Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS (Part 3)

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

The modes that had seen their origin in single-player modes only were relegated to the "Games & More" section. That includes Classic, All-Stars (though that one has a multiplayer option this time around) and Stadium.

CLASSIC

Well, Pit? Wanna fight the Kong, the Pac, or the Falcon?

Giants, metal versions, team fights...
You can faace anything.

I tend to play this before anything else as it’s one of the quicker ways to unlock a few characters, so it’s usually my very first Smash go-to. In the 3DS entry of the series, Classic makes six stops for battles, and goes at it a very different way from previous SSB titles. instead of having a clear battle each time, you choose one of three different paths. Each path has a different color indicating its difficulty; blue for easy, green for medium, red for difficult, so you can choose the difficulty of each level by yourself. The tougher the path, the better the reward in goldor, along with possibly trophies, equipment, custom moves or extra goldor (the extra reward for each victorious battle is set at random before the fight, using a rolling table).

Speaking of difficulty, Classic modes up to Brawl had only 5 options: Very Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard. Things were switched up here, using instead an Intensity system very similar to the Fiend Cauldron from Kid Icarus: Uprising. The difficulty can be anywhere from 0.0 to 9.0, with 2.0 being the basic difficulty and the player having to pay to increase/decrease the difficulty, with even more having to be spent the closer to 9.0 you get (it costs 80 goldor to enter Intensity 3.0, but 2200 for 9.0!). I originally hated that idea because it meant you got few to no rewards half the time when you played the mode on easier difficulties, and the amount required for 9.0 felt ridiculous – then again, as I improved I realized the goldor rewards increased along to the difficulty, so playing through later difficulties would net enough goldor, fairly quickly, to take on 9.0 without much hassle.

It costs 350 to play 5.0?
Why does the price shoot up so bad to get to 9.0?

Another major difference: Previously, one could also select the number of stocks (lives) they had to go through the mode, from 1 to 5. Here? No such thing. Instead, you have two stocks on each battle. On one hand, it means that you are allowed one death per battle – on the other, it means that even if you become reasonably good at the game on later difficulties, you’ll still only have two stocks every fight, even against the final boss (whereas in past games, you could reasonably reach Master Hand with still five lives).

Now, take all of the little annoyances I described in Parts 1 and 2 regarding items and stages, and apply them here. Can’t turn any of that off in Classic, oh no! NPC fighter? Stage boss? Scrolling? One-hit-kill items? The dozens of bombs? Everything has the potential to ruin your day. Really makes you wish you had 5 lives.

Oh no, they're gonna team up.

When you make a boss that has 6 different forms, maybe it's
time to tone it down a little.

As for Master Hand, it’s the boss at the end of the mode, once again. Starting at Intensity 3.0, a second path opens on the way to the boss, with the possibility to fight both Master and Crazy Hand at once; they often use attacks that complement each other. Starting at 5.1, after enough damage has been dealt to both, one will disappear and Master Hand will reveal its true form: Master Core. It shifts through several forms; a pack of blades (from Intensity 5.1 onwards), a four-legged beast (6.0 onwards), and a giant (7.5 onwards), shifting from giant to beast to blades in succession after 7.5. However, the battle will always end, if you get there, with a fight against a shadow version of the fighter you’re using. Once it’s knocked out of the stage, the actual Core appears and has to also be knocked out in order to beat Master Core. A harmless sphere? It has a final move before going down, but it does nothing for 45 seconds so it’s easy to beat compared to everything that comes after.

Jesus, it's a damn good thing you win so much
stuff with this mode!

By the way, past Intensity 8.0, you can’t fight only Master Hand; you have to take the Master & Crazy Hand path that ends with Master Core. If you get a Game Over while playing through the mode, you can pay some goldor to restart, but the Intensity will go down by 0.5. Sorry, if you want to beat Classic 9.0, you have to do it in one go, and if you lose, you must start over or you’ll resume on 8.5. And pay the required entrance fee to play 9.0, every time. That’s a load of bull if you ask me.

In short, Smash 3DS’s Classic Mode is a good overhaul in order to be made simpler and shorter, and it has decent ideas, but it can be extremely annoying at times, much more so than in previous entries of the franchise. A combination of the many hazards added here (in stages, items, and so on) and a few decisions regarding gameplay make this a mode I don’t really hate per se, but it has led me to rage-quit multiple times. As with everything bad I have to say with this game, a couple tweaks would have solved most issues.

(Also, in writing I try to remain calm, but whenever I am playing this mode on Intensity 9.0 I swear I'm cursing like a fucking sailor. Tells you how difficult and annoying it can be... In fact, I actually succeeded yesterday, the day before this part's release.)

ALL-STARS

"I can't wait to beat up a doggo, a robot, my worst enemy,
the Hero of Time and his princess, a space hero,
and the Princess I have to save every other week!"

There have been very few changes to All-Stars throughout the years and here the changes are minor. Fight the roster, you’re not allowed to die at all, you have a period of rest between matches in which you’ll be battling a handful of fighters each time. One thing has changed, however: All-Stars is available as soon as you begin playing the game, with all fighters from the starting roster being battled, with rest areas between fights and three healing items. The mode is updated once you’ve obtained all 12 unlockable characters (or added DLC combatants), now becoming a “True All-Stars” mode with a fourth healing item in the rest area to compensate for the added fighters.

16 down, 30 more to go!

The mode is split into seven levels, with all fighters showing up in their chronological order of appearance on the gaming scene, from Mr. Game & Watch in Level 1 (1980) to Greninja (2013) or Corrin (2015, if downloaded) in Level 7. The fighters are split somewhat evenly between levels, and the stage for each level is reminiscent of the game one fighter battled in that level first appeared in (such as Flat Zone 2 in Level 1, being Mr. Game & Watch’s stage). The player can also set the difficulty between Easy, Normal or Hard. Lastly, All-Stars is one of the few modes in the game that can’t be played with custom movesets and equipment. Beating All-Stars with a character unlocks a trophy different from the one earned by beating Classic with that same character.

There isn’t much to say about this one; very few changes compared to prior games. Why change a winning formula? I like it. I love that the characters are fought in chronological order, too. It can get tough, but it requires no entry fee in goldor and that alone is a win for me. Also of note, All-Stars and Multi-Man Smash can be played in multiplayer.

STADIUM

You like to customize your fighters?
Good! You get to beat up thousands of them now!

Multi-Man Brawl: Much like past Smash titles, this one sees the fighter battling lots and lots of opponents in a row. Whereas Melee had wire frame creatures and Brawl had the alloy team, Smash 3DS makes use of the Mii fighters as the expendable hordes of opponents. The modes making a comeback are: 10-Man and 100-Man (surviving against 10 and 100 enemies respectively), 3-Minute (self-explanatory), Endless (Beat as many as possible until you die), and Cruel Smash (in which CPU aggressiveness is dialed up to 11, and you must once again kill as many as possible while they’re not giving you any chance of fighting back).

Beat up more Miis than your clone!

One mode hasn’t returned from Melee and Brawl: The 15-Minute smash. A lot of modes were shortened probably because this particular game has to rely on the Nintendo 3DS and its battery life. You can actually tell Classic, All-Stars, and many modes have been shortened due to that – so cutting out the 15-Minute mode makes sense. A new mode was added: Rival Smash, in which you and a CPU rival (same character as yours, different color palette) duel, and the winner is the fighter who knocks out the most Mii fighters. The player’s final score is the number of opponents they KO’d minus the number the rival has KO’d.

"Quit staring at me with those puppy-dog eyes, Sandbag!"

Home-Run Contest: This mode hasn’t changed, which is fine. During 10 seconds, you rain blows on poor Sandbag, then grab the baseball bat and knock it out, and the game calculates the distance Sandbag travelled. Batting Sandbag away counts within the 10-second limit. Some players rack up impressive scores… I don’t do super-well, but it’s nice. My only issue is that the circle pad makes it difficult for a character to move without running, so grabbing the bat and getting a fighter at the perfect distance from Sandbag for the best batting effect is very tricky.

You'd think attacking a bomb wouldn't be too smart.

Target Blast: Extremely different from Target Smash. Here, you’re punching a bomb with a 10-second timer, then must knock it out towards the playing field – on which red and green targets are scattered, along with objects. The bomb will explode at 0, so it must be sent flying before then. There’s a wall opposite to the stage the player fights on, to make the bomb ricochet on it in order to reach more areas. The playing field has a few explosive boxes too, which can create chain reactions, and sometimes targets may be replaced by trophy or customization item boxes, netting the rewards if you do manage to destroy them. This goes on for two rounds, so if you haven’t destroyed everything on your first try, there’s a second attempt right afterwards – and if you somehow destroyed everything on the first round, everything will be respawned for the second and you can try to do it again, for an incredibly high score.

Mass destruction!

I can see why they went with this instead of the original mode; less complicated to set up since there’s only one “field” to speak of, no need to program moving targets, it’s also much shorter and simpler. I’m cool with it, and I get why they went for that, but I preferred the previous version of the mode (the Brawl iteration, more specifically). There can be Target Smash mini-challenges found within doors of the Smash Run mode, though.

(Oh, and the Solo portion also has a Training Mode, as usual.)

CUSTOMIZATION

This is where you can edit any character to your liking, depending on the customization items you collected so far.

For regular fighters: You collect equipment to change their base stats. You can then equip up to three of these items to any fighter. These won’t actually appear on them in-battle, they will however have some effect on the battle. These can upgrade the character’s Attack, Defense or Speed, but careful – each item will mainly increase one stat, but will also decrease another stat… Note that some items will also give the ability to summon an item to be used in battle – particularly useful in, say, Smash Run.

You can also find new moves that you can then apply to the character’s B-button attacks. Three options are available for each directional input, so you can mix-and-match moves until each character plays exactly as you’d like. There’s a way to test these new moves on a Sandbag stage included within the mode. Lastly, you can also find powers and apply them to the character, but unlike others, these can only be used in Smash Run. Each item has a certain weight, and each character has its own carry weight limit. Powers include instantly equipping an item to the character, increasing their defense temporarily, other bonuses, stuff like that.

This Mii looks even more ready for battle than
she did before.

The Miis are the luckiest in customization, as they get all of the prior options plus the possibility to dress up with headgear and outfits. The feature made a comeback in Smash Ultimate, as you’ve probably heard due to people losing their minds over Undertale’s Sans being made available as a complete Mii Gunner costume. That's an important detail – all three Mii variations have their own costumes. No trading!

It’s a decent idea, but I don’t use it much. I kind of like the characters as they are… then again, I am not very competitively-minded, so customizing a character to perfection isn’t a thing I’d do all that much. But it’s there, and I appreciate the addition of it for the people who’ve been hoping to improve characters to their liking. Also, whenever one turns on the Custom feature in any mode where it’s available, (I may be wrong but) I feel like CPU opponents also improve, so you can be at a disadvantage. Also, a LOT of headgear and outfits are DLC-only.

Shout-out to the Amiibo menu, which I couldn’t really enjoy since I don’t have the 3DS variant that would allow me to scan Amiibos, and the Options menu, which has everything you’d expect. It does have a few additional features I haven’t mentioned yet, such as turning on/off outlines around the characters so that you can see them better on the small 3DS screen.

VAULT

Let's be honest though - if you come here,
it's probably mostly for trophies.

It would feel weird nowadays if a Smash game didn’t have loads and loads of collectibles for the player to pick up – then again, that may just be my opinion since Brawl, the game I played the most, had trophies, stickers and CDs as collectibles, while Ultimate has more than a thousand Spirits. Smash 4 may be cutting it down to trophies and customization, but it still features hundreds of each to gather and collect.

The Vault has everything else you’d expect; any photos taken during matches and videos recorded; game records and statistics regarding all modes and player preferences; a complete Sound Test with all music tracks in the game as well as all the little voice clips from the 50+ fighters, allies to be summoned with items, NPCs and so on; and lastly, a Tips section that gives helpful advice to the player.

Trophies, now, are divided in 4 sections:

• Gallery, to view trophies earned so far and read their descriptions;
• Hoard, to view all trophies in the same area, all together in a bunch;
• Trophy Shop, in which 6 trophies will be made available to purchase with goldor, the in-game currency, or with Play Coins, a different currency collected by the 3DS while the player is walking around in real life with the console turned on. Sometimes, discounts may be applied. The Shop may be selling trophies you already have, but the ones you don't will be shadowed on the top screen; 
• And finally, Trophy Rush.

Trophy Rush is a mode in which you pick a character, then add seconds to a timer by paying goldor (the minimum is 30 seconds for 180 goldor, but it can be increased up to 2 minutes 30 seconds, paying 6 goldor per additional second for a maximum of 900). Jesus, everything’s expensive in this game.

Trophies! Gimme!

The character is then shown on a platform with crates falling down. You smash crates to fill a gauge on the screen – wooden crates aren’t worth much, stone crates are worth more, star crates are worth a lot, there’s also rocket crates that will blast after a short time unless you destroy them first. Then there’s a bomb crate that will explode if you so much as attack it. If you let crates build up, at some point the platform won’t be able to hold them and fall, so you must always keep attacking crates. If you try to stay in the same spot, a spark blast with high knockback will come downwards to hit you after a few seconds, so you need to be constantly moving.

When the gauge is full, crates will be replaced by pentagons containing coins, trophies or customization equipment. Those are easy to break, but their shape makes them easy to lose into the pits on either side of the platform. At the end, you get a score along with all the rewards earned. Why a score, no idea, but hey, if it encourages you to try and improve each time… Sure, why not. I think it’s a decent mode to replace the Coin Launcher from Brawl, especially considering this one feels more in line with the spirit of Smash – you control a character and use attacks to break stuff.

What do I do if I have all of these 6 already?

Aside from that mode, trophies can be earned in pretty much all of the other modes in the game, usually as random drops or as rewards (in particular during solo modes). For the record, Smash 3DS without DLC contains 685 trophies, and 707 with all DLCs included. And, still following the theme, most of them hail from games on portable consoles.

FINAL WORDS

As the previous… er… ~8000 words can attest, there was a lot to cover in this game. I hardly even had time for jokes, that’s how much there was! I was also trying to keep this down to 3 parts, though with all I had to say, I could’ve made it to four.

That's a lot of characters. I like that.

To go back on what I said in the intro to Part 1, I refuse to consider any Smash game outright bad. That doesn’t mean that I can’t be critical of details. I actually started my save file over in this game in order to write the review. It was a lot of work, but I was always able to squeeze in an hour or two of gameplay. Like all Smash games, this one is good, regardless of whether you’re playing alone or with friends. In spite of the few missing modes, you’re never really going to run out of things to do. The shortened modes also mean you can do a lot in a shorter amount of time, too – perfect if you’ve got only a few minutes to yourself. I like the selection of characters on the roster. The changes in gameplay mechanics and physics were much appreciated. I also like the selection of items and stages, but that comes with heavy critiques regarding the abundance of overly-deadly items and stage hazards. I could have done without stage bosses, those have proven to be a pain.

Most modes are fine; the base ideas are decent, but the problems are always in the minute details that can make or break one’s enjoyment of them, and I felt that there were many elements here that could have been implemented better. Some things are troublesome or annoying, especially in Smash Run and Classic… but most problems could have been solved with simple tweaks and changes, or by adding more options. It’s not a deal-breaker in the end, these modes can still be plenty fun, but these flaws do get on my nerves at times.

This thing will never stop following me and
killing my fun, stupid Yellow Devil!

I really do not think Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS is bad, but I felt it was a lesser experience compared to what I felt while playing Brawl. Not by a huge margin, mind you, as this one stands well on its own. Think of it as the difference between an 8.5/10 and an 8.3/10. Though I find plenty to criticize in Smash 3DS, I felt that the positives mostly made up for it. Some of my personal experiences with the game have annoyed me alright, but it may just be that I needed more practice.

If you own a Nintendo 3DS, I can safely say this is a must-have; in spite of its flaws, it’s a truly impressive game fitting all this content on a cartridge. Smash’s reputation also precedes it, it’s an extremely popular franchise, and so finding fellow owners of the game to play with shouldn’t be a problem. Even if you’re not planning to play with others, the game is still filled to the brim with single-player possibilities. Of course, finding other players may be trickier now since Super Smash Bros. Ultimate came out last year and a lot of Smash fans may have moved on to that one… But the Nintendo 3DS is not going away just yet, either, so it's a reasonable assumption that you can find others to play Smash 3DS with, IRL or through the Wi-Fi Connection.

Phew! That was a long one. What am I planning to review next...