I admit I am eating my own words here and admitting Sakurai did something right...The trophies and stickers in Brawl are damn entertaining.
Now, I was a trophy hater back in the Melee days. At first, I thought they were very neat and an awesome, interactive way of viewing Nintendo history. But after I collecting nearly all of them they lost a lot of appeal. All you did was watch them...and that's it. They did serve as proof of accomplishments but did little to add to the gameplay and made me wish the Melee team had spent more time with the game and less time on the extras.
So now we have Brawl and the collectibles have tripled. We now have stickers and CDs, along with the trophies returning. They looked neat, but didn't expect anything out of them.
Having played Brawl non stop for the last 3 weeks I must say...the trophies and stickers are extremely captivating. While they are still rather superfluous collectibles that many will pass up (especially if you are a hardcore brawler) Sakurai did something he forgot to do in Melee; interactivity. In other words, we can now collect and PLAY with our trophies and stickers.
I can't stress enough how ingenuous the sticker center and diorama modes are. This is a great mode for those that have a creative mind or have a lot of time to kill in between matches. Despite limitations, like size and the fact that it only allows you to place four trophies at a time, you can do some great, creative and just plain funny things with them.
Right now half of my snapshot collection are pics I took of stickers and trophies cleverly placed to tell a story or just messing around with the mood and feel of the scene.
Now don't get me wrong, I still think that they missed the mark on the trophies. First, they just borrowed the models from other Gamecube, Wii and even DS games, so we have twice as many trophies but its all thanks to recycling and second, while Melee's trophy collection was lacking and missed some important characters (Dixie but no Diddy?
) it was a rather varied collection which included some surprising cameos and proved that Nintendo had not forgotten some of their older games.
While Brawl's collection does have some surprising additions (like the Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk trophies) it lacks that sense of nostalgia created by Melee's collection.
The sticker collection does a much better job of bringing Nintendo's history in digital form, but that's because the artwork was borrowed from old promotional material.
But even with these obvious issues the trophy and sticker collection in Brawl wins over anything Melee tried to do for the sole reason fact that we were given a small but inventive way of interacting with the spoils of our hard work.
...But this doesn't quite forgive the terrible online system and the crappy SSE mode
:p .
Topic: Damn, trophies and stickers are GOOD! (Read 3128 times)
