Review: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

It takes more than a little bit of genius to allow a game as accessible as this to still keep the door open for in-depth competitive play.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
Photo: Nintendo

Conventional logic says that a game as enormous as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate should be collapsing under its own weight like a dying star. It feels like the Mr. Creosote of video games, a title almost disgustingly distended with content. The series roster has grown enormous beyond belief, and already another announced DLC character—Joker from Persona 5—threatens to be the wafer-thin mint that makes the whole thing explode. It would be all too easy for any developer to lose the rhythm of a game that juggles so such, so it’s a genuine feat of skill that Nintendo so ably holds the whole thing together.

Ultimate lives up to its name beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, though the game tries to deny that fact at the outset, when players can only use the original dozen or so fighters from the original Super Smash Bros.—a feeble and mildly irksome attempt on Nintendo’s part to drip feed the one component of gameplay everyone will want all at once. On its face, Ultimate offers the same familiar Smash Bros. experience: Pick your favorite character, and use a combination of straight-up strikes and special, series-specific attacks to essentially loosen your enemies’ grasp on gravity—and to the point where hitting them hard enough sends them flying off into the stratosphere, never to return. Thankfully, though, all it takes is 10 minutes in any one mode—fussing with the controls, playing with enemy head and torso sizes, or scanning an Amiibo—for the game to unveil its multitudes.

Play the game’s Classic Mode, a straightforward series of eight fights with dynamic difficulty, and you realize you’re no longer toying around with randomized enemies as in previous titles in the series, but taking a winking stroll down a memory lane that lovingly recalls the games from which these characters originated. Mario’s path leads him to an eight-enemy brawl against the Koopalings, followed by a confrontation with a giant-sized Bowser, featuring remixed final boss music from Super Mario Bros. 3. Simon Belmont’s Classic Mode path puts him up against a series of characters standing in for major bosses from past Castlevania games. His boss stage is a full-blown recreation of the final level from the very first Castlevania, complete with a teleporting Dracula and a second phase where he morphs into a 10-foot-tall demon. The tiny details in the plotting, locations, the music, character actions, and personalized boss fights would be impressive and admirable in any fighting game, and then you realize that Nintendo has done this for 74 characters, half of which aren’t even owned by Nintendo proper.

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Every little accomplishment in Ultimate foists bonuses, spendable points, and new characters on the player. In the age of microtransactions, it’s easy to forget what actual abundance and reward in these types of games looks like. Nintendo cannot be praised enough for continuing to smile on every player for enjoying the studio’s games on any level—whether casually or competitively—while many competitors unapologetically turn their protects into gambling machines. The relative slowness of unlocking Ultimate’s full roster is forgivable in that context, though one imagines players who already have a favorite character in mind, or just want to play with one of the game’s new characters, will find their patience tested somewhat.

It’s hard to feel too bad, however, considering that the game is seemingly designed to keep dullness at bay at all times. Go beyond Classic Mode and there’s an endless number of changes of pace to the standard Smash Bros. battles. There are, of course, relatively straightforward ways to play, like tournaments. The standard-issue match modifiers that have been there for years have returned, like making every player into metal (thus harder to knock out) or giant-sized. There are also more robust and forward-thinking ideas like Squad-Strike—essentially a 5-on-5 tag mode—and Smashdown, which could be described as Ultimate’s interpretation of Fortnite; it’s an elimination mode where you can play as the entire roster, one character at a time, but losing as a character means they can’t be selected again.

The biggest new time sink is World of Light, a full-blown, 20-plus-hour RPG that plays like the unholy offspring of Smash Bros., Pokémon, and Magic: The Gathering. In it, an extraterrestrial being called Galeem pulls a Thanos and wipes out the entirety of the Smash Bros. roster, minus Kirby, who’s apparently Carol Danvers in this scenario. Kirby is then charged with traveling around the world and rescuing the souls of his comrades, which have been trapped by Galeem and are being used as red-eyed puppets to roam the Earth. It’s a strangely dark premise but not nearly as grim in execution.

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The mode really boils down to a basic top-down JRPG journey, with an addictive series of Smash Bros. fights doubling as random encounters, augmented by special Spirit cards—essentially, Smash Bros.’s old trophy rewards but finally given an actual purpose—granting player and opponent alike random augments. It’s more involved than one might expect, to the point where this could have been the only part of Ultimate released to the public and no one would have probably complained. World of Light is held back mostly by some uneven spikes in gameplay, and, yet again, the slow way you unlock additional fighters besides Kirby means being stuck with a weak character for long stretches. Still, having it as a sizable chunk of an absurdly feature-packed whole is bound to buy a lot of forgiveness from players.

None of this would be worthwhile if the foundation of the series’s combat wasn’t still as rock-solid as ever, and even then, tweaks have been made to the gameplay elements that were already finetuned by Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. The gameplay is slightly faster now, with a few useful indicators for telling how close off-screen players are to being completely out.

The Smash Bros. series has always been conceptually right as rain—a genius premise that’s been often imitated but never duplicated. Ultimate makes a strong case that no one ever will. It takes more than a little bit of programming genius to allow a game as simple and accessible as this to still keep the door open for in-depth competitive play. Whoever develops such a game requires an ethos as unshakably welcoming as Nintendo’s to prevent it from becoming a money-sucking, pay-to-play pachinko machine. Above all else, said developer needs a near-bottomless imagination to make it so that pitting the greatest video game characters ever created against each other is as exhilarating to behold the umpteenth time out as it was way back in 1999.

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Score: 
 Developer: Nintendo  Publisher: Nintendo  Platform: Switch  Release Date: December 7, 2018  ESRB: E10+  ESRB Descriptions: Cartoon Violence, Comic Mischief, Suggestive Themes  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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