For the longest time I was a fan of the Nintendo company. Hell, I still am. There was an underpinning to everything they did, every game they made, every console and accessory (minus the hoarde of obscure accessories, yes) that spoke to my child self. Everything about it was fun. Everything that was not for fun was cast aside. This often meant that their consoles were slightly behind the times in terms of raw computing power, but if you think about it, my console is supposed to be a toy. Something I use to relax and enjoy myself. Therefore, any computer process not used for that purpose is processing power wasted, and my behind-the-times Nintendo consoles were, in fact, the front runners and greatest superpowers of any age.

And I was blind to the exceptions.
Oh, sure, the theory is there and is ironclad, games are for fun, so make fun games. The theory also relies on Nintendo continuing a tradition of solid game design and actually delivering fun game-in, game-out. And this tradition carries with it a high expectation from the audience indeed. Enough to make us purchase every last Wii console they make, and stand in line at midnight on a cold March night to purchase a new game that they've been showing us for two years or more.

Brawl. The herald of the company, harbinger of great success, and hallmark of party games and fighting games alike. For as much as we expect, Nintendo must deliver that much or more for the game to be even mediocre. This is the price you pay for excellence and the burden you bear, and given my own expectations I shouldn't at all be surprised that the company finally said "screw it!" and instead gave us something incomplete, buggy, and full of un-fun moments.

I refer, of course, to the new adventure mode called "Subspace Emissary." Basically, the whole thing is an excercise in Nintendo cramming whatever crap they want down my throat until I finally turn in my pokemon trainer badge and give up on the franchise. And where to begin.

There is a plot. This was ultimately probably a mistake, as any plot that serves to string together characters getting to a smash board and going at it classic-style is either going to be obviously a loose string of circumstances like that, and wholly self-conscious about how thin it is, or it is going to be a failure. A grandiose, preposterous waste of time. At that, they did one thing right; the dialogue is perfect. That is, there is none, and the characters pantomime everything and on occasion make a noise indicating mood. Where the plot fails is everywhere else. They try for actual villainy and antagonism, and end up with the plot devices of Final Fantasy V and the storyboard of the back of my Lucky Charms cereal box. And I liked FFV.

Yes I want sophistication from my adventure mode plot, or at least something that doesn't flip around at random, struggling to incorporate every last character and locale into itself.

So about level and enemy design. In a game that is mechanically designed around fighting one to three enemies at a time who have comparable capabilities to yourself, the goal being to knock them off the block after racking up some damage, it is good to be hellbent. Hellbent on making every inch and aspect of the game as complete and balanced and fun as possible. And a game of king of the hill never had such elaborate game design as this. But after becoming so hellbent on making the game function one way, you shouldn't be surprised to have it not work as well when you try to turn it into something else. Like, say, a platforming explorative adventure game. And surprise! The game mechanics don't function as a platformer, no matter how many different takes you do on the level design.
At that, it is difficult to say where poor concept ends and poor level design begins. The levels are either too large, or too zoomed in, or too pointless. There's nothing about the mechanics of the platformer that is difficult or sophisticated in the least. Most of the puzzles are obviously childish, and the rewards for exploration are marginal at best. The penalties; however, are more dire, as a casual explorer is likely to waste his recovery trying to get to an off-camera platform that doesn't exist. The levels themselves are thus bafflingly challenging and annoyingly simplistic at the same time; the kind of experience likely to turn the most rabid nintendo fanboy into a paragon of a different console god and bearer of the four wicked shapes. Even if the experience is less extreme than that, imagine you had to do something that was obviously childish and simplistic and yet couldn't complete it because of how painfully difficult it was? The last game I remember doing that with was Donkey Kong Country 2, and that was still a game that I completed to over 100% (thanks to some curious miscalculations), and really enjoyed, too.

I covered the rancid plot. Check. The heinous concept and level design slider. Check. I guess theme and fun is all that's left. And here, the theme of smash is simply left behind. What I wanted from adventure mode was an array of dungeons that challenge the platforming capabilities of the various fighters while you go through the sequence, a strung-together plot that got you from smash board to smash board with increasingly difficult opponents, and a series of boss battles to further challenge and excite everything. I did get some of that, but in getting between them, the fun is simply lost. So much so that when I was fighting Ridley, and should have been having a blast, it was only enough to drag me out of a miasma and get me to neutral. I was freaking neutral to the Ridley fight!

I'm going to play boss rush from now on and pretend Subspace Emissary simply isn't an option. In all my criticisms, I've put Brawl down a lot, and rightly so for how tragically bad Adventure Mode is. That is, so far, the only mono- directionally negative thing that I've found from it. On the whole a solid game. On the balance, this indicates that Nintendo has fallen from their once lofty position of game design: disincluding unfun elements. Like I said at the beginning; including more features to a game that make it on the whole less fun is a grand waste of time and a design mistake. The game would have been more complete and more fun without an Adventure Mode (compared to the one we got) and would have been able to come out all the sooner thus.

Between that and the serious fan-abuse of not releasing Mother 3 in the US, but including scenes and characters in Brawl that pay it homage, this leads me to think that my affection for the company has become profane; an aspect of myself that needs to be discarded. We'll see, though. We'll see. I'll wash my mind out with a Fire Emblem game or two and get back to you. And beat boss rush. And design some smash boards.

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