Pros:
+ Best Smash game in most aspects. It has the best…
• characters (most characters, and they’re extremely well made, including the newcomers)
• music (most music from previous games as well as good new remixes. Additionally, the ability to make playlists and even use the Switch as a player through Ultimate’s sound test is great)
• stages
• items
• balancing (people claim Melee is a better competitive game, but honestly its jankiness and horribly slanted tier list have nothing on Ultimate’s phenomenal balancing act even with 80+ characters. Melee has little excuse with just 26, with ~5 of those being semi-clones too)
• Stage Builder (so many options to make almost anything with the right elements)
• Classic Mode (each character has their own ”route”, which is filled with references to their home series)
+ Spirit Board and Spirits in general are a great concept and are a good way to modify normal games
+ While some of the side content isn’t the greatest, the normal Smash mode’s new options like Squad Strike, Smashdown and Super Sudden Death are all great ways to change up your experience
+ Local Wireless is a great addition, as well as online’s Battle Arenas and Shared Content
Cons:
- Absolutely atrocious online play. How can you mess it up so bad that Smash Wii U ends up being better?
- Why can’t 30-second clips be recorded? Almost no one’s tweeting a funny glitch or cool combo if they have to remember to save the replay, shut down their Switch, take out their SD card and put it in their PC, and drag the video file out. It’s such a weirdly small issue
- Characters’ alternate skins take ages to load on the character select screen for some reason
- Many staple characters like Sonic, Donkey Kong and Ganondorf require an overhaul and don’t represent their more modern games at all anymore, or even their actual abilities in Ganon’s case
- Multiple Echo Fighters aren’t nearly as different as they could be, with Dark Samus (for example) missing many of her differentiating moves that her Smash 4 assist trophy already had but are absent in Ultimate
- Probably a small thing for most but I dislike how they implemented Ridley, his Down-Air is one of the lamest in the game when it could’ve been his iconic pogo stick tail attack
- Most Final Smashes are butchered in service of lame cutscenes instead of properly unique, interesting or counterplayable ones. I guess they tried to make them competitive, but because they’re unfair and banned anyway it just seems like a useless compromise
- There was huge potential for a Subspace Emissary-level story mode with all of the new characters, which was unfortunately decided against, and we were given World of Light, full of the grindy and samey battles from one to another.
- Some of the new side modes are nice additions like the aforementioned Stage Builder and Classic Mode, but others like Multi-Man Smash and All-Star Smash are neutered to subsections of ”Mob Smash”, for example
- While the Stage Builder is great, why does it restrict playing on them to just 4 players when there’s a certain amount of objects/terrain? Makes no sense to me
- (Not really related to the game itself but I’m writing it anyway: I don’t mind the DLC picks, but their release order was so weird. Why end the first pass with a Fire Emblem character and begin the second one with a B-lister from Arms? Both are fun to play, but it can’t have been the best order to include them in the game knowing Smash players’ reputation to complain. At least we got Hero, Banjo, Steve, Sephiroth and Sora)
+ Best Smash game in most aspects. It has the best…
• characters (most characters, and they’re extremely well made, including the newcomers)
• music (most music from previous games as well as good new remixes. Additionally, the ability to make playlists and even use the Switch as a player through Ultimate’s sound test is great)
• stages
• items
• balancing (people claim Melee is a better competitive game, but honestly its jankiness and horribly slanted tier list have nothing on Ultimate’s phenomenal balancing act even with 80+ characters. Melee has little excuse with just 26, with ~5 of those being semi-clones too)
• Stage Builder (so many options to make almost anything with the right elements)
• Classic Mode (each character has their own ”route”, which is filled with references to their home series)
+ Spirit Board and Spirits in general are a great concept and are a good way to modify normal games
+ While some of the side content isn’t the greatest, the normal Smash mode’s new options like Squad Strike, Smashdown and Super Sudden Death are all great ways to change up your experience
+ Local Wireless is a great addition, as well as online’s Battle Arenas and Shared Content
Cons:
- Absolutely atrocious online play. How can you mess it up so bad that Smash Wii U ends up being better?
- Why can’t 30-second clips be recorded? Almost no one’s tweeting a funny glitch or cool combo if they have to remember to save the replay, shut down their Switch, take out their SD card and put it in their PC, and drag the video file out. It’s such a weirdly small issue
- Characters’ alternate skins take ages to load on the character select screen for some reason
- Many staple characters like Sonic, Donkey Kong and Ganondorf require an overhaul and don’t represent their more modern games at all anymore, or even their actual abilities in Ganon’s case
- Multiple Echo Fighters aren’t nearly as different as they could be, with Dark Samus (for example) missing many of her differentiating moves that her Smash 4 assist trophy already had but are absent in Ultimate
- Probably a small thing for most but I dislike how they implemented Ridley, his Down-Air is one of the lamest in the game when it could’ve been his iconic pogo stick tail attack
- Most Final Smashes are butchered in service of lame cutscenes instead of properly unique, interesting or counterplayable ones. I guess they tried to make them competitive, but because they’re unfair and banned anyway it just seems like a useless compromise
- There was huge potential for a Subspace Emissary-level story mode with all of the new characters, which was unfortunately decided against, and we were given World of Light, full of the grindy and samey battles from one to another.
- Some of the new side modes are nice additions like the aforementioned Stage Builder and Classic Mode, but others like Multi-Man Smash and All-Star Smash are neutered to subsections of ”Mob Smash”, for example
- While the Stage Builder is great, why does it restrict playing on them to just 4 players when there’s a certain amount of objects/terrain? Makes no sense to me
- (Not really related to the game itself but I’m writing it anyway: I don’t mind the DLC picks, but their release order was so weird. Why end the first pass with a Fire Emblem character and begin the second one with a B-lister from Arms? Both are fun to play, but it can’t have been the best order to include them in the game knowing Smash players’ reputation to complain. At least we got Hero, Banjo, Steve, Sephiroth and Sora)