Join a quick and simple brawl against someone, somewhere! If you’re not going to be playing with a friend, this is the mode you’ll tend to use.

This time, we’ll take a look at how it flows.

The Wii is trying to connect in earnest! And it succeeds!

Here you choose With Anyone.

You could also choose Team Battle,
but we’ll choose Basic Brawl here.

You go straight to the character-selection screen.

Huh? We’re already at character selection? That’s right. You don’t make any rooms.

At this point, you’re already requesting a match. If you connect to someone, you’ll see their status at the bottom of the screen.

Character selection is limited to 45 seconds. If time runs out, your character will be chosen for you at random, so make your choices quickly so as not to make others wait.

Then you go to stage selection.

You can cast one vote for the stage you want to play. A stage is chosen by lottery from among those voted on by the players.

Also, the items that are turned off in the item switch are also determined by lottery.

Practice on Sandbag while you wait...

Then just wait until you get everyone together.

Then the match begins!!

Isn’t that simple? You don’t have to trouble with any settings. You just choose characters and stages.

Names won’t be shown and messages won’t be sent. Neither your identity nor your opponents’ will be known, so you can play without any worries.

By the way, have you ever had an experience in which your opponent was disconnected, and the match never came to fruition? Like when you started with four players, but ended up with only one?

I don’t like that feeling, so I’ve tried to counter it.

If you get cut off, your character will get taken over by the CPU without your opponents even knowing—it pinch hits for you!

Hold on! You can’t tell it’s a CPU!

That’s epic! Can we really do this? Wouldn’t you say it’s way better than having all your opponents drop out?

However, we won’t be swapping in CPU characters when you’re playing With Friends. Sorry about that.

And there is one more important thing...

When you have a battle mode that runs online like Basic Brawl, the problem of what to do with hidden characters arises. If one of your opponents chooses a character you haven’t unlocked yet, it will be spoiled for you immediately.

But even without this mode, given the proliferation of the Internet these days, the existence of hidden characters is going to get exposed anyway.

So, this time I’m moving in the direction of not being too hung up on hidden characters.

You can earn most characters by playing through Adventure Mode: The Subspace Emissary. For those of you who look forward to those encounters, I recommend you clear this mode before playing Basic Brawl.

And as the case has always been, I’ve made it so you can play the characters you unlock in battles.