Alternate costume (SSBB)

In Super 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 are 1/2 for the Wii Remote and Nunchuk combination, A and B for the Wii remote alone configuration, and pressing X/Y for the Classic Controller and GameCube controller.

Most characters have six alternate costumes, though, , , and only have five, and  has only four. has twelve costumes; two different outfits with six costumes each, doubling his options and giving him two different outfits for each team in Team Battles. Some characters, namely 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 can choose which colours their team and their opponents' team are, if either team has one of the aforementioned characters on their team. While texture 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 in tournament 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.

Unlike all other characters, Wario has two outfits each with multiple color choices: his biker costume from the WarioWare 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 in Brawl.

Glitch
There is a glitch in Brawl 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 an unused 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.