Ever since its announcement, the wait has felt long for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which has finally released for the Nintendo Switch. Super Smash Bros. is a unique take on the fighting game genre, and Ultimate is the sixth its series. It is known for taking characters from across several Nintendo franchises (and some third-party games) and making them beat each other up. In this installment, every character that has been playable in previous Super Smash Bros. games is making a return. “Everyone is here.” There are some new additions to the cast as well. This puts the roster of fighters at 74 characters within the base game, with six more on the way with upcoming DLC. Basic addition dictates that there will be 80 in total, but I will judge the current game on its merits. While some notable features of past games in the series are not returning, there is no shortage of content. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is easily Nintendo’s most ambitious Smash Bros. title to date.
While most fighting games have players deplete the health of an opponent and memorize complex button combinations, Super Smash Bros. focuses on simple mechanics; Ultimate is no different. The standard Smash mode has characters attack their opponents to knock them out of an arena. Landing an attack compiles damage, represented with a percentage. The higher the percentage, the easier it is to send a character flying. Despite its simplicity, the series owes the depth of its gameplay to how differently each fighter controls. Everyone has their own moveset, speed, weight, and power. Dodging and shielding have been tweaked slightly in order to add consequence to focusing too much on defense. In general, Ultimate is more fast-paced and skill-based than recent series entries, which is what the most hardcore fans have been demanding, but it remains accessible to casual players and newcomers.
The one thing that Smash has always struggled with, and continues to do so, is finding a perfect balance. With so many characters, it is easy to say that will never be the case. There will always be a conversation in the community about “tiers” or how characters rank against each other. When it comes to Final Smash abilities, which are the fighters’ ultimate attacks, some attacks are far better at getting KOs, even against multiple opponents, while others are weak or easily evaded. Thankfully, any fighter can hold their own, and there are likely to be future balance patches that throw any understanding of how they compare to one another out the window anyway.
On the matter of characters, there are initially eight available; the same eight fighters that were first playable in the original Super Smash Bros. Thankfully, unlocking new characters is not hard to do. They tend to appear after a couple rounds of multiplayer matches or the like. Defeating that character in a match unlocks them, and these matches are also typically easy. Another way of unlocking them is to play through the Adventure Mode. Defeating fighters in this mode will unlock them in all other game modes. I honestly think it was unnecessary to lock away 66 of the characters when Nintendo was bold enough to include so many of them in the first place. I had the urge to play as some of the new characters added to Ultimate, but there felt like a slim and random chance that I would encounter them among all the other fighters that yet to be unlocked.
Smash mode, the standard versus mode and the core of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, is deeper than ever. There are many customization options for matches and tournaments, and now rulesets can be saved so to always have a particular set-up for any occasion. Another significant change is that the stage selection precedes the fighter selection screen. This allows players to pick a character that suits the stage they fight on. As a longtime Smash player, I am still thrown off by it, but I only nitpick because I am set in my ways. Stage now also have a Battlefield version of their layout, too, so there is yet more variety for those who want to fight in a simple arena. For me, personally, the most welcome change the ability to turn off stage hazards. There are some stages that have always lost appeal because a random element in the map that might steal a KO or tilt the balance of the match, but now there is less concern of that happening.
Classic Mode returns for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. In this mode, each fighter has a fixed set of matches to advance through, with a boss to face at the very end; this time, that boss may not always be Master Hand or Crazy Hand as it has been in past titles. The difficulty of this mode is on a scale from 0.0 to 9.9. When starting a game in Classic Mode, you can scale it as high as 5.0. Completing matches raises the difficulty while failing them lowers it. Your character only has one stock, or life, and losing that gives you a game over with the option of continuing at the cost of in-game currency. If you have a ticket, you can spend it instead to continue the game without lowering the difficulty. I have always enjoyed the Classic Mode, but advancing through several matches as Link to face Ganon at the end instead of the usual Master Hand is a nice break from expectations.
Mob Smash is a mode in which you fight waves of fighters in a Battlefield type arena of your choice. There are three styles of matches here. In Century Smash, you can fight 100 fighters; most of them are the three types of Mii fighter. There is also the Cruel Smash, in which the fighters are extremely difficult. Finally, there is All-Star Smash, in which you fight all 74 of the entire roster of characters. The characters appear in order of which they first appeared in a video game. For All-Stars, I wish there was a break in the waves or a choice of difficulty settings. The fighters appear too quickly and at once to really appreciate the battle against them. I am sure that the way this mode functioned was a consequence of the massive cast list, but I think that would be all more reason for a short respite between fights.
I want to speak at length about the Adventure Mode called “World of Light”, a massive game mode that may take most first time players over ten hours to complete. To start, there are three difficulty settings from easy to hard, and I chose to play on normal. In World of Light, there are challenges to be found even for experienced Smash players. The three types of battles you will fight on this map will be against Spirits, fighters, or bosses. Spirits are the most common, and defeating them adds them to your team. The Adventure Mode of Ultimate is comparable to the Event Mode of past Smash games except there is more freedom to how different challenges are approached on the large map of World of Light.
Some challenges may be too difficult at first, even seemingly unfair and unbalanced, but finding Spirits that help you tackle these tougher missions is always encouraged. Equipping Spirits can often grant status boosts or nullify environmental hazards among other things. You will usually find that a Spirit you need for a particular mission is close by on the map. When you defeat a Spirit, you can also earn skill point that can be redeemed toward abilities that can give you an edge in fights.
I personally enjoyed World of Light, its cinematics, and especially the Lifelight theme that accompanied it, but it did have some notable flaws. At its best, it really felt like an adventure and paid homage to Nintendo franchises, which I want to see more of in a game that pays as much fanservice as possible to my favorite developer. There was an area of the map the completely rips Kongo Jungle, the first world of Donkey Kong Country, straight out its game. The nostalgia grabs are appreciated, but when there were puzzles thrown into the mix, I found it even more fun. The problem is that the map is so big with no fast traveling of any kind, which makes the frequent backtracking tedious. There is also no good way of tracking your progress.
Finally, in the adventure mode, you start with Kirby and only Kirby; other characters have to be found and defeated in Adventure Mode to unlock them. I adore Kirby, but I will say it again. Having so many characters but locking nearly all of them away does not make sense to me. World of Light does not force you to play as any particular character to complete missions, so being able to play as any character of your choice could only have helped. Plus, some fighters cannot be unlocked in this mode until the very end of this mode, so there is a chance that some will have to wait a long time before having the chance to use their main.
I will admit that I am somewhat disappointed that Ultimate has always done away with one of the series staples since Super Smash Bros. Melee: trophies. They may have been nothing but trinkets, but I love me some trinkets. Anyone who has seen my amiibo collection knows that. Still, it was a worthy trade-off. Nintendo put all their efforts into focusing on developing the gameplay rather than fluff, and it shows. Even without trophies, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is packed with content. The number of characters alone goes far beyond usual expectations, but the amount of stages and songs is almost excessive. It will surely require several days of gameplay to unpack it all.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has a lot to offer for quality content, and while it has trimmed away some features of past games, it does so while focusing on the most important aspect of its gameplay. It manages to have a massive selection of playable characters while making most of them unique and fun to play as. It is a shame that nearly all the fighters are not usable at the start, Ultimate facilitates unlocking them regularly. Long after you have unlocked them all, there will still be plenty of reasons come back for more. Super Smas Bros. Ultimate really earns the name “Ultimate”.
