Collection essentials #572: Super Smash Bros. Melee (GC)

                                                        !!!! BIG POST TIME !!!!

The first Super Smash Bros. game launched for the Nintendo 64 in 1999. It was made on a low budget and didn’t have a whole lot of content. However, the game was a big success anyway, as the frantic and fun four-player action and the appeal of different Nintendo universes crossing over proved to be huge selling points. You can read more about the first game in my previous blog post about it.

With the brand new formula proven as a success, the series creator, Masahiro Sakurai, was tasked with creating a follow-up to be one of the big early titles on Nintendo’s next console, the GameCube. This next game was to be far more fleshed out and refined with a bigger budget. Sakurai famously worked tirelessly and endured an incredibly grueling schedule during Melee’s development to make the game the best it could be. Melee came out at the end of 2001, less than three years after the original game’s launch. The “leap” from the first Smash Bros. to Melee is one of the most remarkable from an original to a sequel in video game history, in my opinion.

The first thing you’ll notice about Melee after playing the original, aside from the obvious graphical improvement on superior hardware, is the fact that there’s FAR more content. Melee is packed to the brim with modes, options, extras and unlockables. Multiplayer has always been the main draw of Smash Bros., and this game delivers with over twice the amount of characters, over TRIPLE the amount of stages to fight in, more game types, more ways to customize the appearance of items, and even more.

The first Smash Bros. didn’t have much in terms of single-player modes, and Melee greatly expands them. There’s the “Classic” campaign based on the 1P Mode in the first game, but there’s also “Adventure” in which players make their way through a series of special fights and specially-designed extended courses found nowhere else in the game, plus a third mode that must be unlocked. There’s “Event Match” which is a series of fights under special conditions (sometimes requiring the use of a certain character, too), and there are some stages here that are found nowhere else in the game.

There are all kinds of little extras, too, like “Home-Run Contest” where players have a number of seconds to try and beat up on a cylindrical bag with eyes and then launch it with the Home Run Bat as far as possible. The first Smash Bros. game made pausing the game fun because the camera would zoom in on a character and let players move the camera around to look at them, and Melee takes this a step further by expanding camera controls and letting players take and save snapshots when the game is paused. The game has excellent record-keeping and viewable statistics, letting players even create a “name” to play under partially for that purpose. There’s even a “Special Movie” available in the main menu in which the game shows off some of the game’s characters and just some random fun. 

But the coolest bonus feature has got to be “Trophies”. There are nearly 300 trophies to collect based on various Nintendo-related things and characters that can be acquired in a variety of ways. For example, you can find them simply lying around and pick them up with the A button, or you can spend in-game currency on a slot machine to get them, and there are some that can only be unlocked by fulfilling a special requirement. Each trophy comes with a description of a few sentences that can be viewed in the trophy gallery, as well as referencing what video game the character or thing in question first appeared and when. You can also view your entire trophy collection at once and freely control the camera while looking at it.

Of course, let’s not forget about gameplay. It’s much better this time around. Characters now have four special moves each instead of only three. “Smash attacks” can now be delayed and charged by holding down the button, allowing for much more powerful blows. There’s now an “air dodge” button which gives your character a bit of invulnerability for a second in mid-air, whereas previously airborne characters were extremely vulnerable. The action is also just generally much more fast-paced. There are a number of other little things which are just a little too numerous to be mentioned in this brief-but-still-too-long blog post.

Melee’s soundtrack is truly excellent. There were many new remixes of music from various Nintendo games made for Melee which were spectacularly done. The game’s many stages all feature their own tracks, and many even have two. There’s some completely original compositions as well for stages like “Final Destination” which are also great.

Now, for my own personal experience, and this section is going to be much longer than usual. As a Nintendo kid, I had adored the first Smash Bros. game. I remember when I first learned about Melee in an issue of Nintendo Power magazine (which I still have) and it seemed too good to be true. I was going to covet the Nintendo GameCube no matter what, but Melee was THE game that truly made it a must. Being only 11 years old going on 12, I wasn’t able to get the console and the game on launch day. I had to settle for trying it out at a store kiosk here and there. 

But my dad knew how badly I wanted the GameCube and Melee, so he gave me a long-term incentive to try to earn it, as I described in my previous post about the GameCube console. Eventually, I did manage to earn it. The big day of acquisition was July 19th, 2002. My dad (without me) got me everything I needed at the mall (perhaps my mom too, not sure if she helped him out), which included the console, Melee, three extra cheap third-party controllers for multiplayer, and a third-party memory card which held over 1,000 blocks. My cousin Kevin came over for the evening, and I remember that it was after dinner that we were going to have it set up in my room, and I wanted to eat as fast as possible. Kevin and my younger sisters gathered around for our first of many multiplayer Melee sessions. The first stage I picked was Mute City, since I loved Captain Falcon and he didn’t get his own stage in the first game. The copy of Melee shown in the photo is my original copy bought on that day. My original save data got wiped once or twice within the first year, but my current file dates back to 2003.

I played the daylights out of Melee in the next couple years. It was THE go-to multiplayer game for a long time, and of course I played single player to death as well. Since my file(s) from the first year are lost to time, I don’t know what my total lifetime play time in this game is, but it’s got to be a few hundred hours. 

I could argue that Melee was the most significant game from my youth. This game really helped stoke my interest in expanding my gaming horizons and seeking out lesser-known titles. Melee’s collectible trophies were incredibly cool because so many of them showcased very obscure characters and games, including many that were only released in Japan. For the first year and a half I had Melee, I didn’t have access to the internet at home, and YouTube didn’t even exist, so I couldn’t find out much of anything about these mysterious games for a long time, but I sure wanted to! Like many others, the inclusion of Marth and Roy from Fire Emblem made me very interested in that mysterious series which up to that point was exclusive to Japan. I was already interested in EarthBound because of Ness in the original game, but now I was even more so since I got to see two stages based on locales from the game as well as trophies showing off some of its other characters. This game was how I found out about Nintendo’s “Game & Watch” line, as they invented the odd “Mr. Game & Watch” to represent it as a playable character.

As you can probably guess, Melee was a major success. It’s the number-one best-selling GameCube title of all-time. It couldn’t single-handedly pull the GameCube out from third place in that console generation, but it tried its darndest to. The game maintains a strong following despite sequels, and it is very well-known as a competitive game. After a while, competitive players began to discover advanced techniques that weren’t actually intended by the developers, which made high-level play more dynamic and interesting. In future Smash sequels, gameplay was altered in a way that displeased fans that appreciated Melee for its specific mechanics, especially competitive players. That has helped Melee enjoy enduring attention with a competitive scene that has remained healthy for a remarkably long time.

As more Smash Bros. sequels have come out, I have to admit that I haven’t revisited a Melee a whole lot. But I got more than my money’s worth when the game first came out anyway, so that’s not a fault of the game’s own. It’s still a deeply special game to me with a unique place in my personal gaming history. 

Melee hasn’t been rereleased (yet), and original copies are fairly pricy despite there being millions of them out there due to high demand. Should you go out and get Melee for yourself? It depends. If you just want one Smash Bros. game to play casual multiplayer for friends, you’re honestly probably better off going with a newer entry. But there are other reasons, such as the single-player and unique mechanics, that make Melee potentially worth checking out. If you’re a big Nintendo fan, it’s definitely one you’ve got to play. Melee deserves to be called one of the greatest video games of all-time, and it’s a true quintessential essential in my collection.