I was hype af for the new Smash Bros last week, and boy was that hype met and then some! Yesterday afternoon I finished the last of the game's content, and I reckon it took me about 40 or so hours to totally do everything in the game 100% (except the online challenges as I don't have online). Compared to previous games in the series, the amount of absurdly difficult challenges for any kind of reward is substantially less, but I'm totally okay with that. This is a brilliant game and yet another example of Nintendo blowing precedent out of the water with a new title on Switch in an established franchise.
First what I did was Adventure mode, and that took me about 15.5 hours to complete. Adventure mode is yet another new take on a single-player content for Smash Bros, and it's the best they've ever done it. The player goes along paths on a world-map covered with fighters to unlock and other smaller fights to do for the game's Spirits. Spirits are buffs you can give you fighter in Adventure mode or in a spirits-enabled smash battle, and they provide attack and defensive buffs that increase as they level up by using them more to fight. They also have equip slots where support spirits can be put in that have effects from having faster charging smash moves to dealing more damage with some directional special (they're basically stickers from Brawl). In over 600 fights (MANY of which are entirely optional), you can go around the world map fighting battles themed around these spirits. For example, the Buzz Buzz spirit is fighting a stamina battle against a very tiny Mr. Game & Watch in the Onett stage who likes to avoid combat. The set-ups for these fights just never ceased to be clever and interesting, and some of them downright brutal in how challenging they are. Adventure mode also adds 7 new boss battles (like Brawl had in its adventure mode) against a powerful AI NPC opponent, and you can also unlock every fighter in the game by going around the board and fighting them (but only unlocked for normal Smash when you finish Adventure mode). Outside of Adventure mode, there is also the Spirit Board, where you can just do these spirit fights outside of adventure mod against a cycling selection of 12 spirits to fight (and even after 100%-ing adventure mode, there are like 400 spirit fights not in Adventure mode only on the spirit board). Now on the topic of unlocking characters, this game has a TON to unlock. In a roster of 74 fighters to unlock, only 8 are unlocked at the start: the roster from the original N64 game. Every 10 minutes played in any mode, you'll get a new challenger approaching from the list. Alternatively, completing anyone's classic mode will get you a new challenger to fight, and each classic mode takes about 10 or so minutes as well, as every character has their own specific classic mode with 6 fights centered around a theme (for example, Dr. Mario's is fighting 1 v 3's against opponents colored in yellow, blue, and red XD ). The classic modes are clever and fun just like the spirit fights are, and it was a joy to go through them just as it was go through the Adventure mode. That said, for over 60 characters at 10 minutes a piece, that's over 10 hours to unlock every fighter in the game. In a game with nearly 1300 spirits to collect, I think this game already had MORE than enough collectables to hunt down to have them put the main meat & potatoes of the game behind a slow grind of over 10 hours of play time. This is compounded further by a lot of these challenger fights being quite legitimately hard (even for an experienced, decent Smash player like myself). The AI in this game ain't no slouch, and I have seen no shortage of complaints online about what a pain unlocking all the characters is, particularly for someone not that great at the game. Not having an easier method outside of using amiibos to unlock the characters really flies in the face of Smash being a party game, and is one of very few things I would say the previous Smash game did better than this one (as nearly every character was already unlocked). This huge time investment to unlock characters is really the one significant complaint I have with Smash Ult, and even then it's not that big a complaint. Other complaints are far more minor, with the most minor being some somewhat problematic (although very Japanese) spirit design as both black human spirit characters (Dee Jay from Street Fighter and Mr. Sandman from Punch Out) are 1v1 fights against primates (Diddy and DK respectively Xp). And then this game also doesn't fix Smash 4's problem of a generally confusing and not entirely intuitive main menu system full of menus within menus that take some time to just suss out what is where through trial and error. Verdict: Highly Recommended. As I said earlier, I loved this game to pieces. I was super hyped for it, and it delivered on everything I hoped for and then some. With a massive roster and an equally massive amount of single-player content (even outside of unlocking characters), Smash Bros Ultimate has really earned its title of the "Ultimate" Smash Bros game.
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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