It's coming out on February tenth!
HamsterBob just created this page to note that Kirby's side-B should be the Rainbow Sword (Dream Land 2) giving him a new set of A attacks instead of the hammer, because now King Dedede has the hammer.
A list of currently confirmed for Brawl characters can be found at [1].
Also, it is currently a WikiIsland. Deal with it.
Also - who added the ridiculously awesome amount of info below? If I hadn't heard anything about him since the year started, I would guess that Jeremy still frequents funwiki!
- Yeah, I still check funwiki. Maybe I'll update my page later to explain what's been going on.
Also, this page is pretty out-of-date, especially the bits about characters and stages.
There was a playable demo of Brawl available at E for All a week ago. Some SSBM professionals went and found out a fair amount of stuff about Brawl. I'll post some of the more notable info here. AlexBobbs also went as a representative of IER (since the Annual Mudder E3 Trip organized by IER was cancelled in 2007), but finds all this jibberish about "cancelling" and "dash-dancing" to be scarily nerdy.
- Wavedashing is gone, because you can no longer control the direction in which you air-dodge.
- L-cancelling is still in, but it functions differently. Instead of hitting L, R, or Z within 10 frames of touching the ground, you have to start an aerial after fastfalling. Like in SSB64, L-cancelling cancels all of the aerial's lag.
- Peach can still float cancel aerials.
- Moonwalking is still in.
- Dashdancing is still in.
- DI is a lot more effective.
- Pivoting is back.
Here's info on the characters shown in the demo.
- Mario is amazing. He was widely considered the best character in the demo.
- Metaknight is very good too, and is said to play more like an SSBM character than the other Brawlers.
- Fox was nerfed a lot; the shine can no longer be immediately jump-cancelled and its pseudo-spike property isn't as notable. His lasers don't travel very far and can't be land-cancelled. His up aerial is no longer a viable KOing tool, although it's pretty good for comboing. In spite of being nerfed a lot, he is still pretty good, which says a lot about how overpowered he was in SSBM.
- Peach's down smash was nerfed, but Peach herself might be even better than she was in Melee, now that she moves faster and her dash attack has knockback similar to Sheik's ftilt.
- Bowser is a lot better than he was in Melee.
- Pit is pretty good, although I haven't heard a lot of specific info on him.
- Sonic is really weird, but good. His dashdance is ridiculous and his moves combo into each other very well, but he controls very differently from the other characters.
- Donkey Kong is unfortunately pretty much the same as he was in SSBM.
- Yoshi's egg toss now helps his recovery, but Yoshi can no longer double jump cancel, which is a serious weakness. Yoshi might end up being even worse than he was in SSBM.
- Link's spin attack does less damage and no longer has its pseudo-spike property. Link's arrows are faster and Link himself is speedier overall, but he still seems like a pretty average character.
- Ike sucks a lot, at least in lvl. Even though he can kill at extremely low percentages, his moves have awful lag. According to SoCal?'s Falcon main Romeo, Ike is possibly the worst character in the Super Smash Bros. series, and he can't even use aerials when he short hops since the start-up lag on his aerials is longer than the duration of his short hop..
- Diddy Kong is a very good edgeguarder.
A few new techniques were discovered in the demo, as well.
- The $-Slide- Some aerials pull you in a certain direction when you use them, like Mario's bair. If you land while doing such an aerial, you continue travelling in that direction. This functions pretty similarly to wavelanding. It's also been speculated that Peach might be able to "wavedash" by floating directly above the ground, using an aerial, and immediately falling to the ground.
- Hugging- If you walk off a ledge and hold towards it, you will grab onto the edge, regardless of what direction you're facing. This is likely to be a very good edgeguarding tactic.
- The Ink Drop- This is a strange technique that has been getting a lot of attention lately. It's basically falling down and rolling over out of a dash animation. It's been speculated that the rolling animation can be cancelled with certain attacks and this did appear to happen a few times, but it is currently unknown how to consistently cancel the Ink Drop.
Stage info:
- Lylat Cruise is really cool. It has a good layout and a nice background. Although there are dogfights in the background, there aren't any actual stage hazards like there were in Corneria and Venom.
- Skyworld is kind of like Hyrule Temple. If you're near the center of the level and you're hit, you're very likely to crash into something you can tech off of, so expect to see characters survive to very high percentages here.
- Battlefield is a lot like it was in Melee, except that the annoying glitchy edges have been replaced with more conventional ones.
- Norfair is really obnoxious. Lava (or acid or whatever) (it actually is lava this time... people need to play more metroid...) occassionally hits the stage and there is one wave that can only be dodged by hiding out in some narrow place that only one character can fit in, IIRC. However, you can both standing dodge this and also air dodge it if you time it right. Some characters can jump over it. Or you can shield it. Or you can use ledge-grab invincibility. Really, it's not that hard to avoid.
- Battleship Halberd is fun. It has a good layout and the stage hazards don't really interfere with the battle very much, since you can see when the Combo Cannon is going to shoot about 10 seconds before it does.
- Delfino Plaza is basically Mute City, but prettier.
Some more general comments on the game:
- Brawl feels sort of like SSB64, although it still has some similarities with Melee.
- Most of the characters are really floaty (heck, Fox can short hop triple laser now).
- There's a larger emphasis on comboing than there was in SSBM.
- Multiple color schemes per character are back (no surprise.) Some of them are pretty cool, like Link's Dark Link color scheme in which he wears dark black and has red eyes.
It should be noted that all of the above information was taken from the E4All demo rather than Brawl itself, and much of it isn't true of the completed game (for example, L-cancelling has been totally cut, Peach can't float cancel, moonwalking is out, etc.)
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