Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Analysis.

The Super Smash Bros. Franchise has always been considered a video game museum of sorts due to the games featuring an iconic roster of characters from the world of videogames. Each game in the franchise does a loving job at implementing a characters move set to match with their personality and the game they originate from. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the latest game to release in this franchise and in my opinion it is one of the most ambitious projects of all time, due to the fact that they got the the rights to feature characters from 190 different franchises while still remaining faithful to their source material, and as massive as the scale of this project was, the final product more than delivered and has cemented itself as not only one of the best fighting games on the market, but also as a loving homage to video games.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was released on December 7, 2018 and it’s the fifth iteration in the fighting game franchise while also being the first one to be playable on the Nintendo Switch. When Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was revealed back in E3 2018 it came with the tagline “Everyone is Here” due to every single fighter coming back from every iteration of the Smash Bros. franchise, while also adding some new faces. The roster that was featured in the base game consisted of 74 different characters and later got expanded to 82 in 2021 with the release of 2 different fighter passes that consist of 5 characters in fighter pass 1 and 6 in fighter pass 2 (the second fighter pass is still in development, with only 3 characters out by the time of writing).

I’ve talked enough about the characters and museum aspects in the game, but you may ask how does it play? The answer to that question would be amazingly. SSBU shows as much love to its gameplay as it does to its roster. The game can be enjoyed as a casual party game, with the inclusion of 8-player smash up to eight players can enjoy together and brawl it out in over a hundred stages that range from classic maps like “Fountain of Dreams” or “Fourside” that have been given a glow-up to look as beautiful as some of the new stages like “Mementos” or “Moray Towers”. The game doesn’t only appeal to casual players only though, its gameplay can still be enjoyed by hardcore competitive players that can turn off the more random aspects of gameplay and battle it out to see who is the best player. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate does an amazing job at appealing to every type of gamer, whether they only want to play with their friends at parties or they want to prove their skills at local tournaments.

Despite all my praise the game still has its flaws; the main one coming from the games single-player content. The game features a mode called “World of Light” in which the player traverses through a map fighting characters that have modified stats and move sets to match the personality of a character they are representing. As cool as it is to fight a character that is meant to embody a character from a different franchise, at the end of the day you are still fighting the character that is in the game. World of Light is a cool idea that showcases a combined videogame world, but after playing it for several hours it feels repetitive and I feel that the implementation of characters that are not playable is cool, but feels more disappointing than anything.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is an incredible achievement on all fronts. It does an incredible job at incorporating hundreds of franchises into one package, while at the same time retaining the personality of each franchise and making them feel as nostalgic as ever. In November of 2019 it became the highest selling fighting game of all time, and it also received several awards that year. The incredible positive feedback that the game received is more than deserved and proves that the hard work devoted into the game was not in vain.