Super Smash Bros. Ultimate - Everything We Know
The ensemble fight game returns to the Nintendo Switch with Super Smash Bros Ultimate. With its cast of colorful characters pulled from franchise favorites and tight, responsive gameplay Super Smash Bros has attracted casual fans and professional fighting game players alike. The latest installment is one for the fans, so read on for all the information surrounding the latest, and biggest, Super Smash Bros.
What is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
Promotional Group Art - A pretty crowded shot, but still only scratching the surface of playable characters.
The Smash series is beloved by fans for allowing players to face off with their favorite characters from Nintendo’s greatest franchises with guest appearances from third party properties. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate ups the ante by bringing in every character to ever appear in a Smash game with updated balancing to level out the massive roster.
The Smash games are a lighthearted foray into fighters with bright colors, cartoonish characters, and crazy items that’s been a favorite of gamers of all ages. The gameplay is refined enough that the series has been a mainstay of major competitive tournaments. Even so, it’s designed to be accessible enough that games of any age can pick up and play. You’ll find your fighters on locations pulled from a wide variety of games with unique layouts and hazards for players to contend with.
Ultimate will strive to bring features to please both casual and competitive players. Casual fans can look forward to seeing all their old favorite characters return along with some new fighters, new items, and new assists. For the competitive crowd Ultimate brings a slew of rebalancing including air dodge mechanics not seen since the Gamecube version as well as different versions of maps to suit tournament play.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Release Date
Ultimate is being developed by Bandai Namco Studios and Sora Ltd. who also developed the previous title in the series. Creator and director Masahiro Sakurai returns to spearhead the title announcing it publicly during Nintendo’s E3 showcase. Players won’t have to wait long to get their hands on the latest installment as Ultimate will be arriving December 7th, 2018 for the Nintendo Switch.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Gameplay
Tournament Level Smash Gameplay - Don’t let these guys fool you, you’ll be playing competently after one match.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a fighting game for the Nintendo Switch, it is a heavily multiplayer focused game with 2-8 players duking it out. Past games have hosted single player challenge and training modes and several different multiplayer modes to bring players together. While Nintendo is yet to confirm it, it has teased that online play will be included at release as the game arrives shortly after the launch of the Nintendo Switch Online service.
Players will choose from the over 65 characters along with the stage of the battle with options to customize the match. The fighters then teleport in atop trophy bases before dropping into the battlefield and fighting to launch their opponent off screen. The controls are simple, attacks are inputted by one of two buttons with a tilt of the directional stick to determine what attack comes out. By tilting the stick and holding the attack button the fighter charges up a powerful, launching Smash attack, but the amount the opponent flies is based off how much damage had been done to them previously.
Attacks and special moves pull inspiration from the games the character has appeared in. Special attacks tend to be more situational than regular attacks but are also where the personality of characters really shine. Special attacks also help with the utility of certain characters such as Snake’s remote-controlled missile launcher to seek out distant opponents or Mario’s cape to reflect projectiles back.
The bottom of the screen displays the characters "health" as a percentage. As the fighters take damage the number increases leading to them flying further when hit with powerful attacks. When a character is knocked completely off-screen and unable to recover they are out, which depending on the game mode will be the loss of a point or the loss of a life.
Though it can be adjusted the default game mode involves items that occasionally spawn on the map. As the games have continued Smash has become host to a great number of items ranging from guest characters that fight for you to mystery balls that can contain anything, whether it’s to heal or to hurt. The granddaddy of all items is the Smash Ball, when a player catches it they gain the ability to deliver their unique Final Smash to their opponents.
Multiplayer modes can be tailored to the player's delight, including selecting what items spawn as well as the layout of the map itself. Some of the most popular modes involve setting a match time limit and fighting to see who can score the most knock-outs or setting a number of lives and fighting to the last man standing.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Trailers
Announcement Trailer - Masahiro Sakurai takes you through all the upcoming changes in the latest title.
While most games launch their trailers with a tease of what gamers can expect, the team behind Smash decided to go all in with a wealth of information on what’s in store for fans in the latest version. The trailer starts with little surprises as it methodically works through a roster of mostly old veterans. Partway through, Solid Snake, who hasn’t appeared in Smash in ten years, decloaks to bring the announcement that “Everyone is Here!”. After moving through Smash’s history of characters we see a panning shot of the roster that will appear in the game.
Sakurai returns to discuss the myriad of changes present in the game. Several changes have been made to characters to update them from their latest adventures, such as Mario wearing Cappy from Super Mario Odyssey or Link’s Hero Tunic from Breath of the Wild. Outside of cosmetic differences, changes have been made to lend themselves towards a faster Smash experience: Several Final Smashes have been revamped to be quicker and flashier, charge moves can be built up in air, and some more complicated character mechanics have been streamlined.
Among the myriad of characters are Echo Fighters, who are largely based off other fighters with different characteristics to serve as more than a different costume. Not limiting themselves to bringing in only returning characters, Inkling of Splatoon was introduced in full. Inkling had previously been confirmed in the initial tease for the upcoming Smash title.
Assist trophies and items have also gained an expansion. Among them are the nefarious Fake Smash Ball which mimics the Smash Balls with some differences, when the Fake Smash Ball is activated it explodes in spectacular fashion launching those caught up far off screen.
Expanding upon Smash 4’s Omega mode, which turned maps into a flat plane, Ultimate adds Battlefield mode simplifying maps to a base with three floating platforms. Fans of the series will find game mechanics missing or adjusted from previous titles are being reworked for Ultimate.
As the trailer comes to a close after the dense information dump the ending cinematic contains one last announcement: Ridley from Metroid would be playable. Previously Ridley had only appeared as stage hazards and a boss in the Subspace Emissary mode. Ridley has been frequently requested by fans but the design team was unable to accommodate this previously due to concerns of matching Ridley’s imposing nature into a smaller frame to match the rest of the cast. For Smash Ultimate, though, the team has reworked the character to fit into the melee.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Developer
Bandai Namco Studios and Sora Ltd. will be returning to develop after having made Smash 4 for Wii and 3DS. The creator of the Super Smash Bros. series and longtime director Masahiro Sakurai once again set out development with lofty goals to satisfy the fanbase. The team set about to acquire all the necessary licenses and worked with creative directors from those titles to best represent the characters in game.
Ultimate’s engine has been redesigned from the ground up to match the new hardware. While its predecessor Smash 4 has already appeared in HD and several of those locations will appear in Ultimate,the new engine promises to bring more dynamic lighting and better textures.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate News
A Four Player Brawl on Battlefield - Mario, Inkling, Donkey Kong, and Link bring beautiful chaos
While most of the conversation surrounding the game came from the announcement at E3, the tens of thousands of changes Sakurai suggested has been trickling out in detail. In addition, Nintendo has announced that many Smash fighters will have Amiibo figures made for the game. This will give collectors and fans the chance to display figures of older characters who otherwise probably wouldn’t have gotten their own figure.
While it seems that the roster was already packed enough, the team has recently announced the addition of five new characters. Chrom and Dark Samus will serve as Echo Fighters to Roy of Fire Emblem and Samus of the Metroid series. However, Simon Belmont (And his Echo Fighter, Richter Belmont) received their own trailer as completely new characters to the series. Not content with that, the Rivals trailer teased, and then showcased that King K Rool, Donkey Kong's nemesis of Donkey Kong Country, would be joining the expansive roster.
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