Huh. After being extremely underwhelmed by the last… I don’t know, seven DLC, who would’ve guessed that this of all things is what ends up getting me back to Smashboards.
I actually agree with the sentiment that the single-player offering in Ultimate is lacking. “Hey, remember stickers? Well, now they’re everything! Stickers. You win fights, you get stickers that let you win more fights to get more stickers and- wait, what do you mean you never cared for the customization? Well, er, we have Classic… and a gimped Multi-Man Smash that we sort of crushed All-Star into. …Home Run Contest?”
Honestly, if Brawl’s single-player content ends up being even remotely in the vein of Slap City’s, which was basically Melee Adventure Mode with custom text-based stories and fights for each character in between, then I’ll be satisfied, especially since there’s no custom moves.
That’s besides the main point of my post, though. I’ve been doing as meticulous of research into this game as possible, and I’ve arrived at something I’m calling the 28 Theory.
Recently, the Target listing updated, adding a description that confirms two things.
First, that Avatar will get character representation. We knew that already, of course, however it’s the second of the two that’s far more interesting.
The start of the description uses surprisingly careful verbiage to claim All-Star Brawl as, to quote the description exactly, “The Largest Collection of Nickelodeon Characters Ever Assembled In a Fighting Game!”
This would specifically imply two things:
1. There are other Nickelodeon fighting games, all having smaller casts than this. This is true, as “Nick Brawl” is a long-running series that started as a series of flash games and ended up with this game’s predecessor, Nick Super Brawl Universe, which had exactly 27 unique individual fighters, not counting a bunch of costume alts treated separately.
2. A different, non-fighting game crossover has more characters, otherwise the “fighting” specification would be redundant. This is also true. The previous Gamemill game, Kart Grand Prix has 30, the most individual playable characters of a Nickelodeon crossover by far.
Going by this statement, the logical conclusion is that the game has more than 27, and less than 30.
Now, there’s always a chance it could have 29, however 28 is already surprisingly relevant in a fun way, considering everything officially revealed so far.
I always thought it was somewhat weird that the initial trailer had 14 characters. Not 12 or 16 to make it divisible by 4, instead they specifically had 14 and left a character out of half of the groups.
However, I looked over it again, and noticed something: The trailer goes out of its way to also show the exact same number of stages as it does characters, 14 each. What are the odds that the initial trailer was neatly set up to show off exactly half the game, with the other half either announced later or… up to us to find out?
See, there’s another specific number that has caused a lot of fretting around social media: 20. The idea that once we know everyone on the box, we’ll have the entire base roster locked down, no more new surprises until potential DLC.
Press info for this game has also specifically used 20 before as the number of individual stages, while the site says more than 20. How can those two things be correct at the same time? Easy.
My conclusion is that ASB’s base default roster is 20 characters and stages, with an additional eight of each for the player to unlock.
Such a lineup would be the most characters in a Nick fighter while not being the most ever in a Nick game, exactly as the description states.
Also, one other thing: A minute into the trailer, when GIR runs across the screen, there is what genuinely sounds like a voice effect. Easier to hear on the weirdly-mixed JB Hi-Fi upload, though once you catch it you can easily go back to the others and compare the audio.