Anyone with experience in gaming has seen games packed with fighting and violence. They make up a huge part of the market, with Super Street Fighter 4 and Mortal Kombat X (Ten) being the two  new games every hardcore fan will lean towards. However, there is another huge reason these fighting games are popular, and it’s not the fact that you can beat the ever living heck out of anything you dang well please. (Though for some, that might be the only reason.) No, it’s the fact you can play with characters from anywhere without nerds and geeks complaining about whether or not it really happened.

The goal of Smash Bros. is, unlike traditional fighters, to take  classic Nintendo characters and use them to knock opponents off the screen without falling off the many platforms they fight on, all the while using classic and current characters from all across Nintendo’s history. Nintendo All-Stars like the Mario Brothers, Link, Pokémon, and more all join the chaotic fray of four player free-for-all battles.

The game has controls that are simple to learn but difficult to master. With four directions to attack instead of the normal eight, the game’s fighting style is more focused on dodging than blocking, and the Finishers (Final Smashes) are not the end-all-be-all attacks they are in games like Mortal Kombat. Instead, players rely on your quick reflexes and strategy to roll, punch, and fire projectiles to win.

Now, not all characters are the same, as most would expect. Character has a clear strength and weakness. The only character that can be considered average over-all is Mario. Sonic the Hedgehog, as the name suggests, is the fastest character in the game, while Ganondorf is the slowest; however, he makes up for this with his brute attack power. There are characters that are better than others, such as Bowser with his speed, power, and defense. Others, like Falco, have weak denfense, and fast fall speed. This combination of problems makes them much harder to use, but it is the way of the game’s control: easy to learn but difficult to master.

If players want to make Falco more suited to their fighting tastes, they can customize him and all other characters. Want a faster Ganondorf? Equip some speed items. Is Pac-Man too floaty? Well slap some defense items on to add some weight. In addition each character has three special moves for each directional special (standard, up, side, and down).Now, playing as 49 Nintendo characters is fine and dandy, but what if someone wants to play as Son Goku of Dragon Ball Z fame?  They can, with the Mii fighter! Remember that little avatar players made when you started up their Wii or 3DS? Well now they can make that little munchkin a fighter! The have three types of fighters to choose from are Brawlers, who are specialized in melee combat and speed, Sword fighters, who are all around, and Gunners, who are slow and specialize in ranged combat. Players can also dress up the Miis and customize them just like other characters, so now they have 52 characters, a far cry from the original twelve of the first game on the Nintendo 64.

Along with classic gameplay, the game comes with a museum with over 600 visual  trophies that display many of Nintendo and other video game companies history with descriptions that will explain what the trophies display, and a soundtrack that you can listen to like an I-pod with its play in sleep mode… mode. Players have to collect the trophies and certain musical pieces to complete the game, the solo modes like Classic Mode, where players run through a marathon of seven levels and adjust the difficulty with coins they’ve earned to bet against themselves for more challenge and bigger reward, or bet for themselves with no challenge and weak reward. Or All-Star mode, where you’ll marathon beat each character in the game, which admittedly, has been weakened from the last game, Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The character AI is good, but it has a handicap set on it to where all attacks have bigger knockback on them, making it a joke to win with power characters like Bowser. The mode that was heavily pushed in the promos, Smash Run, requires the player and three others to run around in an arena for five minutes, collecting stat boosts to make the character better. After the five minutes are up, the game decides a random challenge, ranging from a running race, a jumping challenge, an enemy killing marathon, or a special brawl, where the rules are changed up slightly to make the fight either easier or harder.

This review has been nothing but positive, but there are minor nitpicks about the software itself. One is the fact that the online mode, while heavily improved, is also laggy (The game slowdown) at certain points to near standstill. The lag happens rarely, but when it does, I have so much trouble with it, you’d have more fun watching cheese mold. Also, the modes, while fun, do become repetitive, and the achievements that require players to beat certain challenges with all the characters are mind numbingly dull. Now not all of the achievements are hard, but achievements that require the online mode are not fair to certain people with no access, or horrible connection. So they cannot fully access and enjoy the game.

Other than that, the game is great.  Whether playing with friends, playing smash run, or the online, when it works, players will have a blast. The music is catchy to the point of making me dance, and the characters are all playable in their own unique way, allowing for anyone to get in the game and play.

So how does Super Smash Bros. for 3DS hold up?