Week 1 of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl

Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl(Nick) has now been out for a week as of me writing this. This game was on a lot of smash fans’ radar, being a platform fighter with recognizable characters and a known development team. For Ultimate players, the promise of roll-back net code was a great sign as they just went through a year plus of horrendous delay-based netcode as their only way to compete. 

Leading up to launch, the smash community as a whole was excited. With the developers releasing character breakdowns and revealing characters up until release, content creators were making videos daily. Everyone was analyzing characters and gameplay. Even with the final Smash character being set to be announced the day Nick launched, the game was still finding a lot of attention going into its launch day of October 5th.

 While many were positive on the game before launch, some thought the game looked janky. The animations were goofy and that lead some people to believe that the game wasn’t very polished gameplay-wise. Another big critique was a lack of voice acting. These are classic characters like Spongebob and the Ninja Turtles. It feels weird to not have these characters spouting off classic lines. 

So the game comes out and… Sora was revealed for Smash. To say Sora was the biggest announcement for Ultimate so far would be an understatement. Sora was the perfect character to end off the Smash Ultimate roster. It was a huge deal. Despite that huge announcement, Nick was still seeing a lot of attention. The whole day, streamers were playing the game. Panda Global hosted a popular charity tournament that featured some internet personalities. Many top players of Ultimate and Melee were playing. Once they got their hands on the game, they saw that it was pretty fun and played well. The jank of the animations didn’t matter much once you started playing. 

During the week, we saw a big online tournament, the Juice Box, host a tournament. A lot of top smash players entered and Void, a smash Ultimate player, won the event with Aang from Avatar the Last Airbender. It was an explosive finish and honestly, it was a really fun watch. 

People are really high on the game and it’s already on the lineup for many Smash tournaments to come. On October 8th, we get some huge news. The developers for the game have put up a $10,000 prize pool for their game at Smash Con Fall Fest. This is huge. Many of the people playing this game are smash players and this is something that Nintendo has never done. Nintendo has never sponsored a tournament held by the grass-root smash community in that way. This was huge news and a sign that the developers are committed to this game’s competitive community. 

We also got the first patch for the game. It wasn’t a huge patch, it just got rid of some glitches and exploits. While not every problem found has been fixed yet, the ones that have, show that the developers know what’s going on. The developers have also spoken to the prospects of downloadable content (DLC). While new characters are for sure on the table and coming, they also said voice acting might be an update in the future. This is really exciting. With Smash Ultimate’s DLC coming to a close, we’re already seeing people’s Nick wish lists. 

So, in the last week, Nickelodeon All-Stars has hit the ground running. The competitive community is loving the game. Many doubters have come around and like it. The developers have shown within a week that they are much more supportive than Nintendo and that’s huge. The game is starting strong and we’ll see if it keeps up the momentum.