Super Smash Bros Ultimate review: A stylish Switch brawler, and a comprehensive celebration of the series
The Super Smash Bros series has been around since the halcyon days of the Nintendo 64, which launched – you might want to sit down for this – 20 years ago.
The original starred characters from a bunch of disparate Nintendo games beating seven shades of shandy out of one another, and as the series progressed more and more fighters were added, many from games outside of Nintendo’s publishing umbrella. Erstwhile Mario rival and Sega mascot Sonic even found his way into the roster, as did Konami’s Solid Snake and Square’s Cloud Strife.
The series quickly garnered a rabid fanbase and a loyal esports following. Adjustments to the game’s sprawling roster are reliably controversial. And at the professional level, discerning Smash players refuse to play on anything but CRT televisions. The response time of the old technology is microseconds faster than modern displays, giving skilled players a slight advantage in this highly technical and reaction-based fighting game.
With players this uniquely dedicated, protective, and vocal about change, game director Masahiro Sakurai faced a challenge in creating a new version for the Nintendo Switch. How do you please everybody?
The solution? Include absolutely everything. Super Smash Bros Ultimate is comprehensive. It includes every character ever to have appeared in a Super Smash Bros game, plus a couple of new ones, bringing the total number of fighters to 74. It features every arena from the last two decades of games, encompassing stages from the Mushroom Kingdom and the Pokémon Stadium, to levels in which you fight atop Pilotwings planes in-flight and on F-Zero tracks, where you’ll dodge incoming racers.
There’s a giant single-player mode with RPG and collectible elements, in which each victory rewards you with equippable spirits that boost your stats or grant you special abilities.
A downside to this kitchen sink approach is just how overwhelming the amount of content on offer is for the uninitiated. New fighters are gradually unlocked – roughly every 10 minutes one will show up to challenge you – but from the outset you’re faced with a stage select screen so crammed that it’s impossible to make out what exactly you’re selecting. And, once it fills up, the roster is now so large and diluted it includes rare characters most will never even have heard of. I’m sure Lucina from Fire Emblem could have sat this one out.
With so much stuff on show, new players might struggle to grasp the basic appeal of Nintendo’s brawler. There’s beauty in how balanced fighters are despite how differently they all play. Samus’s arm cannon can face off against Ryu’s hadouken. The nameless silhouetted woman from Wii Fit can smack Kirby around in a way that makes tactical sense. Pikachu can electrocute Pac-Man.
Smash Bros has always been a celebration of gaming’s most beloved characters. Ultimate is like joining that celebration at 1am, when everyone’s a bit sozzled and not making much sense, but there’s still plenty to eat and drink. It’s the series at its finest, as well as its most bloated.