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.

10. 27 - Yoshi's Island (Melee)

The Melee stage trend happens once more on the countdown with Yoshi's Island as the next Melee stage to appear on the countdown. While Yoshi's Island is a stage that offers great music and unlike some other stages on the countdown where it's a stage that has interactivity, it's ruined by some of the cheap and annoying interactivity that happens on it making Yoshi's Island, (Melee version) not a very good stage to enjoy playing friends on.

The biggest problem I had with Yoshi's Island, was the annoying and cheap spinning yellow blocks in this stage. The slightest attack on any of the three pairs of spinning yellow blocks in this stage would cause the yellow blocks to spin around on you and causing some of your main attacks to be destroyed, blocked or reflected back at you if you were to land your attack on your opponent if you were battling with him/her on the top of the Yellow blocks.

Another annoying problem with the Yellow blocks is that the bottom pair of blocks near the center of the stage, were very cheap and annoying. Since the yellow blocks spin every time you attack it, it was easy for you get trapped underneath a KO pit where the pair of the yellow blocks were. If you were trying to recover and get back to the main fighting action on the stage, your opponent could easily come up to you, attack the blocks and by doing so, would have the blocks spin around in the direction you are in where the bottomless KO pit was and it would force you down the pit, resulting of a cheap and annoying KO. This happens more often then you think because, it IS so easy for the yellow blocks to be attacked on this stage and ruin some attack combos and whatnot on your opponents for you in this stage. Major balancing issues here.

The music itself however, is pretty good. The main gameplay theme that plays on this stage is a Western Remix theme from Super Mario World on the Super Nintendo. However once again, music and animation does not make a stage wonderful. It's the gameplay and no matter what, that is what comes first, no matter how good or bad the music and animation is on this stage.

Another minor problem I had with this stage is, the weird and boring stage design in this stage. There is no real stage recovery in this stage other then able to grab and recover by grabbing the Warp Pipe slide on the left side of the stage. The right side of the stage is an upwards hill with no recovery whatsoever. It's extremely easy for your opponent to simply throw, toss and trap you on the right side of the stage resulting of a Cheap KO.

With the weird stage layout in this stage, the annoying and cheap spinning yellow blocks in this stage and the stage being fairly small to fight on, makes Yoshi's Island not a very good stage to enjoy playing friends on and very forgettable like many other Melee stages.