now you can, and this time you can even adjust the amount of HP you’re given. How about a match with bunny hoods on at all times? or how about we set the items to only ever drop assist trophies? Plus there are the obvious additions of more levels and characters (40+ levels, 30+ characters) that mean that it’ll take over nine-thousand hours to exhaust the possibilities in the multiplayer mode.

Naturally, the guys at Sora weren’t content with just having an awesome party game. There needed to be more. That’s where the SubSpace Emissary comes in. This is basically an adventure mode that’s very reminiscent of the old Kirby games (which makes sense considering Kirby is also Sakurai’s brain child) and has plenty of little baddies to kill and rooms to explore. The story is… well, confusing. I’ve been trying to make sense of it since I beat it, and from what I understand the premise of it is that the bad guys have trophy guns and are trying to steal the good guys by turning them into trophies. I don’t think the story’s too important, though, since the whole affair is essentially just a big fan service anyway. It’s just meant to be cool, nothing more. I doubt many people will play through SSE more than once, only really going back to make sure they’ve unlocked everything.

Besides SSE, there are plenty of other things for a solo smasher to do. The event mode has 40 or so events to complete on 3 different difficulties, classic mode has 5 difficulties and sends players through a gauntlet to defeat about 12 different matches or target tests, all culminating in a battle against the Master Hand. If that’s not enough for you, there are also countless trophies and stickers to collect, too.

In short, Super Smash Bros. Brawl is going to be played for years to come. For me, this’ll be the game that’s going to be nestled within the disk drive of my Wii the most. So… yeah. Stop reading this and just go buy it. Jeez.