Time for another megapost of mine. This time, I'm going to focus on stages.
Here's a starting point for the discussion.
To start, if I had to choose the 10 best stages in Brawl, these 10 would be it.
75m
Mario Bros.
Pictochat
Big Blue
Pirate Ship
Flat Zone 2
Electroplankton
WarioWare
Shadow Moses Island
Green Hill Zone
The 10 stages above, besides just being really cool, drenched in Nintendo history, and having great music selections is how differently they play. Flat Zone 2, Pictochat and WarioWare even change landscapes within their own stage while you play and dramatically so.
But should every stage be that dynamic?
I'm of the mindset that, yes, most of them should be. There are a few exceptions though. For example, I never get tired of playing Yoshi's Island or Space Battleground because both of those stages, despite being simple with no hazards, never FEEL boring. Both manage to capture the essence of their game worlds perfectly.
The crayon graphical style, changing seasons, and fantastic song choices in
Yoshi's Island makes it a perfect example of a stage that totally captures nostalgia for the series its presenting while still being a fair stage for all characters to play on. The orchestral music from Star Fox Assault and the epic journey through the Lylat system that the player takes on the back of Fox's ship also puts
Space Battleground in that same category: a stage that's great for a fair match without ever growing tired.
That said, I think
Pirate Ship is a perfect example of a Smash Bros. stage. It manages to capture everything that's enchanting and wonderful about Wind Waker while still providing players with a dynamic map, incredible music and an experience that rarely feels the same.
Here's my big gripe with the stages in Brawl though. Aside from the 12 stages that I mentioned in the paragraphs above, many of the rest of the maps feel, to put it lightly, lifeless and disconnected from their material. And, in a game where only 12 of the 41 included stages are fun upon replay, there's a problem. Two of the worst examples of this issue are The Bridge of Eldin and Mushroomy Kingdom, albeit for very different reasons.
The Bridge of Eldin is bad for a few reasons: the stage itself is terribly designed, the stage hazards do very little to enhance the enjoyment of the stage and the music choices (aside from the one epic orchestral rendition of the Zelda theme) are absolutely terrible. If the creators wanted to replicate the essence of Twilight Princess,
why didn't they choose to make a stage in the Twilight Realm? The art style in those sections of the game immediately conjure the source material's themes of isolation and desperation that made Twilight Princess so good for the player and there were plenty of locales within the Twilight Realm that could've acted as a perfect location for a stage (the trees that Wolf Link has to leap to and from in the Faron Woods swamp area are what come to my mind first (and because Link as a Smash character never transforms into Wolf Link they even could have included him and Midna in the background fighting Twilight enemies like the Shadow Insect Queen or even Zant). Hell, they even included Midna's Lament, a song that would have worked perfectly for a Twilight Realm stage, in Brawl so why didn't they choose a more distinct area with a more relatable atmosphere to represent Twilight Princess.
Total missed opportunity.
Mushroomy Kingdom is a bad stage, not because of how it plays, but because of how it's presented. Instead of coming off as Sakurai and his team intended (as an apocalyptic abandoned Mushroom Kingdom) the deserted version of 1-1 feels generic and has, unquestionably, the worst music choices in the entire game with a piss-poor arrangement of the classic 1-1 theme and the awful Gritzy Desert theme (seriously Sora Ltd, of all the desert themes from Mario games, you choose the shittiest?) as its only music choices. The concept of the ever scrolling platforming stage is not a bad idea however and in fact, I want to see the idea make a return in the next Smash Bros. but instead as either a stage that recreates a level from New Super Mario Bros. (a series now synonymous with an entire generation of Mario)
using this music or revisit the idea of a classic stage wrecked by the passage of time but
really go all out with the atmosphere (maybe use, oh gee, I don't know, DRY BONES, DRY GOOMBAS, DRY PIRANHA PLANTS AND BOOS AS STAGE ENEMIES TO SYMBOLIZE DEATH INSTEAD OF RANDOM SHADES OF BROWN).
Enough about the past though. Onto the future!
I think Sakurai and his team have some really great material to work in terms of stages for the upcoming Smash for Wii U. Perhaps a map that takes place in the
London of Professor Layton that takes place on the back of a double decker bus but dynamically changes ala Brawl's Wario Ware with puzzles that must be solved in the background within a time limit. Or, in the same vein, I'd love a Rhythm Heaven stage, with playable rhythm mini-games.
There are plenty of opportunities for "essence" stages ala Yoshi's Island and Space Battleground too: stages that don't have hazards but completely engross the player in the battlefield's source material. The Mechonis ship
Junks from Xenoblade could be a great update on Space Battleground's idea of taking the player through a game's universe while still remaining a standard platform. The ship could fly around iconic locations from Xenoblade like Gaur Plains, Valak Mountain, and Mechonis Field, all while incorporating their incredible orchestral scores. The ship could occasionally fly far outside of the giant's bodies to get a look at them fighting as well.
These are just my opinions of course, but I'd love to hear what interesting stage concepts you guys want to see in the next Smash and which you think are likely to happen.
