Written by Andrew Burwell, 5/6/2008
So you've got your character, understand all of the items, and have a decent amount of experience playing the game under your belt. All of that is a good start, but if you've played against your friends or online, chances are you're not much better than average. Fear not though, dear reader, some of the problems you're likely running into against your average player will be covered in this section, such as: How to protect yourself during a fight, using ranged attacks to your advantage, basic comboing, and much more. If you're a new player and haven't read my first guide, check it out.
We're talking about practice
Before I talk about anything else, I want to first let everyone in on a little secret: Practice Mode is your best friend. I know you probably had the same approach to it as I did when you first saw it on the menu, that it's just some boring mode where you beat up on a computer aimlessly with no reward, but that's just how it looks on the surface. Any time I've wanted to implement anything into my game that would take any sort of work, I'd go to practice mode and do it until it came naturally. Can't seem to get your timing down on a certain combo? Have bad timing when you try and air dodge or shield? Don't have a mental image of how far your character can reach with his attacks? Practice Mode is the answer to all of those questions, and any others that can arise. Keep all of this in mind when reading the rest of this guide, because chances are you aren't going to get most of it down without practicing first.
Using ranged attacks properly
If you use a character such as Sonic or Captain Falcon, this section likely won't mean much to you, but it's important to cover it for the sake of all the Links and Pits of the world: use your ranged attacks. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, you think it would be, but I can't count how many people I've played against that use a character with ranged ability, yet don't take advantage of it at all. Don't get me wrong, I'm not implying that you should continuously run away and shoot your bow/gun, but you do need to make them an integral part of your game. How so? Well, lets use Link vs Marth as an example.
Now if you're Link, I know it's pretty tempting to just charge in and beat Marth's face in with the Master Sword, but if you try and do this, you'll likely find that you're going to get hit first and take a good deal of damage. The reason you're getting beat down is because you're ignoring Link's most powerful asset, his versatility and wide array of ranged attacks. How do you take advantage of those things in this match-up? Well, instead of just charging in, draw a bomb and throw it before closing in, or throw your boomerang. Either way, if you hit Marth with one of those, you're going to buy yourself the split second you need to get within striking distance and beat on him. All of this may sound like a no-brainer, but I see the first approach happen at least four to five times a day when playing online.
Bob and Weave
Ah, dodging and blocking, the forgotten skills of your average Super Smash Bros. player. I'll admit that it wasn't until I started practicing Brawl heavily that I picked up certain habits in this area, so don't feel like an idiot if you don't make a habit out of these things. The fundamentals of it are really quite simple. Depending on which control style you use, you should have a button that brings up a bubble shield that lasts for a set period of time/takes a limited amount of damage. If you get in the habit of pressing that - or that and the control stick away from/behind your opponent to do a speed dodge - whenever you aren't attacking, you should be in pretty good shape. There is however, more than that to it. Remember how I ignored the Sonic's and Captain Falcon's in the last section? Well, this part applies almost entirely to you.
Have you noticed how due to your shorter range and lack of any ranged abilities, you find it hard to swoop in and attack your opponent? I've found a pretty simple solution to that problem. When going into attack against an opponent that has longer range than you, simply throw up your shield as soon as you get within their range. Chances are, if you're fast enough and accustomed to doing it, their attack will brick off of your shield and you'll have a split second to start beating on them. Once you start doing that, you'll find that you'll be doing more damage per skirmish and taking less in return.
Stick and Move
Constant action is a good point to emphasize now that we've established those two things. I always tell a friend of mine that the reason he loses a lot of the time is because he'll have periods, however brief they may be, where he's doing absolutely nothing. If you aren't evading your opponent or blocking their attacks, you should be attacking them or setting up a combo. Keep the pressure on them at all times, because once you start letting someone get comfortable, you give them the opportunity to do what they want to do, and letting someone fight the way they want to is a sure-fire way to lose.
Since we've kind of beaten Sonic into the ground, lets say you're using Luigi. As a predominately melee character, it's important to always be in your opponent's face with Luigi, but of course, it's almost guaranteed that you won't always be there. So, what do you do in the time in between? Why not chuck some fireballs? After all, it doesn't hurt you at all to throw them, and if you hit the enemy with one you're going to do at least a couple percentage points of damage. Scoff at those couple percentage points of damage all you like, but over the course of a fight, those minute and ultimately simple actions can add up to well over 50% damage, which for most lighter characters is basically half of a stock.
No Hadoukens here
Okay, so maybe none of the characters can shoot energy blasts out of their hands for massive damage ala Dragon Ball Z, but that doesn't mean that Super Smash Bros. Brawl is devoid of all combinations. Combos come in a different form in this game than they do in most fighters, here they consist of well timed and executed combinations of buttons to produce a string of what most would perceive as "normal" attacks, as opposed to one move that does big damage to the opponent. Sadly, people have had a hard time finding really good combos thus far in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, so there really isn't much I can tell you aside from providing a short video demonstrating some. What I can tell you though, is that with the more you play your character and practice with them, the more likely you are to find legitimate combos, so long as you know how to recognize them. As I said above, don't look for some really big super-attack, but rather search for the things that seem normal but have the ability to do massive amounts of damage in a short span OR run the opponent off the stage, with little down time involved.
