Before Super Mario Galaxy, Super Smash Bros. Brawl’s Subspace Emissary Mode

Before Super Mario Galaxy, another “movie” brought together several Nintendo characters: the Subspace Emissary of Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

When Super Smash Bros. Brawl arrived on Wii in 2008, the franchise was already one of Nintendo’s most popular. Seven years after Melee, this new installment brought an impressive amount of new features. Up to this point, Smash Bros. had “just” united iconic characters like Mario, Link, or Pikachu in an arena to fight each other: a brilliant idea, but almost exclusively focused on multiplayer, aside from a few short game modes. Smash was designed as a showcase, never as a story.

Brawl changed the game. Its director, Masahiro Sakurai, finally got the green light from Nintendo to realize a project he had in mind for years: a truly ambitious single-player mode, alongside the classic combat game. In the form of a platformer and beat ’em up (moving forward and breaking heads) for about ten hours, the Subspace Emissary brought together and interacted with characters that had never shared the same universe before. All accompanied by just under an hour of cinematics where Fox, Peach, Yoshi, and others interact as in a real film.

The reception was unanimous: players loved the gameplay mode. Yet, nearly twenty years later, the experience has never been replicated. Why was this choice made? What didn’t work? And will we ever see such an ambitious adventure mode in a Smash game again? Decoding a mode that has become legendary.