Three awesome games. Three best-selling games. Three "get your friends together and enjoy the arguable best multiplayer experience available" games. But at the same time, three very similar games. It's hard to complain when each title is crafted with such enormous care. I get the impression that when HAL Laboratory develops a Smash Bros game, it's reminiscent of a fast food commercial which shows a burger being assembled as if it were spacecraft. But unlike the festering pile of sub-animal meat and heart-poisoning grease you'd get at your average fast food restaurant, the Super Smash Bros series is the real deal. But how many generations can withstand the same basic gameplay? Can they survive merely by adding additional characters until we're playing as Bubbles from Clu Clu Land against Tin Star?
Some sort of shake-up to the basic formula seems likely, but it's tough to foresee what that could be. Perhaps a merging of the basic formula and The Subspace Emissary, where the gameplay becomes more Power Stone-esque. A jump to 3D may also be in the works, but there's only so much that the addition of an axis can do.
