As I feared, the Wii U's slow adoption rate appears to be taking its toll on Nintendo, and it seems they're now rushing some of their big name games out the door in an effort to boost sales. Sakurai has announced that they're cutting the story mode from the upcoming Smash Bros game, citing that the cutscenes from Brawl were leaked to the Internet which ruined the element of surprise and sense of reward from that first-time playthrough. While this is their official statement, I think it's fairly obvious that we all know the real reason behind the omission, because the excuse given is pretty bad. Really, because the cutscenes were leaked to the Internet? Everything gets leaked to the Internet. Deal with it. I guess Hollywood should just pack its bags and find a new industry then, because obviously no one must be going to the movies anymore since it's all being leaked to the Internet, right? Oh wait.
 |
| Not swimming in money at all. |
To punish legitimate players like me who actually waited for the game to come out before viewing the cutscenes is just stupid, and even if I had seen them before, what good does it actually do to just cut the content entirely? It's not like viewing them online meant that I now had no incentive to play through the story mode, nor for that matter an incentive to play the game at all. If anything, I would have just been hyped more to see what kind of gameplay is in store for me between those cutscenes.
What this really comes down to is that now the new Smash Bros already feels like it's going to be a significant downgrade from the last game and my hype has dissipated for it. One of the biggest attractions for me with Brawl was that the series was now getting a proper fully-featured adventure mode as the Melee version had previously felt tacked-on and incomplete. The idea of being able to play through a large expansive world with all my favorite Nintendo characters was a very attractive concept to me, and I was looking forward to seeing how Nintendo was going to continue to expand upon it in this latest release, but now that interest has been evaporated. My biggest disappointment about this whole omission is that the series has historically always been adding and expanding upon its features with each new release; never taking away from them. The roster was always getting bigger, and the gameplay modes were always getting better. Sure there would sometimes be some small things here and there that wouldn't always carry over, but all of the bigger features of the franchise have always been taken and expanded upon in each iteration. Now for the first time this feels like it's not the case, and it's really killed my excitement for the game.
 |
| Look what you made Samus do, Sakurai. |
Perhaps I'm wrong though; maybe even though they're omitting a story mode, they intend to make up for it by expanding much more of the game's other features. I know they did mention that there's going to be character customization this time which has never been done before within the franchise, and it will not only affect appearance but performance as well, and that will be interesting to see, but so far that feature by itself is not nearly enough to make up for all the content we're going to be losing out on from having a story mode instead. I know a lot of fighting game enthusiasts don't really care for a story mode in their games, but for me personally, I've never been a big fan of the fighting genre outside of the Smash Bros games, and this is in part due to the feeling of there being a lack of content in most typical games of the genre. The single player modes often only feature the same content that you can access from versus mode; it just pits you against an AI and takes away your ability to customize the matches, which ends up leaving me feeling bored pretty quickly, and only able to play the games in short bursts. Features like Brawl's Subspace Emissary mode on the other hand add a lot more value to my purchase and allow me to absorb myself into the game for much longer periods of time.
I think it's fairly clear that the real reason behind Sakurai's decision is that they just want to rush out the Wii U's killer app, as it currently doesn't have one. Nonetheless, it's not doing right by their fanbase to be cutting corners like this. It's not our fault that they thought they could pass off another Mario Bros sidescroller as a must-have launch title for the system, and it's not going to make their situation any better by continuing to make lazy releases while the system is so desperately hurting for new adopters.
A few new characters and some shinier graphics aren't enough to cut it for me anymore, especially when most of the additions are so lackluster as it is. The WiiFit trainer? Animal Crossing villager? Seriously? Those can barely even be described as "characters". Where's Marina from Mischief Makers? Crono and Magus from Chrono Trigger? How about Krystal from Star Fox? I'm sure they could come up with a creative move set for her if she's equipped with the magic staff from Star Fox Adventures. There's still plenty of awesome characters that haven't been used yet in spite of Nintendo's lack of new iconic IPs as of late. Even as nice as it is to finally have Megaman, they're only using his older NES iteration instead of the more appropriate X variation which would have opened up options for them to bring Zero and Sigma into the cast of characters as well.
 |
| My reaction to this character announcement. |
The omission of the story mode harkens back to a longstanding issue with Nintendo in that while they're usually on the cutting edge of inventing crazy new gameplay mechanics, they have been very slow to catch up with the rest of the industry as far as narrative development goes. While western game studios have been creating deeper and richer stories, Nintendo ignores an opportunity to improve itself in this aspect almost every time. Mario is still stuck saving the princess, and Link is... still stuck saving the princess too. But the thing is, we know Nintendo is capable of doing better than that, as evidenced by examples like Metroid Fusion, which did an excellent job of providing quality gameplay coupled with a compelling story. And then you have examples like Super Mario RPG that--while it was produced by Square and not directly by Nintendo--it still shows that you can tell a more interesting story even with a character as absurd as the classic Italian plumber. There's no reason you can't have great gameplay while telling a good story too, and I'd really like to see Nintendo try to improve in this area.
As things currently stand, the latest addition to the Smash Bros series feels like it's only shaping up to be another Melee with an HD coat of paint and with not even as strong of a character roster to show for it. I don't know what Nintendo is thinking, but I hope they can get these bad decisions turned around very soon because now I doubt even the latest Smash Bros can entice me to pick up a Wii U at this point.
