Hype train first, functional video game second

Fucking terrible, can’t believe everyone likes this overhyped shit. hardly any content to enjoy by yourself and an embarrassment of a story mode. GARBAGE I TELL YOU. Oh and don’t even get me started on the character roster, fucking MID AS HELL. Not a single character even matters to video game history, none of this matters when you don’t have motherfuckin GWIMBLY! DUH HELLO?!?!? I cannot in good faith waste my hard earned money to cavemen that live under a gigantic Stonehenge-ass rock of a company that is Nintendo

half a star for kazuya

My favorite Smash game that adds every character and nearly every stage and more. It improves upon the gameplay of Smash 4 by once again speeding up the game a little. The new roster additions were pretty good and by the end of the DLC passes, I got both of the characters I wanted and more. While it does have more single-player content than Smash 4, World of Light isn't quite on the same level as Subspace Emissary. They also replaced trophies in this game with spirits which I'm slightly peeved about but can understand why they make the choice to get rid of them. While I haven't gotten them all, spirit collecting is still a fun challenge. Like pretty much any other Smash game, its best when played with friends. I have spent many hours playing with friends or other people online or at other places. The biggest gripe I have ironically enough is the online. When the connection isn't perfect, playing the game online is absolutely miserable. However, when I don't have connection issues its quite fun. Out of all the other games on the Switch, this one is easily my favorite and the best possible conclusion to Smash (for now).

If you put me in a room of trash talkers who want to play this particular Smash Bros., I'll gladly pick Samus and snipe people like a cheap bastard and have a great time. (And by "play," I mean a multiplayer brawl, not a stripped-down one-on-one fight. I'm sorry tourney nerds, but Smash is an uninteresting one-on-one fighter. You suck the fun and uniqueness out of Smash Bros. when you sanitize it in the name of some conservative notion of competition.)

But from a critical standpoint, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has been spit-polished to the point where it registers as very made-by-committee and antiseptic. Its distinguishing characteristic is a ridiculous amount of content (a word that shouldn't be confused with creativity). The number of characters is obscene when one recalls the main appeal of Smash Bros.: pitting the most iconic and popular Nintendo characters against each other. Now everyone shows up for the sake of random fan demands and Nintendo's almighty bottom line. All the stars from the non-Nintendo games, as well as the Nintendo-branded characters who don't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as your Marios and Kirbys, betray the notion that we're watching larger-than-life Nintendo figures fight it out. I don't care about Ryu from Street Fighter trading blows with Cloud from Final Fantasy. Does Ryu really need to be in another game? I can raise the same question for others. Ultimate may not be an open world game, but it champions a similar type of quantity-over-quality philosophy. Meanwhile, as fine-tuned as the controls are in Ultimate, I still vastly prefer the faster flow and more dangerous vibes of Super Smash. Bros Melee (which introduced the most fascinating stages in the series: Hyrule Kingdom and Brinstar Depths). Ultimate feels quite safe despite the lofty implications of its title.

Yes, I 100%ed this game. My save file contains one copy of every spirit, and I completed World of Light twice.

You know why?

Because I keep wishing we got a new Subspace Emissary, or at least an Adventure Mode like Melee's.

This message brought to you by the Single-Player Campaign Mode Smash Gang

This is meant to be more of a review of the environment that this game created, as I have very little credibility when it comes to the critique of its mechanics. I don’t play Super Smash Brothers Ultimate competitively, and I have rarely looked into the deeper mechanics at play. I still get frustrated by Sephiroth’s neutral B catching me while not paying attention, and I frequently spam Banjo’s side B to my friends’ equal dismay. If you’re interested in reading the experiences of a high-level Ultimate player, this is not the place to do it. What this game accomplishes on the gameplay side of things is enough to facilitate having fun with my friends, and that is all it has to do. Smash Ultimate was more than just a game to me in the excess of three years it has continually been in the public eye for. While the character reveals for Smash 4 were monumentally hype, especially as it opened to door for characters like Cloud and Ryu, Smash Ultimate solidified the “character reveal event” with the Fighter Passes. Everyone would come together for each Nintendo event with bated breath, wondering if enough time finally passed for a new fighter to be revealed. These characters captured everyone’s imagination, and Joker’s reveal gave credence to anyone’s left field bozo pick. Dante? Definitely in the conversation. Doom Guy? Not too out there. Steve from Minecraft? He actually made it in, and it still feels like a fever dream. The funny thing is that, other than Sephiroth, I don’t particularly love any of the DLC characters included. Even Sephiroth, while a very left field pick, didn’t really wow me in the same way Cloud did for obvious reasons. The truly surprising door was already opened by the likes of Cloud and Joker, and every character that followed them was a little less surprising. The community aspect was still there for characters like Byleth and Min Min, but nobody’s dream was coming true. That kind of cynicism that felt so antithetical to Smash Brothers, the series that embodied everyone’s childhood fantasies, started to creep its way in. For the final DLC character, it felt like almost an inevitability that they would disappoint. Despite the overwhelming amount of soul that Masahiro Sakurai (one of my all-time favorite creators) has given Smash Brothers as a series, and the equally astounding care put into each character in their every facet, even I started to feel like Smash Ultimate would end on a down note. I was ready to post some unoriginal and unfunny joke when I believed the character would be from Dark Souls. I was anticipating my cynicism to be rewarded as it usually is in this world, and I would feel the momentary satisfaction of coming down on this labor of love that shouldn’t exist. It wasn’t even the knowledge that Sora would be the final character that quelled this feeling. I had considered Sora to be a leading candidate despite the licensing nightmare that is his existence. It was the love that was put into his cinematic, and the silly but bittersweet knowledge that Sakurai’s wild ride was coming to an end.

I don’t even like Kingdom Hearts that much. I think 2 is a fine game, and Birth By Sleep and underrated gem, but the rest of the series I can take or leave. I grew up banging my head against the original Kingdom Hearts, having restarted it countless times. The game was difficult, and the narrative was like nothing I had seen in any other game. I never grew to like the game, but I certainly remember it like few other games. I would probably call Kingdom Hearts my least favorite series that I cannot get enough of. There are times where I truly hate it with a passion, but there are other moments that still get me teary eyed. I’m not sure why I expected to look upon a hypothetical Sora reveal with steely eyed stoicism. Any representative from a game that I had played tirelessly before the age of 10 would have had an effect on me. Sakurai could have thrown Crash Bandicoot in and my heart would have fluttered a little bit. Sora, in his great experience with doing so, unlocked something in my heart. The unashamed love that I could have for something, a feeling that I seldom experience in my 20s, came back to me for a while. I sat watching this silly sales pitch for downloadable content in a game I have spent over $100 on, knowing exactly what it was, but not being able to stop the tears in my eyes. The image of all these characters I’ve spent my life with emerging from their plastic state and having one last hurrah for their final visitor made me more emotional than I should be willing to admit. I don’t know if there’s going to be anything like this for the rest of my life, but I can’t imagine it will be as exciting. I’m not part of the “smash community” (and I don’t know if I want to be), but I am part of the internet community. It’s this larger group of people that made Smash Ultimate special. I couldn’t go two hours after the reveal of Sora before I heard the news being talked about among people outside of my circles in real life. Everyone, regardless of how they felt about this character or how much they play Smash Brothers, knew that there was magic in what Sakurai did. In retrospect, that magic was always present, and we didn’t appreciate it enough. It’s not until summer vacation is over that you regret taking it for granted.

It's hard to determine what is the biggest emblem of soulless capitalism that I've ever seen in the gaming sphere. Triple A developers put stuff like it out all the time. Games with no soul, no ambition. Even though there are probably worse offenders out there, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate takes the cake for me.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate doesn't have anything it wants to say. It's a masturbatory experience, one full of references to the history of the gaming industry devoid of any meaning beyond understanding the nature of the reference. It parades around facsimile of characters you recognize with no intention of making them meaningful, of recontextualizing them. The fact that people see a character they like getting into Smash as an honor shocks me; it only ensures that they'll be flanderized to the point of unrecognizability. A shell of a game with no identity aside from the vague notion of video games.

But hey, that guy you like is in it, right? Might as well have eternal brand loyalty or whatever.

The netcode sucks, the single player options are utterly barebones, my one attempt at trying to learn this game competitively only resulted in utter frustration at how bad the buffering system feels, and the obnoxious hype culture surrounding this game's speculation scene has resulted in some of the most agonizing discussions I've seen surrounding a video game but goddamn, the time I played this for hours with two friends while talking over Discord was one of the most magical experiences I've ever had playing a video game