Completion Time: 42h:29m:00s
Rating: 10/10

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The Big Five-O

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Wow, so now I’ve done fifty of these. 50 GameCube games completed and under my belt, so to speak. That’s roughly 1/12th of the North American GameCube library… ok, so that sounds less impressive. Still, to think I’ve managed to stick with this, even if the schedule is ever fluctuating and non-consistent. It’s fitting that I’ve gone with “Melee” for this milestone, as it’s a relatively big title with a ton of completion aspects behind it, and it was one of the first games I can remember obsessively playing as opposed to just wiling away the time until my next show was on. I completed this a while ago, and have had it sitting in the wings for just this occasion. In fact, there are several largescale GameCube titles to complete in the future (“Tales of Symphonia”, anyone?), and maybe I’ll slot those in for future milestones as well. I need to 100% them at some point, might as well make it special! Get ready for a long one.

Get him Pikachu! I'm rootin' for ya!

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A Battle to End All Battles

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I won’t try to hide it because I don’t want to hide it, this is a game that I adore. And who doesn’t? This is a title that consistently tops the charts for best GameCube games and one of the best fighting games as well, even if it’s more of a “party” fighting game by nature (unless you actively configure it not to be for competitive play). And I’ve loved it ever since I got the chance to play it at a cousin’s house and fell in love with all things “Melee”. It wasn’t until sometime later that I came across it in a bargain bin at Wal-Mart for cheap that I was able to get my own hands on it, and from then on, I played it constantly. Unlocking everything I could along the way as I struggled in Event Matches and blew coins in the Lottery. It’s a fun time, because as a fighting game it’s designed not just to enjoy with others, but in a solo setting as well. I would take my GameCube (and eventually Wii) around to friends’ houses and parties and soon enough dorm rooms as we all played and laughed together at the chaos. But I just as frequently enjoyed my time playing it by myself, going through the various modes and challenges as I attempted to be the best, surprised at what would unlock at every corner. I really miss it when there was a surprise aspect to a fighting game’s roster, as opposed to the entire thing being revealed to you before launch.

Just look at all these beautiful characters

The design is impeccable, plain and simple. This is taken a bit from the sensibilities of Smash Bros. on the N64, but to the nth degree and with a more “blue and black” palette going on. While it was clear in the first title that you were basically imaginary dolls playing pretend war in a kid’s bedroom, this is more likely a masterfully crafted simulation where some evil entity is running through endless battle strategies to determine how to conquer the universe… or something. Master Hand and his off-brother Crazy Hand is still here to participate in the fun, but I never felt like these were dolls to be played with in “Melee”. It’s so much more futuristic and spacey, even the way the music drifts through the floating menus while you’re trying to select what to do. Beautifully immersive.

Don't forget the deep space, on rails shooter for the credits sequence. Glorious

I appreciate how off the wall the roster can be between the N64 version and this one. Obviously as the franchise marched along, we got more and more fighters introduced from all walks of video game life. But characters like Mr. Game & Watch blew my mind as a kid. I had no idea who that little guy was, and others like Ice Climbers were so bizarre in their structure to me that I had to go down the rabbit hole and find out who all these people were. People have often complained about too many characters from the same franchise, and with Melee I at least understand it with Mario (there’s, like, 6 people from that game here not including Donkey Kong, and they’ll only get more!), but adding another guy from Star Fox here and two Fire Emblem men in there gives you a lot of variety to play with, even if some are technically “clones” in that parlance.

Death to all Links

There’s just so much to do here, I don’t think you could ever be bored really. There are 51 event Matches to partake in that gradually get more and more difficult as you unlock them. There are different single player modes to wander through, with varying degrees of difficulty spread throughout. And even the fun nonsense modes like the wireframe melee battles, Break the Targets, and the Home Run Contest can keep you busy with their promise of unlocking something extra for playing them. Even inside of some of these modes there are secrets to discover. In Adventure, you can end up fighting a giant Kirby or having Falco come after you depending on how quickly you make it through certain stages. And if you play through quickly enough on a high enough difficulty, Giga Bowser will come out of the woodwork to fight, and you’ll have to best that disgusting monstrosity. A figure so good they had to bring him back as Bowser’s ultimate in Brawl! There's just so much here in such a tiny disc, and I love it to death.

Bowser and the Triforce, what is this, a crossover? Oh, yeah...

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Completing the Game

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OK, what is there NOT to do here? Fighting games tend to have a lot that goes into them between characters, stages, and usually concept art. But “Melee” takes things to the next level with all the modes and additives and stipulations behind certain unlocks as well. And believe you me, I had to make concessions to what I considered “completion” worthy so as not to go crazy. As a brief list of the things that need to be done:

• Unlock all Characters
• Unlock all Stages
• Unlock all Trophies
• Unlock All-Star Mode
• Unlock Score Display
• Unlock Sound Test
• Beat all Event Mode Matches
• Beat Adventure Mode with all Characters
• Beat Classic Mode with all Characters
• Beat All-Star Mode with all Characters
• Unlock Mew
• Unlock Celebi
• Unlock Sound Test
• Earn all Bonuses

Yeah, so that’s a ton. Now obviously, some of these things feed each other to make it a bit more manageable. Beating modes with all characters will unlock various trophies, and you can get trophies and stages by beating Event Mode matches. And things like Score Display and unlocking the two mythical Pokémon are dependent on the completion of other items in the list as well. But it’s still all over the place, and can be difficult to track if you don’t know what your end goal will be. Thankfully, I’ve played a fresh version of this game on an empty save file so many times just to experience the thrill of unlockables that I knew the major beats of what I would need to achieve.

And if you get stressed out at all, just beat a sandbag up a little

The best part about the characters that can be unlocked is that they all have multiple paths to acquiring them. One is the special path, and these are the ones that most everyone remembers in the game. You want to get Luigi? Well, cross the finish line in Stage One of Adventure Mode with “2” as the last digit in the timer and then you’ll have to beat him and Peach. How about Falco? Defeat 100 Man Melee, which seems easy enough until you get down to around the 40-man mark. Alternatively, you can unlock all the characters by playing 1000 VS Mode matches. And the most important bit you cannot forget is that you also must beat the character 1-on-1 to officially unlock them! The above challenges are just so you can get the chance to unlock them, but you’ve still got to fight for them. Genius!

Just try not to be fooled by rumors of unlocking Sonic or Daisy. They'll come later.

Event mode matches can end up being difficult as you go along, especially if you aren’t a pro fighter, which is the case with me. That “Space Travelers” event has always been the bane of my existence, as Captain Falcon is a huge pain in my ass. I still don’t know how I eventually beat it during this recent run for my first time ever. I relished that. I also had difficulty with “Link’s Adventure” this time around, making me wonder how I ever beat it the first time around as a child. I eventually won by tricking the shadow version of Link into drowning under the pier twice, not my proudest moment but I’ll take it. Continue making your way through these events (and getting stages, characters, and trophies all the while), and you’ll unlock the final event, the hardest of the hard. Beat THAT and you’ll get the Final Destination stage and a Final Destination trophy. Which leads to my next, and largest point: trophies.

Come on, I'm just a little guy. You wouldn't hurt a little guy, would you?

There are many, many trophies in the game. There are three for each character, obtained by beating Adventure Mode, Classic Mode, and All-Star Mode with each character. Others are tied to goals, like the Event Matches, collecting 1000 coins cumulatively, or hitting different collective distances in the Home Run Contest Mode (which has you beat up and launch a sandbag as far as you can with the roster). Hell, this is why I mentioned the bonuses in the list above. Whenever a match is finished, you have a screen giving you points with bonuses assigned. These seem meaningless, and are accomplished for doing everything from getting the most KOs to holding an item the longest to performing a Meteor Spike (a feat I still can’t replicate consistently). The game tracks the bonuses you’ve achieved, and once you’ve gotten them all, you get the Diskun trophy. One of the more arduous prospects is the random element to the other half of the trophy list. You can find some lying around in Adventure/Classic/All-Star Mode, but also as you play and get smashes you earn coins. You spend these at the Lottery to get trophies, and the more you get, the chances of you getting a new one drastically decrease. Soon enough, you’ll reach the point that no matter how many coins you dump in, it’ll always say 0.00% chance of a new trophy. Only then are you done with this “minigame”, if you can even call it that.

Was this little guy worth it? You'd better believe it!

Finally, there are more random elements that don’t do too much for the game. Things like the Sound Test, which you get for unlocking all the stages in the game. Don’t forget about the togglable on-screen Score Display, which requires that you get 5000 KOs in VS Mode. What a pain in the ass! You also have two Mythical Pokémon. Mew will start appearing randomly in Poké Balls once you’ve unlocked all the characters, and Celebi once you’ve unlocked all everything else (sans trophies). But these are random, and have an incredibly low chance to spawn in, so you likely won’t see these too often. The only other thing I could think of touching on would be the Milestones, which I’ve conveniently left off my completion checklist. You see, whenever you accomplish a goal/unlock something/etc., you have a text box pop up congratulating you with a little message about your unlock. I’ve decided not to include these, because they do literally nothing other than exist in a database in an Extras folder, and because some of them are for playing different amounts of VS Mode matches. Including 100,000 and 1,000,000. I’m not doing that. I CAN’T do that. And I’m not going to cheat to get them. So, they’ll sit hidden away in the game for all of time, until I maybe happen to stumble into unlocking them in 2075 just through casual playing.

Only here can you play as a Pokémon while ON a Pokémon

Look, you don’t need me to tell you that this is one of the pinnacles of competitive fighting games, with a scene that still exists to this day. But from the outside of that community looking in, it can’t be stated enough that this is a great, fun party game to hang out with family and friends. It helps that there’s a robust number of secrets and unlockables to constantly reward you for playing every step of the way. We’ve lost a lot of this, and I wish we could get back to this. While maybe it is a tad unfair, this is the game that I’ve always held as a completion standard with other games, and it’s extremely rare that a game’s unlockables and rewards system can ever live up to the hype that I’ve created in my own mind. Here’s to another 50 of these, and have a great 2026!

This is another entry in a series where I go through and complete every GameCube game, as it is the largest part of my video game collection. GameCube Games: 50/652