“Show me your moves!”
It has now been more than a week since the release of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and I still haven’t played the game. While everyone else posts gameplay videos and combo tips, I’ve had to keep myself occupied while I wait for Christmas to roll around. And I’ve kept myself occupied by going back to the older games; namely, Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
Brawl was not my first Smash Bros. game, despite me not having a GameCube growing up. Actually, Melee was my first Smash Bros. game, and I bought it entirely on a whim after seeing a crumpled-up, years-old ad in the reused game case of an ancient copy of Luigi’s Mansion. Right next to an ad for Nintendo Power, no less.
Some of you may remember this, some may not, but the Wii could actually play both Wii games and GameCube games, a feature which I used to experience Luigi’s Mansion, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Smash Bros. Melee, in that order. And while I was a big fan of Melee, I never played it nearly as much as I played Brawl, which came out only a year or so after I first heard of the Super Smash Bros. franchise.
I remember the months leading up to Brawl’s release that I was talking to someone in the school cafeteria. Mind you, I was probably ten at the time, so everything was believable to me. They mentioned that Brawl might be slated for an ESRB rating of “M,” supposedly due to the inclusion of Zero Suit Samus and her boobs, which at that time might as well have been separate characters.
Of course, Brawl ended up being rated “T,” and my parents let me get it once I had saved up enough money. I got the game home, booted it up, and the rest, I suppose, is history. My friends and I sunk more time into that game than just about any other on the Wii. I still remember, quite vividly, playing it at my cousin’s house and having him beat my ass at the game for hours on end.
I love Brawl, but I haven’t played it for years now, since my Wii eventually stopped reading the disk and I sold the game because it no longer worked. So my memories of the game are perhaps a bit more rose-tinted than I care to admit, but the part of the game that I really remember the most is the story mode, Subspace Emissary.
Regardless of how you feel about the Wii remote controls, the odd cast of characters, the introduction of Final Smashes, or Fox’s voice actor, there’s no denying that the inclusion of Subspace Emissary is the biggest difference between Brawl and its predecessors, and even its descendants. Sure, Smash Ultimate has World of Light, but it doesn’t have the hour of fanservice cutscenes that Brawl was gifted with.
And that’s what I remember most about Brawl; those cutscenes. I thought Subspace Emissary was the coolest thing in the world because I got to play what was basically a Nintendo highlights movie. Mario and Link team up to fight Bowser and Ganondorf? Hell yeah, I want in. Samus and Pikachu have to escape a secret base? Gimme that controller. Solid Snake and Lucario fight against a cosmic embodiment of societal limitations? Wait a minute, what?
I rewatched the entirety of Subspace Emissary’s cutscenes during some of my workout routines recently, and I have to say that I definitely selectively remembered the good parts. I remember that bizarre fight between Diddy Kong and Rayquaza, and I thought it was great. I remember that battle between Lucas and Master Porky, even though I didn’t know who either of them were at the time. What I didn’t remember was the existential dread embedded within the overall story. And boy was there a lot of it.
The gist of the story is that some flying robot thing is dropping these weird blackhole bombs all around the (apparently shared) world that Nintendo characters reside in while the big bads from Mario, Zelda, and Kirby turn their enemies into decorative trophies. Then there’s something about an alternate dimension and a grand betrayal and some god-figure. Reviewing the story now, it reads like fanfiction I would have written when the game first came out. It’s a bit like handing a stack of Amiibos to my little cousin and asking him to reenact the second World War. Because, much like the second World War, Subspace Emissary is full of ideological suicide.
This was the part that tripped me up the most watching these scenes now. Throughout the story, it’s shown that in order to set up the bombs, some robots (or ROBs, as they’re called) have to manually open them. But these robots aren’t fast enough to get out of the way before the bomb explodes, so they accept their fate and die. Sure, you could argue that they’re just dumb robots and don’t have a consciousness or free will, but later on in the story we learn that yes, they do, because Ganondorf takes away their free will when they start to disobey him. So these robots are willingly choosing to carry out their mission, even if it means their own destruction. Especially if it means their own destruction. That’s got some heavy fucking emotional and cultural baggage.
Maybe there’s something in there about Kamikaze pilots and the useless suffering of war, since Nintendo is a Japanese company, after all. Maybe it’s channeling the collective human trauma of civilian bombing to provide emotional tension. Maybe it’s a commentary on blindly following orders or being so devoted to something without ever thinking how it might be detrimental to your health, a theme that’s pretty common in the video games industry. Or maybe sacrifice, heroic or not, is just a plot device that keeps showing up in the story.
There’s a lot that can be said about suicidal devotion to a goal, and the sacrifice that comes with it. Do the ends justify the means? Is the destruction an ends in itself? Is any goal, no matter how supposedly noble, ever worth the death and suffering of human beings? What value do you place on your own life when compared to others? What will you do to carry out what you believe is right? These are all questions that Subspace Emissary made me think about. And I thought for all of thirty seconds before the game threw in another character and added some nonsense deus ex machina that shifted my attention somewhere else.
Between every scene of heartfelt tension or genuine excitement, it feels like there are two scenes that Nintendo threw in so they could include every character. Which, in an ensemble fighting game aimed at children, is justified. But from a story perspective, it turns it into a ramshackle mess that just serves to shepherd the player from battleground to battleground. There’s a story with some themes, sure, but it doesn’t make any sense or come to any thoughtful conclusion. Story threads and characters show up, fight for thirty seconds, and then fall to the side, never to be seen again. And there are so many unanswered questions, too. How did the Game and Watch guys get the Halberd? Why do those Dedede pins un-trophy them? Did Dedede know this was going to happen? And why am I putting so much analysis into a throwaway story mode from ten years ago?
Looking back now, I understand why people were so critical of Subspace Emissary. If I played it right now, as a twenty-year old man-child, I don’t know if I would enjoy it nearly as much as I did back in the day. Of course, I don’t think I’ll ever actually have the chance to play it again, since I can’t find a copy of Brawl anywhere, but maybe that’s for the best. Because the emotions I felt at the time I first played it were real. I remember blazing through that storyline and feeling awesome. I was heartbroken when characters were killed off, and shocked at the twist behind Master Hand. I loved watching my favorite characters team up for an over-the-top, epic battle of good versus evil. I was also ten, and easily impressionable.
Subspace Emissary has not aged well, and I felt deeply ashamed to be watching it on a treadmill in my University’s gym. And yet, as I watched it, some emotions would still flare up. Every so often I’d feel that childlike sense of wonder that one gets from crafting stories with favorite characters, and my heart would leap for a chance to tell a new story about how Bowser Jr. and Olimar finally defeated the evil Giga-Pikachu, or something else inane like that. It was a bit like rediscovering an old, half-remembered toy from my childhood. Sure, the reality was very different than what I recalled, and very much a product of its time and place, but hot damn was it fun back then. And maybe, just a little bit, it’s still fun today.
That subspace emissary stuff is kinda crazy. Makes me wonder if I should maybe have paid more attention when you were playing that game!!!