September 12, 2007 - Welcome to IGN Wii's official Super Smash Bros. Brawl FAQ, your one-stop destination for anything and everything related to Nintendo's upcoming Wii mega-fighter. In the text to follow, you will find the most comprehensive compilation of information about the game, from character and stage breakdowns to gameplay details, soundtrack information, items and pick-ups listings, screenshots, and much more. Our FAQ will be updated every day, as more details about the brawler become available. You might want to bookmark this page, because this is the place where you'll find the Most Recent Updates posted every single weekday.

Most Recent Updates

New details and revelations drop on a weekdaily basis for Brawl, courtesy of game director Masahiro Sakurai's five-a-week blog updates at SmashBros.com. Every day we'll be collecting the new info presented there and integrating it here into the FAQ – and here on Page 1 is your place to find out what the most recent updates have been.

We've been waiting a while for this one, but we already knew about it – it's the Battleship Halberd stage. Meta Knight's massive, intimidating airship first served as the setting of Kirby's adventure, The Revenge of Meta-Knight, in the Kirby Super Star game from the SNES. Now it's back again, with a greatly expanded role – the Halberd has been seen in videos being used as the base of operations for the evil Subspace Army. We don't know if Meta Knight himself has joined forces with those primitive Primids, but we can be sure that the Halberd will play host to one of Brawl's many battling arenas. The stage begins as a fairly standard platform set-up, where you fight the good fight while the Battleship itself soars around in the background. But then the fight will transition to the main deck of the Halberd, where on-board weaponry awaits to make your life a little more painful – lasers and a flexible "grabbing arm" will lash out from the background to cause trouble for everyone. The ship will star in both multiplayer and single-player modes, but Sakurai's holding on to the particulars of why for a later date.

It's confirmed – Sakurai reads Smash It Up! He must, because this newly confirmed Assist Trophy character was just mentioned in Volume 7 of that speculation series a few days ago, as a potential Sister to join the Smash Brothers fray. She's not a playable fighter, as some had hoped, but she will be using her signature attack from the first US-released Fire Emblem game from the Game Boy Advance. She'll appear on stage once summoned, pause and kneel to build up her strength, then disappear in a flash as she delivers a slicing strike with her Mani Katti. It's great to see Lyndis get to represent the female fighters of the Fire Emblem franchise, and to see that some of our speculation now seems to be paying off – what other characters mentioned in the Smash It Up! series do you think will make it now?

We're shuffling up the FAQ a bit today with the addition of two new sections, a swap of the Most Recent Updates here to Page 1, and the movement of the History of the Series discussion to Page 2. Additionally, we've got the info revealed from today's SmashBros.com update quantified and clarified, and placed in the appropriate locations – you can learn more about the new Poke Ball Pokemon Munchlax in the Pokemon section, and the Items section is now home to analysis of the returning item, Lip's Stick. Browse through to all of the all-new content by using the upgraded navigation map above.

It's all about the tunes today. This update was massive, filling three separate blog posts on SmashBros.com and revealing a wealth of new information for those interested in Brawl's audio aspects. The "My Music" mode headlined the announcements, and will represent a utility in Super Smash Bros. Brawl that allows you to choose from a variety of different songs from throughout Nintendo's history to play as the background music to each stage.

Melee took one step toward this idea, as some of its arenas had two different tunes you could choose from – but here, it appears every level will have access to far more than that. Playing on the Zelda-themed Bridge of Eldin stage? You can select a tune from Twilight Princess, or Ocarina of Time, or even the original Legend of Zelda. Brawling in Delfino Plaza? The music of the Mario series is open to you. And so on and so forth. Sakurai has said that not every track made available will be remixed in "Brawl" style, so even old-school Nintendo purists who'd prefer their tunes untouched will have something to be happy about.

The disc sitting next to Mario there is a new collectible item, the CD. Like the trophies in Melee, CDs will be scattered around in several places throughout Brawl's adventure, and picking up each one will add a new soundtrack piece to your available listening library in the My Music mode. There were several hundred of the collectible trophies in Melee – could we be in for several hundred different song selections in Brawl?

And, topping it all off, Sakurai reposted the Super Smash Bros. Brawl Main Theme, notably heard in the game's trailer videos, and the newly-remixed version of the Pokemon series' "Gym" song, which will be one of the options available to play in the background of Pokemon Stadium 2. Both are available as mp3 downloads in our Music section.

After a couple of uneventful days offering no real, new info, good old Masahiro has come through with something fresh to talk about – F.L.U.D.D. The yellow, talking, water-spewing backpack is back from Super Mario Sunshine, and it appears in place as Mario's new Down + B Special Move.

This is a novel revelation, because it represents the first confirmation of a real change to the moveset of an established series character. We've previously seen slight alterations, like Link's Boomerang gaining some wind-generating properties, but a total swap-out of an existing move for something totally different hasn't been seen until now. F.L.U.D.D. will fire forth a chargeable water stream that will do no damage, but will provide a lot of push-back power – potentially serving Mario well when he needs to attack enemies who are trying to get back onto solid ground after being blown away. The move will replace his old Down + B from Melee, the Mario Tornado, but Sakurai assures us that that spinning strike is still available elsewhere in Mario's repetoire.

The revelation of F.L.U.D.D.'s addition naturally suggests an appearance by Luigi's Poltergust 3000, the other E. Gadd backpack device granted to a Mario Brother in the GameCube era. Our character speculation series, Smash It Up!, looked into that possibility in Volume 4 – check it out there. But it's an almost assured alteration for the Man in Green now, as he too had the "Luigi Tornado" as his Down + B move before.

The second part of today's update concerns the Pokemon Stadium stage, now reinvisioned as Pokemon Stadium 2. Like in Smash Bros. Melee, the floating Pokemon battle arena will have its geography altered during the course of each battle, but this time the terrain types are Flying, Ice, Electric and Ground.

In the Ground terrain change, a massive mound of earth and dirt will rise up to take center stage, while Ground-type Pokemon like Cubone and Dugtrio make cameo appearances in the background. Flying monsters like Skarmory and Drifloon will soar about behind the action as every characters jumping ability is maxed out in the Flying terrain, and the Ice terrain may give monsters like Glalie and Snover a place to call home while you're trying to tack down traction on the slipping, sliding surface area below. No screenshots have been revealed of the Electric terrain, but it'll surely be the perfect place for Pikachu to pound his opponents.