As it stands, Super Smash Bros. is currently Nintendo's biggest franchise. Super Mario 3D World failed to innovate on any part of the Mario formula, Mario Kart 8 only brought a temporary reprieve to poor Wii U sales and all of Nintendo's other franchises are currently dormant. In terms of first-party, Nintendo-developed games, Super Smash Bros. is, in all honesty, the only title that currently carries any real weight with players.

Nintendo is trying something new with the latest game in the franchise: instead of the game appearing solely on home consoles, Super Smash Bros. 4 is also appearing on the 3DS handheld. Nintendo is betting a lot on the handheld version, but can the 3DS keep up with a game like Super Smash Bros.?

Players already familiar with the previous Super Smash Bros. games will immediately be at home with the new one. Everything about the controls has been pulled straight from the older games. Players use two main attack buttons, a shield, grappling, and jumping to openly move around a stage and attack opponents. Fighting still feels great: attacks carry a lot of weight and characters move smoothly, it's just a shame that the actual button mapping is so terrible. Players hoping to use the face buttons for something other than jumping will be fine, but the lack of directional-pad movement is a pain. Instead, players are forced to use the control stick, which can feel unresponsive and sluggish. Super Smash Bros. Brawl featured fully-customizable button layouts, and it's a shame that the feature wasn't included with the 3DS version. It can end up causing some cheap losses (and in some cases, broken control sticks), and will likely affect the 3DS version's longevity, especially when it comes to high-level play.

Thankfully, the characters themselves make up for any shortcomings in the control department. Each character may have the same basic controls, but the differences in attacks, speed and jumping make the characters distinct. A heavy, up-close brawler like Bowser or King Dedede will play nothing like a faster character, such as Fox or Sonic. What this means is that anyone can pick up the game and play, and will have a multitude of options to play with. Trying out a new character doesn't come with the same necessary level of commitment as other fighting games because the player doesn't need to relearn the game to play. The inputs will always be the same, it's more about finding a character that feels right, rather than learning complex button combos.

The cast of characters is also extremely diverse, and Nintendo has made some significant changes to returning fighters in addition to the newcomers. Most of the characters in the game have received a fairly significant tune-up, and the result is that more characters are viable options for high-level play. Characters that were basically unplayable in earlier games are now hard-hitting fighters in Super Smash Bros.

The new fighters in Super Smash Bros. 4 are also universally fun to play as, and fit in well with the rest of the cast. Heavy hitters like Little Mac from Punch-Out!! and Charizard are great alongside the likes of Captain Falcon and Ganondorf, and while most of the newer characters like the Wii Fit trainer and Mega-Man tend to be faster, lighter characters, there's more than enough variation to keep the fighters distinct. Even the Mii Fighters, which use the 3DS's avatars to create customizable characters, are great. Being able to choose each of the three classes' special attacks is great, and a simple testing stage built into the menus encourages trying out all of the different combinations. The Mii Fighters don't revolutionize the game, but they do add an aspect of customization that the series has previously lacked.

There are still duds within the full roster--Captain Olimar is just as useless here as he was in Super Smash Bros. Brawl--but the vast majority of the characters are extremely fun to play with.

The game's stages feel just as diverse as its characters, and of the 34 total stages, 21 of the arenas are brand new. From simple backdrops like the Boxing Ring from Punch-Out!!, to the constantly-changing stages like Kirby's Dreamland, each arena is genuinely unique and features something different to master. While some levels, like The Legend of Zelda's Spirit Tracks, are a bit too complex for their own good, there are far too many amazing new arenas to really complain. The previously mentioned Dreamland stage, Zelda's Gerudo Valley and Earthbound's Magicant all stand out among an already masterful set of levels. Across the entire series, Super Smash Bros. 4 easily has the best battlegrounds.

None of this would matter if there weren't any games to play, and Super Smash Bros. is stacked when it comes to different modes of play. While each of the modes is different, every one of them is still based on the same core mechanics, meaning that transitioning from one mode to another is simple. The whole package ends up feeling cohesive; there are no half-baked kart racing or chess minigames here. If you're the type of player that simply can't get enough of Smash Bros., the list of different game types to play is staggering.

The game is basically set up into four separate parts. 'Smash,' the game's preeminent mode, is where the core of Super Smash Bros. lies. This is all about the fight: set the rules, pick an opponent and get to it. The mode can also be used for local WiFi play against friends who own their own copy of the game, and it's the exact same pick-up-and-play experience from every other game in the franchise.

'Online' returns from Super Smash Bros. Brawl, though the options have been greatly expanded. Online is where players will fight with others around the world, and while Brawl's experience was generally bland, Nintendo has wisely broken down the online experience into smaller, more customizable chunks. If you want to play with friends only, just hit 'With Friends.' If there's no one around to play with, just hit 'With Anyone,' it's that simple. Nintendo even split the global matches into 'For Fun' and 'For Glory' modes, which is a nice touch and means that players just looking for fun won't have to worry about being trounced by players looking for tournament-level fights. Players will still hit spots of laggy connections and performance--this is Nintendo, after all--but our experience playing the game with others in the United States was generally smooth. The connection only really suffered when playing with people overseas, and overall, the quality of play is far better than Brawl's shoddy online modes.

Sadly, the 3DS-exclusive mini-game 'Smash Run' is more of a mixed bag than the other modes. As a substitute for Brawl's awful 'Subspace Emissary' single-player story, Smash Run has players navigating a giant map for five minutes, grabbing power-ups and boosting stats, before meeting for one final match. While it's fun to push characters past their normal levels with power-ups, the final confrontation is randomized: it could be a regular fight, a race or a climbing match. It can be fun at times, but players can accidentally end up focusing on the wrong skill, essentially losing the final match before it even starts. It's no fun to play through five minutes of the game and beef up a player's attack skill, only to find out that the final match is a speed competition. If there was some clue as to what the final bout would be, the mode would be infinitely more replayable, but as it stands, Smash Run is but a temporary distraction.

Super Smash Bros.' other modes are far better by comparison. 'Classic' is the basic single-player mode from the series, only the mode now features branching difficulty paths. It still feels generally similar, though being able to choose a path based on rewards and the opponent's difficulty is a nice touch. 'Training' is exactly what it sounds like, and 'All-Star' is a one-life/no continues gauntlet in which characters are presented in chronological order. It's a nice, nostalgic touch that groups characters by era, and actually evolves as more and more characters are unlocked.

Finally, the 'Stadium' is broken up into three mini-games: Multi-Man Smash, Home-Run Contest, and Target Blast. The last two are essentially the same; damage an object enough to send it flying and grab a high score. Home-Run Contest is the exact same mode from every other Smash Bros. game, where Target Blast is basically the Smash Bros. take on Angry Birds, where players launch a bomb at targets. Both are fun, though they each require precision that the controls aren't well-suited for, and the rules for launching the bomb in Target Blast seem to change on a random basis.

Multi-Man Smash is the surprisingly fun stand-out mode of the bunch. Players can take on giant packs of weaker enemies, and while the six different variants are essentially the same (the only real difference being the number of opponents), it's the quintessential 'one more try' mode of the game. What's great is that Nintendo has added multiplayer support for what was traditionally single-player only: both Multi-Man and All-Star modes are playable locally with friends.

What's strange is that the biggest problem with the different modes isn't the game itself, but how everything is arranged. The menus in Super Smash Bros. are just plain bad, and extremely confusing to navigate. Playing Online or Smash is easy enough, but expect to wade through two or three different pages of menus if you want to play something else. The worst of the offenders is the Trophy Rush mode. While all of the other mini-games are located in the 'Stadium' section, the Trophy Rush mode is located in an entirely different section of the game, and one that features no other playable modes, at that. It's not something that tears the game down by any means, but it does get annoying when you just want to sit down and play something.

If there was one question on everyone's mind, it was whether or now Super Smash Bros. would even be playable on the 3DS. It's inherently different from the console version, where players have an entire TV to play on, and unfortunately, Nintendo wasn't able to find a perfect solution for its handheld version. The camera will pull back extremely far in a four-man match, and even on the larger 3DS XL screen, it's simply too easy to lose track of a fighter. The problem isn't as pervasive when there are fewer players on a stage - two-man matches work beautifully - but playing with larger groups may lead to some annoying hangups.

That being said, a few camera issues can't stop Super Smash Bros. from being gorgeous. The game may not push the same number of polygons as a game like Resident Evil: Revelations, but Super Smash Bros. wisely focuses on its art style to really push the visuals. The characters all look fantastic, and while these aren't the most complex character models on the system, tiny details like the ones in Samus' armor or Palutena's robes are more than enough to compensate. The cel-shading also goes a long way to cover up any blocky models, and doubles as a clever solution for distinguishing one player from another. The shading even takes on a certain hue when playing on teams - a subtle effect that ends up making a big difference.

The animation is also top-notch. Characters move with convincing weight, and the effects from power moves and different projectiles never fail to look fantastic. The stages also shine; these are some of the most imaginative arenas in the fighting game genre. Despite everything that can happen on-screen at once, it's amazing that the game never slows down at all. Certain effects, such as Assist Trophies, don't run at the full 60 frames-per-second due to the 3DS hardware, but the effect is barely noticeable and never affects the gameplay.

While the graphics are great, it's the sound that really steals the show. With most 3DS games, the audio compression required to get the game running is annoying, and at its worst, it can be downright awful. With Super Smash Bros., it's easy to forget that a 3DS is producing these sounds: every hit resonates and every attack feels powerful, and Super Smash Bros. manages to do it without sound effects that sound like they're coming from inside a washing machine.

The real icing on the cake is the soundtrack. One might think that music from three decades of Nintendo might sound jumbled, but the compositions in Super Smash Bros. are fantastic. Yes, many of the tracks do return from previous entries, but the new tracks alone put Super Smash Bros. above previous titles in the series. Having multiple tracks associated with each stage is a nice touch, and it prevents the music from getting stale.

When it comes down to it, Super Smash Bros. 3DS is fantastic. There are lingering issues, such as the camera breaking down in larger matches or the half-baked control customization, and they could potentially hurt the game down the line. With that said, the rest of the package is simply too much fun to play for what few issues exist to ruin the experience. Super Smash Bros. 3DS is more evolution than revolution, meaning that non-fans aren't going to suddenly fall in love with the game, but anyone who's hesitant to play the game on a handheld can put their fears to rest. The characters are great, the game is gorgeous and the number of genuinely different ways to play makes the whole package feel complete. Super Smash Bros. 3DS not only works, but it's one of the biggest and best games in the system's library to date.

Gameplay:

Replayability:

 Graphics: