Nick All-Star Brawl in it's original state can be best described as if a dictator and their corrupt military organization landed a deal with Viacom to develop a platform fighter, and embezzled 98% of the budget to develop useless aircraft that die to low flying pigeons. This then left NASB with so little drip, that upon exchanging currency or trading goods for it immediately dehydrated you to the point of becoming a flattened corpse on the ground.

Since then some characters were added, items were brought in to actually bring spice to the dreaded concept of casual play, and the characters now are allowed to display "character" via voice acting rather than just being dummies with some paint applied to them and funny looking Mortal Kombat animations. I mean, after all why would you even bother bringing in Hugh Neutron if you weren't getting Mark DeCarlo? Granted I asked this very same question a year ago about the lack of voice acting and Nigel Thornberry's entire existence on the base roster, so what the hell do I know? Even if you can't get Tim Curry in the studio, don't throw speechless Nigel at me! It's just nice to hear Patrick actually go "THIS IS PATRICK" as he smashes the Krusty Krab phone over Lincoln Loud's pathetic noggin.

Some of the stages I think suffer a bout of purism competitive nonsense, with little gimmicks and non-chaotic platform design. I know you still need the Battlefield and Final Destination shit, but there could be more going on in some of the illegal stages. They actually made a great choice adding Double Dare as a stage, but the best they could come up with was a pit of slime lining the bottom of the stage, in addition to lagging the game somehow. My robust supercomputer that I utilize for supervillainy can run Hitman 3 at max settings effortlessly, but the Double Dare stage in NASB? It was like I never left my bronze age laptop that would keel over from running tower defense flash games. The best stage for me actually ended up being the kitchen countertop stage based on the series created by well-known creeper John K., where every fighter is lactose intolerant and capable of dying to Chex cereal. Part of me wants to like the soundtrack, since it attempts to mimic the feel of the shows the game is trying to imitate, but a lot of it just comes off flat. I do however need to give a special shout out to this crazy-ass application of the Howie Scream here that is actually pretty genius.

I could talk about balance and instantly grow a neckbeard as my deodorant's effects wear off immediately, but the modern day concept of researching more advanced character-specific tech by having to visit a discord server makes my brain swell into a heavily-concussed state. Realistically, I would not be playing this for longer than a weekend anyway, and that's assuming I try to coerce every friend and cohort I know into playing with me. My only real complaint about the gameplay itself is that I feel like a lot of the characters aren't really that fun to play as, and a bunch of them feel very similar. Sorry to say, but Peter Piranha here solos the cast of NASB. I could also just be sore about them being creatively bankrupt on day 0 of development and giving Helga Pataki a Marth counter.

Single player is still pretty much an afterthought, but after Sakurai decided I needed to waste my time unlocking series mainstays by fighting annoying SNK AI for nine hours prior to finally unlocking Ridley, I can safely say I don't care anymore. No, I did not get the appeal, and I never will.

My ultimate judgment on NASB, is that for an actual finished product on Steam at a sale price of around 14 or 15 usd with DLC included, it's actually a decent game. If I had played this last year and bought it for 40-50 and got an unfinished beta, I would probably be breathing hot fire and rampaging through Philadelphia. It's fine now!