Super Smash Bros. is such a unique slab of video game history. I’d like to think one of the reasons so many people care about Smash Bros. is because it’s a game that made people want to care about games. Super Smash Bros. Melee presented its players with so many interesting characters, and history books worth of information on every series within, and that grew with every sequel. The passion that Smash Bros. carries for other video games is contagious. The game design is also memorable; Smash games are sandboxes of silly interactions, and have a lot of intelligent design to make fighting games more accessible. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate isn’t about reinventing any of this, but it is the biggest game yet.
The most defining trait of Smash Ultimate is the unique nature of its roster. The game debuted through a fantastic trailer titled “Everyone is Here”, revealing that every character that had ever been playable will be playable. This fantastically combines the sentimentality of fighting games: the attachment we get to characters who score us wins, and the sentimental feelings we hold for those series we love. When Everyone is Here was revealed, I was dumbfounded that Pichu was going to return to the series, a joke character I had grown attached to when I played Melee. Everyone has a main, and everyone gets to banner themselves through that main.
This also results in a new issue, in that the developers clearly had to prioritize quantity over quality. Why are there four Fire Emblem characters that are modified versions of each other, but Ganondorf doesn’t even play like he acts in Zelda? This is reasonable critique, but also feels like a worthwhile sacrifice. The hypothetical perfect Smash game wouldn’t have Everyone is Here, it wouldn’t need it; but Smash Ultimate puts it to great use. It honours Nintendo’s history, Smash’s history, and most importantly, a player’s own history. I may have tried Pichu in Melee in the first place because I loved Pokemon. But when they returned to Smash, I thought of my memories of messing with them in Smash more than my memories with Pokemon.
The game released 6 new characters, and 5 echo fighters. The most fundamental of these characters to my experience was Ridley. He was added due to fan requests, an important part of Smash Ultimate’s identity. He has this uniquely rugged bait-and-punish playstyle; Ridley in Smash made me feel like I was playing how Ridley would play Smash. According to the in-game statistic tracker, I had played Ridley for 65 hours, and 3 minutes. If Ridley wasn’t in this roster, I would’ve lost those hours of gameplay, which is longer than the entire runtime of some of my favourite games. If there’s any reason to believe in the power that a single character can hold, and why ‘Everyone is Here’ is a big deal, it’s that. The other new characters were fun as well: I enjoyed the Castlevania characters quite a bit, and King K Rool’s animations oozes personality.
Smash Ultimate would then enter a long DLC phase that lasted over 2 years, becoming the majority of the time we’ve had with this game so far. The most noticeable trait of the DLC was the quantity of characters from non-Nintendo series. By the end of this DLC, Smash Bros would have 18 non-Nintendo characters, which is more than the entire roster of the first Smash Bros. game. This rippled through the conversation around the game. When Smash Bros. could give us these exotic characters in rapid succession, I began to feel confused on what I even wanted from the game. Just the DLC for this game alone makes any thoughts I had about how Pichu in a new Smash game would be “awesome” sound unimaginative. I’ve recently seen conversations about how Banjo & Kazooie were the least memorable characters added in the DLC, but I can relate to those who wanted them. Banjo & Kazooie was what you’d consider a shocking luxury inclusion before we knew Smash could be this.
Smash Ultimate’s DLC lineup isn’t a linear representation of video game history, it’s more like someone’s personal video game best-of compilation. While the Dragon Quest Heroes and Steve are video game all-timers, the rest are from B-list obsession worthy game franchises. Smash Ultimate doesn’t live up to the idealistic idea that Smash Bros. could be a museum of global video game history, but these inclusions are very memorable either way.
Those DLC contains the most complex Smash Bros. characters yet. The DLC’s character kits are explosive culminations of game design inspired by their respective series, packed together to create unique play styles. Smash 4 set out to flesh out the series’ variety of play styles with its archetypal inclusions, and Smash Ultimate’s DLC often feels like much more inspired and refined takes on those archetypes. In comparison, most launch characters feel primitive. The most obvious flaw in this game design is that the DLC often relies too much on meters and second forms as a mechanic.
The roster is where the most innovation lies within Smash Ultimate, but there are iterative gameplay improvements as well. Smash Ultimate’s engine is a mid-ground of previous Smash Bros. game’s traits. The ending lag that moves have is so much faster in this game that it feels like they intentionally didn’t want any attack to feel committal. The lagless gameplay results in punishing an opponent's bad moves being downplayed by the game’s mechanics. Though, the changes to the speed of lag and being hit allows for Smash Ultimate to speed up the pace of the gameplay a lot. The game is just fast enough, but not too committal so that planning ahead and focusing on your opponent’s actions are easier for a broader number of players. While the game could definitely have some more momentum to its movement, it reaches a sweet spot of speed and ease of player control.
The game also has 115 stages, another boast used to justify the title of ‘Ultimate’. Almost every stage has been visually revamped, and they all look pretty. The new stages the game released with are only okay, but some of those DLC stages are great. The game also improves omega forms, introduces battlefield forms, and adds a ‘hazards off’ toggle, which allows for these stages to be experienced in many ways.
Then there’s the centerpiece single player mechanic, Spirits. Through several modes, including the game’s Adventure Mode, you experience many Spirit Battles. Spirits seem to use a rather low CPU level, no matter what rank they are. They dodge around, reading your inputs, but never seem to play that great. These matches are so stilted, they feel like puzzles where you equip the right thing and mash away. I messed around with equipment sets to see if I could have an optimally fun experience, and the best I got was from simply using the spirits the game recommended me. If there’s anything to like about spirits as a collectible in comparison to trophies, it’s that seeing illustrations by a large collection of artists conveys the diversity of styles between games better than character models do. The descriptions being gone is a huge loss, though.
Spirits just aren’t luxurious enough to be a centerpiece for a game like Smash Bros. Ultimate. They’re out of place, and don’t work as an incentivizing reward at all. There are other single player modes in the game, but all of them are bland. Smash Ultimate’s Classic and Spirit modes both constantly reference things, but the references are shallow. Trophies made me want to try new things, Spirits and references made me feel out of the loop.
This results in Smash Ultimate’s most pivotal flaw, that despite the incredibly dense amount of content it holds in its core gameplay, there aren't that many valuable ways to interact with that content. The single player content is mediocre, and the online netplay is aggressively terrible. The best way to play Smash Ultimate is through its main mode– Smash. And that main mode, while fulfilling its exact purpose, has proven itself to not be accessible enough. This has rightfully formed cynicism in the community for the game, and the truth is that everyone would hate it if this game wasn’t so dynamic. Smash became the most successful fighting game series exactly because it was multifaceted, because its ruleset customization allows for it to be played in so many flavours. Even if you only played the game with one ruleset for the entirety of your time with it, there’s more variety in this game than most other fighting games in general. Just one mode and some bad netplay was enough to form some great memories with the game.
Near the end of the final Smash Ultimate presentation, a list of statistics began to play, showing the numbers of how many characters, stages, spirits, and other things were contained in the game. During that presentation, a looming feeling formed in my mind, as I had realized that I had experienced this before, 6 years ago at another Smash presentation. In that moment I knew that one day, Smash Ultimate would also be nothing but statistics in the back of my mind, downplayed by fans in comparison to whatever game came next. The path to iteratively improving on Smash Ultimate has become rather clear, as its flaws have shown themselves over time. Smash Ultimate’s title of “Ultimate” has a deadline on it, and I’m sure the developers knew that as well. The game came out in a time in which the primary traits of Smash are now less unique. Crossovers are now a staple of our current brand of pop culture. Platform-fighters are a legitimized subgenre, one that has brought several games with fresher ideas than any individual mechanic Smash Ultimate brings. This made me wonder what made Smash Ultimate unique in this modern ecosystem, and why I kept coming back to it. And I knew that I wouldn’t have kept playing it, if not for the memories the game had flowing through its DNA. I knew I wouldn’t have wanted to keep playing if not for how I saw something new every time I played. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate celebrates old memories so that I can keep wanting to make new ones.
The most defining trait of Smash Ultimate is the unique nature of its roster. The game debuted through a fantastic trailer titled “Everyone is Here”, revealing that every character that had ever been playable will be playable. This fantastically combines the sentimentality of fighting games: the attachment we get to characters who score us wins, and the sentimental feelings we hold for those series we love. When Everyone is Here was revealed, I was dumbfounded that Pichu was going to return to the series, a joke character I had grown attached to when I played Melee. Everyone has a main, and everyone gets to banner themselves through that main.
This also results in a new issue, in that the developers clearly had to prioritize quantity over quality. Why are there four Fire Emblem characters that are modified versions of each other, but Ganondorf doesn’t even play like he acts in Zelda? This is reasonable critique, but also feels like a worthwhile sacrifice. The hypothetical perfect Smash game wouldn’t have Everyone is Here, it wouldn’t need it; but Smash Ultimate puts it to great use. It honours Nintendo’s history, Smash’s history, and most importantly, a player’s own history. I may have tried Pichu in Melee in the first place because I loved Pokemon. But when they returned to Smash, I thought of my memories of messing with them in Smash more than my memories with Pokemon.
The game released 6 new characters, and 5 echo fighters. The most fundamental of these characters to my experience was Ridley. He was added due to fan requests, an important part of Smash Ultimate’s identity. He has this uniquely rugged bait-and-punish playstyle; Ridley in Smash made me feel like I was playing how Ridley would play Smash. According to the in-game statistic tracker, I had played Ridley for 65 hours, and 3 minutes. If Ridley wasn’t in this roster, I would’ve lost those hours of gameplay, which is longer than the entire runtime of some of my favourite games. If there’s any reason to believe in the power that a single character can hold, and why ‘Everyone is Here’ is a big deal, it’s that. The other new characters were fun as well: I enjoyed the Castlevania characters quite a bit, and King K Rool’s animations oozes personality.
Smash Ultimate would then enter a long DLC phase that lasted over 2 years, becoming the majority of the time we’ve had with this game so far. The most noticeable trait of the DLC was the quantity of characters from non-Nintendo series. By the end of this DLC, Smash Bros would have 18 non-Nintendo characters, which is more than the entire roster of the first Smash Bros. game. This rippled through the conversation around the game. When Smash Bros. could give us these exotic characters in rapid succession, I began to feel confused on what I even wanted from the game. Just the DLC for this game alone makes any thoughts I had about how Pichu in a new Smash game would be “awesome” sound unimaginative. I’ve recently seen conversations about how Banjo & Kazooie were the least memorable characters added in the DLC, but I can relate to those who wanted them. Banjo & Kazooie was what you’d consider a shocking luxury inclusion before we knew Smash could be this.
Smash Ultimate’s DLC lineup isn’t a linear representation of video game history, it’s more like someone’s personal video game best-of compilation. While the Dragon Quest Heroes and Steve are video game all-timers, the rest are from B-list obsession worthy game franchises. Smash Ultimate doesn’t live up to the idealistic idea that Smash Bros. could be a museum of global video game history, but these inclusions are very memorable either way.
Those DLC contains the most complex Smash Bros. characters yet. The DLC’s character kits are explosive culminations of game design inspired by their respective series, packed together to create unique play styles. Smash 4 set out to flesh out the series’ variety of play styles with its archetypal inclusions, and Smash Ultimate’s DLC often feels like much more inspired and refined takes on those archetypes. In comparison, most launch characters feel primitive. The most obvious flaw in this game design is that the DLC often relies too much on meters and second forms as a mechanic.
The roster is where the most innovation lies within Smash Ultimate, but there are iterative gameplay improvements as well. Smash Ultimate’s engine is a mid-ground of previous Smash Bros. game’s traits. The ending lag that moves have is so much faster in this game that it feels like they intentionally didn’t want any attack to feel committal. The lagless gameplay results in punishing an opponent's bad moves being downplayed by the game’s mechanics. Though, the changes to the speed of lag and being hit allows for Smash Ultimate to speed up the pace of the gameplay a lot. The game is just fast enough, but not too committal so that planning ahead and focusing on your opponent’s actions are easier for a broader number of players. While the game could definitely have some more momentum to its movement, it reaches a sweet spot of speed and ease of player control.
The game also has 115 stages, another boast used to justify the title of ‘Ultimate’. Almost every stage has been visually revamped, and they all look pretty. The new stages the game released with are only okay, but some of those DLC stages are great. The game also improves omega forms, introduces battlefield forms, and adds a ‘hazards off’ toggle, which allows for these stages to be experienced in many ways.
Then there’s the centerpiece single player mechanic, Spirits. Through several modes, including the game’s Adventure Mode, you experience many Spirit Battles. Spirits seem to use a rather low CPU level, no matter what rank they are. They dodge around, reading your inputs, but never seem to play that great. These matches are so stilted, they feel like puzzles where you equip the right thing and mash away. I messed around with equipment sets to see if I could have an optimally fun experience, and the best I got was from simply using the spirits the game recommended me. If there’s anything to like about spirits as a collectible in comparison to trophies, it’s that seeing illustrations by a large collection of artists conveys the diversity of styles between games better than character models do. The descriptions being gone is a huge loss, though.
Spirits just aren’t luxurious enough to be a centerpiece for a game like Smash Bros. Ultimate. They’re out of place, and don’t work as an incentivizing reward at all. There are other single player modes in the game, but all of them are bland. Smash Ultimate’s Classic and Spirit modes both constantly reference things, but the references are shallow. Trophies made me want to try new things, Spirits and references made me feel out of the loop.
This results in Smash Ultimate’s most pivotal flaw, that despite the incredibly dense amount of content it holds in its core gameplay, there aren't that many valuable ways to interact with that content. The single player content is mediocre, and the online netplay is aggressively terrible. The best way to play Smash Ultimate is through its main mode– Smash. And that main mode, while fulfilling its exact purpose, has proven itself to not be accessible enough. This has rightfully formed cynicism in the community for the game, and the truth is that everyone would hate it if this game wasn’t so dynamic. Smash became the most successful fighting game series exactly because it was multifaceted, because its ruleset customization allows for it to be played in so many flavours. Even if you only played the game with one ruleset for the entirety of your time with it, there’s more variety in this game than most other fighting games in general. Just one mode and some bad netplay was enough to form some great memories with the game.
Near the end of the final Smash Ultimate presentation, a list of statistics began to play, showing the numbers of how many characters, stages, spirits, and other things were contained in the game. During that presentation, a looming feeling formed in my mind, as I had realized that I had experienced this before, 6 years ago at another Smash presentation. In that moment I knew that one day, Smash Ultimate would also be nothing but statistics in the back of my mind, downplayed by fans in comparison to whatever game came next. The path to iteratively improving on Smash Ultimate has become rather clear, as its flaws have shown themselves over time. Smash Ultimate’s title of “Ultimate” has a deadline on it, and I’m sure the developers knew that as well. The game came out in a time in which the primary traits of Smash are now less unique. Crossovers are now a staple of our current brand of pop culture. Platform-fighters are a legitimized subgenre, one that has brought several games with fresher ideas than any individual mechanic Smash Ultimate brings. This made me wonder what made Smash Ultimate unique in this modern ecosystem, and why I kept coming back to it. And I knew that I wouldn’t have kept playing it, if not for the memories the game had flowing through its DNA. I knew I wouldn’t have wanted to keep playing if not for how I saw something new every time I played. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate celebrates old memories so that I can keep wanting to make new ones.