Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale

No it's not that kind of Battle Royale

Smash Bros is a juggernaut, no use in pretending otherwise. And with it being developed by Nintendo, it has invited people to wonder what a similar game would look like from other console manufacturers or big companies. Sony themselves wondered enough to make their own answer to the question on the PS3 and Vita.

At a glance Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale (henceforth PASBR) may look like an outright Smash Bros clone, with up to four characters fighting on varied stages while making use of randomly spawning items. But if you look closer you’ll see that it’s an experimental game with its own identity.

Super KOs

When setting out to create a counterpart to Smash Bros, the developers at SuperBot Entertainment knew it had to be different in some key way beyond the roster. So they settled on a unique and controversial feature of the game, KOs can only be scored using super moves, which in turn can only be used after building up meter.

While Smash Bros was distinguished by you never being 100% safe from a KO, in PASBR you know exactly when to worry about being KOed and what can do it. Yet beneath that is a strong similarity. Attacks in Smash Bros increase an opponent’s damage percentage to make them go further when smashed, while attacks in PASBR generate meter to use for supers. In both games attacks aren’t the win condition, but they are needed to reach it.

Your super meter has three bars, each filled bar corresponding to a different super move. All supers use the same input, so if you’ve completely filled your meter you can only use your level three super.

There are ways to lose meter before you can use it. Taunting makes you shed energy, which can have some utility if you want to keep a lower level super on hand. Throws will cause some of a character’s super meter to come out of them as glowing blue energy that can be picked up by anyone, even the victim of the attack if nobody else gets it first. This gets interesting in four player battles where it’s likely someone else will get the energy you knocked out of your target.

Stage hazards can also knock super meter right out of you. And falling off of the stage will teleport you back to the center, stunned and with your energy falling out where opponents can easily collect it and then kill you.

Some characters and items have their own interactions with this system. Parappa the Rapper has a move that spawns a boombox which generates energy that can be picked up by anyone. Meanwhile one item in the game will steadily drain energy from an opponent and give it to the user.

The system does have some clear flaws however. It feels frustrating when you whiff a super and you’re back to square one just to get another attempt at scoring a KO. Not all supers are created equal amongst their level as well.

For example Parappa the Rapper and Fat Princess have similar level two supers where they can freely move around and kill opponents on contact for a short time. Fat Princess’s level three super has her sit down while a bunch of soldiers throw attacks all over the screen that aren’t that hard to dodge, her level two is more of a threat. Parappa the Rapper’s level three super plays a cutscene that instantly kills everyone else on screen, no ifs or buts.

Obviously there’s far more to a character than just their super moves, like how quickly and reliably they can build meter. But I’m not a fan of the cutscene supers and think the game would be better off without them, activating them has the highest reward of any action in the game with zero risk attached. Some higher level supers being worse than lower level counterparts also feels wrong, though I can see an argument that it creates a different dynamic with the system.

With how dismissively some people hate on the super KO system, while also accusing the game of not being different enough from Smash Bros, I’m not interested in writing the whole thing off. It could do with adjustments, but I’ve come to appreciate games willing to break from established molds at the cost of being imperfect. The super KO system should be refined, not replaced.

Unlockables

Each character in PASBR has their own set of unlocks to strive for, consisting of intro animations, win poses, taunts, and a secondary costume. These are unlocked by leveling the character up, which only impacts unlocks and nothing else. Some minor things like backgrounds for your profile card also require an obscene amount of grinding on one character.

Having an unlock system that works just by using the related characters is nice and flexible, and the unlocks that actually matter are quick enough to get. I remember wishing that Smash Bros 4 (3DS/Wii U) used a similar system for some of its unlocks because that would have made more sense than the random drop method.

Back to PASBR it would have been fun to actually unlock some characters and stages. Sadly it came out in the era where fighting games were all about the esports and so didn’t include any actual impactful unlocks. I wish more Smash inspired games in general would realize that unlocking characters and stages is part of why Smash is fun.

Modes

Much like Smash Bros, VS mode offers some different options for how to fight. Adjustable settings include the rate of energy gain, AI difficulty, number of fighters, items, the win condition, stage hazards, and if there are teams. I’ve heard some say PASBR is at its best in 2v2 matches, but I don’t have enough first hand experience to weigh in on that claim.

To expand on the win condition bit, you have the options for a typical ‘last man standing’ ruleset, timed matches where you try to score the most KOs, and an option to have the first player to hit a certain number of KOs win. The last one feels almost like a precursor to Multiversus now.

All the different conditions add a lot of variety to matches. You can fight a team of three AI of either low or high difficulty depending on how much you want to suffer, you can turn off stage hazards if you’re a dullard allergic to interesting stage design, even watch the AI fight each other.

Naturally there’s also an online mode. But the servers have been shut down. If you want to play the game online now you’ll need to find workarounds.

For single player offerings you have tutorials, arcade mode, trials, and the ability to play against AI in VS mode.

While the tutorial has some typical fighting game tutorial issues, it does at least have character specific lessons, so you can figure out what each character is actually capable of doing.

Trials are a mix of general ones that can be taken with each character, and a set of challenges for each character. Though the character specific ones are almost all copy and paste with the same objectives. Combo challenges are in the game, but sorted in the tutorial section.

The arcade mode for each character has the standard formula of an opening cutscene, rival fight, final boss, and ending cutscene. Each rival battle has its own pre fight cutscene that offers a brief interaction between characters. I wish there was more narrative to the game though.

Roster, Stages, and Style

Fighting games are defined by their rosters, especially crossover fighters. And this has quite the mix of characters, both in genre and popularity. You have the likes of Kratos co-staring with characters from early PS3 games people had stopped talking about well before PASBR was announced. Which is how I like my crossovers, I didn’t know who some of the characters were, so seeing what they could do was exciting.

However, the game also had some characters clearly chosen because they were in a game coming out around the same time. That’s why the version of Dante from the Devil May Cry series used in the game is the one from the reboot that was widely hated by series fans. It makes the roster feel a little too ‘flavor of the month’ for me. Though Dante is at least fun to play, which is why he’s my main.

[Obviously the above is not my video, I am not good enough to do all those combos.]

PASBR also made one of the biggest mistakes a fighting game can make, the character select theme is an earsore. If you don’t play fighting games this might sound like comedic exaggeration, but with how much time is spent on the character select screen it at least needs to have sounds you don’t hate. I found the main theme of the game so irritating that a glitch cutting off the song entirely felt like an improvement to me.

In terms of stages however, this is one of the few games with stage design that captures what I enjoy about Smash Bros stages. They make you fight on their terms and will sometimes change those terms. The Uncharted stage for example starts out in the interior of a cramped airplane with everyone right next to each other, then the cargo door opens and expands the stage greatly.

One standout for me stage wise is Alden’s Tower from inFamous, because it’s a vertically moving stage that actually feels fun, something Smash Bros has yet to do. Instead of constantly ascending the stage starts out stationary, then forces you to move, repeats the cycle, and then when you reach the top you stay there.

And PASBR has a clear distinguishing factor in stage design, each stage represents at least two distinct games. The floating city of Columbia from Bioshock: Infinite appears in the background of the Uncharted stage, Carmelita from Sly Cooper shows up to shoot fighters on Alden’s Tower, Patapon from the titular game show up to kill Hades in his namesake stage, and so on.

These fusions add a lot of character to the game. Each stage in itself is a short crossover story, not a passive fusion where two characters from different games happen to be in the same place, but an actual explosive combination you see take place.

The items are fun to use as well, like with stages they stand out from Smash while understanding what I like about them. Sometimes you just want to smack someone with a big fish. Though I feel the items in PASBR lack a certain impact or charisma, they don’t evoke strong feelings the way seeing someone else grab a hammer in Smash immediately has me going ‘oh fuck’ internally.

Also the Vita version has you pick up items by tapping the screen, which isn’t great, it’s the one notable difference from the PS3 version and to me it’s a needless downgrade.

Another Round Please

It’s likely never happening, the original developer was even shut down, but boy do I want a PASBR 2. I want to see the mechanics expanded on in a way that keeps what made the original unique instead of conforming to the crowd, with an expanded roster that doesn’t tell me when the game came out.

At the very least, a modern console port with online play restored would be nice.