Pandora's Box: The Ultimate GameCube Tier List

#6: Super Smash Brothers: Melee

Rating: T

Players: 1-4

Price Range: ~$60 USD

A platform fighting game with Nintendo characters.

Yeah, this is a shoe-in for the best multiplayer experience on the system, even if it is inferior to Ultimate and Brawl in a few ways. Now, while it hasn't aged well in quite a bit of areas, it is still a pretty great game.

Now, once again, this game was rushed, crunched within about eighteen months, with director Masahiro Sakurai arguably suffering the most, collapsing due to exhaustion while monitoring the recording of the orchestral pieces in the game, with his hospital visit being the only semblance of a break he ever got.

Now, as good as the game is, it left many technical flaws within the game's systems, with a few glitches and refinements in some places, leading to the game's primary issues. However, it also led to the influential and massive competitive scene, where players exploit the game's programming mistakes to make the game extremely fast-paced, with an ever-evolving meta game. This is why the game is played even today, and even as a casual experience, it is really fun.

Unlike Prime 2, Melee is a very balanced game in terms of content, with a substantial multiplayer that is really what many people come to play to begin with, but also with a ton of single player content to really chew on.

First, we'll go over how it expands on the original game on the N64, then venture into the single player modes before discussing the multiplayer, and then finally what I don't like about the game. We'll go over the issues along the way too.

The original Super Smash Brothers, while having a small competitive scene of its own, is shockingly light on things to do. Other than Classic mode and unlocking the four secret fighters, Ness, Captain Falcon, Luigi, and Jigglypuff, there wasn't much for a solo player to do and had only twelve fighters to play with. Melee dials all of that up to eleven. There are twenty-six characters, with all of the previous game's, minus Luigi and Jigglypuff, all unlocked from the get-go.

The roster selection is a mixed bag, albeit more positive and impactful. Sure, the first Smash introduced many people to its roster, giving a helping hand to many franchises. Metroid was a little niche at the time with high critical reception, but low sales, even in Japan, so having her be a default character definitely introduced her and the style of her universe in the fighter, which helped the sales of Prime 1, Ness, who was from a rather forgotten JRPG series, Earthbound (Mother in Japan), ending up being lifted from obscurity and became a cult favorite, Captain Falcon overnight became the mascot for Nintendo's own franchise only on racing, F-Zero, Mr. Game and Watch became a symbol of Nintendo's humble beginnings in the industry, and, most famously or infamously depending on how you look at it, Marth and Roy from the Fire Emblem series made their debuts in Melee outside of Japan. Fire Emblem was a Japanese exclusive series of tactical JRPGs, pioneering the genre with its grid-based battlefields and trinity weakness system. While they were added to Melee, Nintendo of Japan actually considered removing them from international versions of the game, but Nintendo of America liked playing as them so much, that they decided to keep them in, which worked incalculably for the company. While sales were very low at first, with the release of Awakening for the 3DS, which was meant to be the swan song for the series, it became a massive financial and commercial success, becoming one of the best games on the system, leading to Fire Emblem becoming a mainstay series with more well received games, even to the point that their inclusion in Smash in later entries came off as annoying due to the quantity of characters included. Safe to say, we wouldn't have Fire Emblem without this game, which has become another jewel in their crown.