NOTE: Every claimed source needs a cross-reference link; claimed sources need to be plausible, not horrendously obscure; default costumes usually don't need descriptions since they are not alternate costumes; returning costumes original toSmash do not need references to their appearances in previousSmash games.

A battle between fourMarios, each one in different colors.Masahiro Sakurai referred to the implementation of costumes as "one of the joys ofSmash".

Four ofPeach's alternate costumes. Note that one resemblesDaisy.

InSuper Smash Bros. Brawl, players can pick different alternate costumes for their character by cycling through a list of up to six choices for a total of 222 costumes in the game. The buttons used to cycle are1/2 for the Wii Remote and Nunchuk combination, A and B for the Wii remote alone configuration, and pressingX/Y for theClassic Controller andGameCube controller.

Most characters have six alternate costumes, thoughJigglypuff,Lucario,Pokémon Trainer, andSonic only have five, andPikachu has only four.Wario has twelve costumes; two different outfits with six costumes each, doubling his options and giving him two different outfits for each team inTeam Battles. Lucario, Pokémon Trainer, and Sonic have sets of alternate costumes that can be difficult to distinguish from each other in a match. As such, tournaments have the "colorblind rule" in doubles matches, where a player (colorblind or not) can choose which colours their team and their opponents' team are, if either team has one of the aforementioned characters on their team. Whiletexture hacks are usually discouraged from being used in tournaments, if not flat-out disallowed, it is usually acceptable to use simple texture hacks on these characters to make the color difference between their team palettes more obvious.

When selecting characters intournament mode, instead of displaying the character's colored image of the chosen costume, a colored bar is displayed in the player list. This color is usually an intuitive indicator of which costume has been chosen, but there are several cases where costumes are given strange colors, such as giving cyan to Ike's default blue-brown getup, or using orange or yellow when the opposite is clearly more correct.

In Wi-Fi, Tournament and Team Brawls, if two identical characters share the same alternate costume, the second character will have a lighter tint in their appearance. A third character on the same team uses a darker tint. The fourth character's tint is even darker than the third character's. It is generally quite difficult to distinguish from the third character's color scheme.

The order of the palette swaps for each character are sorted in the order in which they appear on the character selection screen.

Bowser

Captain Falcon

Diddy Kong

Donkey Kong

Falco

Fox

Ganondorf

Ice Climbers

Popo and Nana switch positions for their red, black, and white costumes, and their head icons change to match, but Popo and Nana do not switch positions on the character selection screen like inMelee.

Ike

Jigglypuff

King Dedede

Kirby

Link

Lucario

Lucas

Luigi

Mario

Marth

Meta Knight

Mr. Game & Watch

Ness

Olimar

Peach

Pikachu

At four costume choices, Pikachu has the least amount of alternate costumes inBrawl.

Pit

Pokémon Trainer

R.O.B.

Samus/Zero Suit Samus

Zero Suit Samus's costumes are complementary toSamus's respective costumes.

Snake

Most of Snake's costumes seem to be based on different camouflage uniforms worn byNaked Snake inMetal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

Sonic

Sonic is the only non-Pokémon character to have fewer than six alternate costumes.

Toon Link

Wario

Unlike all other characters, Wario has two outfits each with multiple color choices: his biker costume from theWarioWare games, which is his default costume, and his classic overalls. This doubles his alternate costume choices. There are a total of 12 costume choices for Wario inBrawl.

Wario's overalls closely resemble the cartoonish look in both the Mario and Wario games, in contrast to Mario, Luigi, and Waluigi, who were given more realistic-looking overalls and his current appearance inMario Party 4 onwards.

Wolf

Yoshi

All of Yoshi's costumes appear as different variations of the Yoshi species inYoshi's Story.^[1]

Zelda/Sheik

Glitch

There isa glitch inBrawl that allows multiple players to be the same character with the same color scheme, without the shading seen in Team Battles.

This glitch can also occur when every player selects random, and multiple players end up playing as the same character.

Trivia

• Captain Falcon's red outfit actually has one file for each available PAL language in the game (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian). While presumably done so localizers could edit the "Blood Hawk" on the back to match the current language, this appears to have been skipped or glossed over, as there is no difference between the files.
• Mr. Game & Watch only has one file for his model and textures. This indicates that the color variations come from tinting or blending the textures, instead of pre-rendered bitmaps.
• Luigi has anunused blue costume in the game's data; this costume is slightly lighter in color than the used one, and the reason for its removal is unknown.

References

• Palette swaps (SSBB)
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl

• Featured articles