Super Smash Brothers Ultimate finalizes its legacy

Posted Oct. 26, 2021

By Graciela Del Rosario

Staff Editor

Three years after their anticipated release, Super Smash Brothers Ultimate (SSBU) makes history as one of video games’ most ambitious crossovers ever, with their iconic roster of 89 fighters, including characters from the Super Mario Bros. series all the way to Kingdom Hearts.

Developed by Nintendo and released Dec. 7, 2018, SSBU is the award-winning, fifth installment of the critically acclaimed Super Smash Brothers franchise. SSBU is a competitive, fast-paced fighting game that pits some of Nintendo’s and other third-parties’s (SEGA, Capcom, Square Enix, Atlus, and Disney) most recognizable characters against each other in the heat of battle. Smash takes the traditional 2D, side-by-side fighting stylesーlike Street Fighter and Fatal Furyーand creates its own mechanics. Instead of a health bar, each fighter is given a percentage (starting at zero), and during standard matches players must battle one another to increase their opponent’s percentage to send them flying off the stage. Higher percentages can be launched easier, thus it creates critical focus and tension to not get blown off the field, whilst sending other players packing. SSBU, in its three-year release, has been awarded a plethora of achievements, including Famitsu's 2018 Game of the Year Award, The Game Awards’s 2019 Best Fighting Game, Japan Game Awards’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Award, and many more. The Smash franchise has a 22 year legacy thus far and has created a sub-genre of PVP-styles games that has shaped an entire industry of competitive gaming; it is not only an industrial beast, but a monster of crossovers.

Arguably, the entire selling point of Smash, since its 1999 release, has been its inclusion of characters. SSBU certainly makes its impact considering the main tagline upon the game’s reveal trailer in June 2018 was “Everyone is Here,” signifying the return of every past fighter and DLC up to Super Smash Brothers for Wii U and 3DS; returning them as base game fighters. The characters range from classics like SuperMario Bros. and Kirby, to throwbacks like MegaMan and PacMan, to recent smash hits like Xenoblade Chronicles and the Persona series; Smash has even revived/brought to light games nearly forgotten like Fire Emblem and Kid Icarus. 74 characters across the video game universe encapsulate SSBU’s massive base game roster (includes alternate characters like Ivysaur and Charizard for Pokémon Trainer), and the additional 15 DLC characters (includes alternates like Mythra) ramp up the hype SSBU has built up. Fighter announcements (specifically the ones pertaining to DLC fighters) have amassed an entire fanbase in itself of reactors, theorists, and die-hard video game enthusiasts that gather by the thousands around livestreams to see the character Nintendo will reveal next. On the official Nintendo Youtube channel, characters like Joker from Persona 5, Steve from Minecraft, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, Banjo & Kazooie from Banjo-Kazooie, Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII and many more from SSBU alone have garnered millions of views . The trailers’ qualities are magnificent that certainly do the game’s graphics justice. Alongside the graphics, the variety of soundtracks SSBU has provided are nothing short of fantastic as they bring upbeat classics, like Super Mario Odyssey’s “Jump Up, Super Star!,” to remixed versions of mellow songs like Persona 5’s “Beneath the Mask,” to remastering initial 8-bit tracks like Castlevania’s “Divine Bloodlines.” SSBU certainly does not fall short of the Smash legacy, and it only adds to the communities and e-sports teams that have been created since, even to the point where the DDHS’s Dads Club sponsors annual SSBU tournaments.

“Having Mario and Zelda duke it out against Street Fighter’s Ryu and Final Fantasy 7’s Cloud on a battlefield from Metal Gear Solid is a weird, wonderful thing that only the Smash Bros. series can deliver—and Ultimate is undoubtedly Smash Bros. done big and done right,” states IGN writer Tom Marks.

Although SSBU has solidified itself as one of Nintendo’s most known releases, even the most legendary of games has its downfalls, and SSBU certainly has its downfalls. Besides its laggy, wireless internet battle connections, one of SSBU’s first selling points was the return of storymode, or what at least is considered a “storymode.” It’s called “World of Light” in SSBU, and it follows the story of all the fighters, and many more other characters, from familiar franchises being turned into “spirits.” Players must work their way area to area fighting battles relating to the characters’s stories, playstyle, or aesthetic and retrieve them back (much more simpler in concept). Once the player wins the fight, the spirit is overturned to the player’s side to be used as power-ups, or if it’s a spirit of a Smash fighter, they can become playable in the player’s roster. It can be pretty tedious to get through every spirit in storymode, and as someone who played casually, it took me about 20 hours to 100% the entire story. The story is very open to player interpretation, and it unfortunately did not reach the majority of the Smash community’s expectations, and it’s considered lackluster, as players were anticipating it to be a cross-over overload or heavily story-driven in general, like Smash Brothers Brawl’s “Subspace Emissary.” The spirit system in general is pretty basic and repetitive, and it only serves like a collectible system to players once storymode finishes. Spirits are a new mechanic introduced to SSBU, and it’s supposed to replace the Smash series’s iconic trophy system in hopes of less programming and more inclusion. In addition, SSBU thrives on its multiverse inclusion, but players and fans will never be totally satisfied with a single character's inclusion. I remember being completely flabbergasted when Joker from Persona 5 was announced at the 2018 Game Awards. Many others like myself were completely obsessed with the fact, and yet there was a select few who complained about his inclusion; and this pattern repeats for all new characters. Players (either as a joke or completely serious) anticipate fighters like Waluigi, 2B, Crash Bandicoot, Sans, the Doom Guy and more; just to have their dreams crushed or "deconfirmed" entirely. It’s a twisted rhythm and players have been even bold enough to take it out on the game’s director.

“Apart from health issues and struggles when adding certain fighters - whenever he [Masahiro Sakurai] appeared on a show, did an interview, or posted something on social media, he had to be extremely careful as some fans would speculate about anything he said and link it back to the next fighter or collab coming to Nintendo's all-star brawler on the Switch,” states Nintendolife writer Liam Doolan. “Obviously, as of this week [Oct. 23], it's the end of an era—with the final DLC fighter, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, now available.”

SSBU and the Smash series as a whole has become one of Nintendo’s most iconic and recognizable franchises. Just like how Disney turned three circles into an empire, Nintendo has been able to take a circle with two lines and make something for video game lovers and enthusiasts to jump out of their seats for. SSBU is truly the best inclusion to the Smash franchise (with exceptions), and it’s such a shame that now with Sora’s inclusion it is now officially the end to SSBU’s character-packed legacy. However, this game has only been out for less than five years and will simply become timeless as the years go by. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate isn’t going anywhere just yet.