Preston Ward Condra Ranks All 35 Super Smash Bros 64 & Melee Stages

by Preston Ward Condra

A project I initially made back in June 2009. I critiqued, discussed and ranked all of the Super Smash Bros 64 and Melee stages from worst to best. I wrote this down, when I was 15 years old. As with all of my other stories, I wrote over 10 years ago? I won't be fixing any of the spelling mistakes, that may or may not be present here. Enjoy reading this now ladies and gentlemen.

6. 31 - Brinstar Depths

If you can't tell by now on the countdown, Melee has some of the worst stages in the entire series, IMO. The fifth Melee stage in a row to appear on the countdown goes to, Brinstar Depths.

Brinstar Depths has a few notable problems. The biggest problems I had with this stage was the, annoying shifting in the stage and the stage itself as whole, was very small to fight on. Shifting would occur in this stage very often and would happen likely every 20-30 seconds when a fight with you and your friends is going on. Kraid would shift and turn the main platform around causing you to find a platform to stay on, until the stage turned back to it's normal platform area.

The shifting is a big problem because, whenever the stage was shifting, you were forced to find one of only two nearby small platforms to recover on. Another notable problem was that, while the stage was shifting, the edges of the stage likely used as recovery just like other stages in Melee, could not be grabbed and used for a recovery leading to a result a KO on yourself.

The stage was fairly small to fight on. Whenever you felt like fighting with your friends on the main circle platform in the stage, multiple objects like pillars would block most of your attacks on your opponents and not effecting them. You were given barely any room to jump and float around in the stage due to, so much random objects in view blocking yourself in movement while you were trying to move on the stage.

The only positive thing I have for this stage is that, the animation is decent. The music that plays on this stage was one of my favorite main themes in Melee and unlike Brinstar, you can tell that this stage shows a nice amount of Metroid personality where Brinstar didn't. Overall like I stated before, animation does not make a stage fun. It's the gameplay. Not a very fun stage at all.