Video Game Reveiw: Smash Bros Ultimate
Smash Bros Ultimate, for the Nintendo Switch, is the latest addition to the Super Smash Bros. franchise. Released in December 2018, the game features an all-star cast with over 74 playable characters, including Mario, Pikachu and PAC-Man. The characters hail from all sorts of games and celebrate the Smash franchise’s long history by including every fighter from previous installations of the franchise. Furthermore, Smash Bros Ultimate includes various stages and music from all kinds of games, such as the calm music of Pictochat and Pikmin or the exhilarating conquest themes from Fire Emblem and Xenoblade Chronicles.
In Smash Bros Ultimate’s local multiplayer battle mode–the main focus of the game–up to eight players fight against each other until one remains. The game features a countless number of settings combinations, with an emphasis on Stock, Time and Stamina.
Stock allows each player a set number of lives, or ‘stocks,’ and players aim to be the last one surviving. In Time, each player must compete for the highest score within a time limit, with knockouts (KOs) adding to the score and falls decreasing it. Stamina is incredibly similar to Stock, but instead of the normal percentages, each player has a set number of hit points.
Ultimate is widely regarded as much more balanced than previous versions. While older versions provided character options with widely varying power levels, Ultimate presents characters without such large ability gaps. Professional players have ranked each character, and compiled something called a ‘tier list.’ The list groups most fighters very close together with only a few standouts.
Ultimate contains the sharpest graphics of the franchise thus far, with much more clean-looking particle effects and expressive character animation. The game also upgraded the quality of play with more balanced character options and useful cosmetics during gameplay. For example, a map appears on screen when showing the positions of characters in relation to blast zones off camera and a special zoom effect was added for the last hit of each game.
Ultimate also made changes to the core mechanics in order to provide faster and smoother gameplay. New mechanics, such as reducing the number of air dodges a player can do, encourage more aggressive playstyles and make it much faster than its predecessors on the 3DS and Wii U.
Part of the game’s fun also comes from turning on stage morph and embracing the chaos of Smash. The variety of modes offered, from ones that remove characters from the select screen after use to ones that add conditions to all characters, make for an even more varied and unpredictable casual experience.
Another distinct characteristic of this game comes from its variety of single player modes. Some modes from previous titles, such as Home Run Contest and Stage Builder, unfortunately were cut from Ultimate, but the game still has great variety in its single player content in the Classic and Multi Man Smash modes.
However, despite all the previously mentioned modes, the main focus of the single player experience is the Spirits mode, which includes World of Light and Spirit Board. Both of these modes focus on spirits, which are a selection of characters across many video game franchises, most of which are unplayable as characters in the game. World of Light features a world map, a story and cutscenes, whereas Spirit Board is a mode in which you pick a spirit from a randomly generated selection, and battle it. Winning the battle gives you a chance to attain that specific spirit. The spirit battle for the spirit of Caeda, a character from the Fire Emblem Series, provides a good example of how Ultimate represents the original character in a spirit battle. In the Fire Emblem Series, Caeda is a pegasus rider, with the main character Marth as her eventual husband. To represent this, the battle features wind that pushes the player, as well as making the opponent lighter and faster. The characters fought in the battle are Lucina, meant to visually represent Caeda as they both have blue hair, and Marth.
Every spirit battle uses this kind of creative style to represent over a thousand characters across the history of video games, making for a fun side mode that introduces you to new characters and franchises. The spirit battles also offer a change of pace from regular Smash games. Once a spirit is defeated and acquired, it can be added to a team. When using a team of spirits, they strengthen a playable character’s attack, defense and speed. Spirits can also give certain perks when equipped onto a team, such as immunity to specific ailments or powering up a specific kind of attack, which leads to greater replayability to the mode, as you can have a practically infinite number of spirit teams or even go into a fight against a powerful opponent without any of the boosts that come with spirits.
Despite the creativity of the fights, a major flaw of the mode is the monotony. Spirit mode features no cutscenes outside of the beginning and end, and the fights in the middle can begin to feel stale, as the battles use the same conditions over and over. They can also feel either too hard, if you use no spirits, or too easy when you use spirits. The only exception to this would be the bosses, who add variety and have very clear patterns to exploit, allowing players that don’t use spirits to win.
Overall, this mode can make for a great distraction, but it is not a mode you’d want to play a lot of at once. While the game also features an online option, it is currently unplayable on campus due to the routers blocking connections between consoles.
On campus, Smash Bros Ultimate is a great way to bond with your dormmates, and has become a big part of many dorm cultures. A club centered around the franchise as a whole, Exeter Super Smash Organization (E.S.S.O.), also hosts many setups of the game as well as organizing casual sessions and more competitive tournaments. We believe that Smash Bros Ultimate is a great way to have fun with your friends. It will take your mind of off your stresses and capture your attention with the various modes and use of gameplay techniques that provide for a unique and entertaining experience every time you play.