After several delays and what seemed like an eternity since its release in Japan, our (first) copy of Super Smash Bros. Brawl has arrived. With its bevy of gameplay modes, options, and features, deciding what to start playing was a challenge in itself. I decided to do what any other Smash Bros. fan would do: plug in a Wavebird and play mutiplayer brawls until the sun went down.

During my initial three or four hours of brawling, I saw some amazing things. The more powerful Wii allows for improvements to the game's performance compared to its GameCube predecessor. The stages have great detail and are set against dynamic backgrounds that demand your attention. This proved a problem for me in the early going because I was actually getting distracted by the activity in the stages, rather than the fighting action. After adjusting to the new settings, it was business as usual for many of the new stages.

Still, some stages feel busy, visually. The Pikmin stage, for instance, has a gorgeous background. But it also has a lot of the same colors as the foreground, sometimes making it a little tricky to pick out where you are in the stage. The camera likes to zoom in and out a lot too, keeping the bulborb in frame when it comes in to position at the lower-right corner of the stage. Another stage, Castle Siege from Fire Emblem, caught me out with some strange scene transitions. As I was performing a move, the floor went out from underneath me, costing me a point. There were times on those two stages, and a few others, that I felt like I got totally screwed because of suspect stage design.

Those are minor complaints, in just a few stages. Of the 30-plus I have available up this point, almost all of them are terrific. The different stage types are well-represented here, for better or worse. New Pork City from the Mother series is the designated “ridiculously big huge large” stage, which is twice as large as Hyrule Castle in Melee. The “vertically auto-scrolling whether you like it or not” stage is Donkey Kong Rumble Falls. The standard Battlefield, Final Destination, F-Zero, and Metroid-style SSB stages are updated slightly for Brawl, too. Some of the new stages for Brawl, particularly Pictochat and Wario Ware, are absolutely great.

Just like I needed to grow accustoms to Brawl's shiny new locations, it took me a while to learn the intricacies and refinements to the basic Brawl fighting engine. It took me about two hours to see how things have changed. The general action feels both faster and slower than it did in Melee. Faster, in that with four people flying around and beating the crap out of each other, things happen in a hurry. Slower, in that when you focus in on your own character, it feels like you have more control over their actions and therefore have an easier time of translating your mind's thoughts into action on the screen through the controller. It may sound impossible for it to be both faster and slower, but somehow, that's exactly what's going on.

The better control is why all the characters in the game feel just right. Every character is unique, and you can feel it just by moving around. They all have the correct mass, I guess you could say. This point is driven home by a new gameplay tweak: characters flying offstage after being smash attacked can knock other players out of the air in the the same way as projectile weapons. I found this out the hard way when another player smashed someone right at me as I was recovering back toward the main stage platform. Not only did the flying body hit me, it KO'ed me!

The new characters in Brawl fit right in to the world of Super Smash Bros. Pit and Metaknight have the power of flight, but because they are generally frail and have weak smash attacks, they balance nicely with the rest of the roster.

The same goes for Ike and Dedede. Ike's attacks are very powerful (his sword lets out a giant boom every time you lay out a big swing), but are slow. Dedede is literally a tank. He's the heaviest of all characters, and has attacks that can KO most characters at the 60% damage level. He's painfully slow, though, so the trade-off works out.

You'll start off with 20 characters (two of which are not Sonic or Snake, who are hidden from the start), and unlock two favorites returning from Melee very, very quickly. Playing the single-player Subspace Emissary mode will unlock just about everyone else the easy way. When your roster is completely filled, you'll have 35 characters. For you brave souls trying to avoid spoilers, let me say that you will be rewarded for abstinence. There are some big, big surprises waiting for you.

That's all we'll reveal about Brawl for now. We'll have something new on the game just about every day this week, including full tests of the online game modes, the ridiculous depths of single-player, including the Subspace Emissary, and of course, gameplay video covering every angle of the game imaginable. Check back with us for the best Brawl coverage you can get, right here at NWR.