Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – Is it really the “Ultimate”?

            Let’s rant about video games! I know if I was going to jump on the internet video game reviewer bandwagon I should have done it back in like 2007, but I’m going to review video games from time to time on this blog anyway, when I feel inspired to. I am no longer the avid gamer that I once was in my youth, being busy with adulthood and all that, but I like to play when I can.

 I’ve been playing Super Smash Bros. since the first one came out in 1999 for the N64, and for the next two installments, subtitled Melee (for the GameCube) and Brawl (for the Wii), I felt that it was always a big improvement over the previous one. Not everyone would agree that Brawl was better than Melee, however; in fact, a significant amount of people wouldn’t agree. And many of these people are members of the elitist tournament community; hardcore competitive Super Smash Bros. players who generally hate the use of items, stages with hazards and gimmicks, and the “Final Smash”, which in Brawl where it was first introduced, could allow someone on the verge of losing to still KO their opponent with a devastating move. Basically, they hate anything that could level the playing field for someone with less skill than they have, sucking the fun out of the game for casual players. Despite them being a minority, albeit a vocal minority, for some reason Nintendo listens to these people. And I think this is one big reason why I felt underwhelmed by Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, although not the only reason. (And if any of these hardcore players should discover this blog, sorry for any offense, and yes, I admit you could easily defeat in Super Smash Bros. in mere seconds without any items and on a plain fighting stage, hooray for you and your ego.) Another cause for my disappointment would be mainly laziness on behalf of the developers when it comes to story mode and other aspects. I’ll get into both of these causes in this review. I must let it be known that I missed out on Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (they really couldn’t have given it a more creative name?), so I’m mainly comparing Ultimate to Brawl; two games with ten years between them.

            Now Ultimate, on its own merits, is still a fun game, and it can still be addicting. I’ve been playing it almost every day for the past few weeks (in brief spurts, while the baby is asleep, ah parenthood, the gamer’s nemesis). It brought back a lot of old stages I hadn’t seen in a long time, with enhanced graphics. It also added some new characters that I’ve grown fond of as I’ve played, even if I sometimes have no idea what game they’re from because I’ve been out of the loop for so long with video games (comes with getting older, becoming a parent, having less money to waste and getting less for your birthday/Christmas). But I would have expected it to improve on Brawl the way Brawl improved on Melee and Melee improved on the original. I didn’t really find that to be the case. I found it to be a step backward in some respects. The extra characters and stages are perhaps the only thing Ultimate has over Brawl; and that being said, even a lot of the characters are unnecessary clones. These are some of the ways I feel Ultimate falls short compared to Brawl.

Story Mode

            The story mode for Brawl included beautiful cutscenes and full 2D platforming levels reminiscent of a game from the 16-bit era but with improved graphics. The story wasn’t the greatest, mind you (I was never a fan of the whole “the characters aren’t really the actual characters they’re just trophies” aspect), but at least it had a story. Ultimate’s storyline is…you get dropped in the middle of the action while these two entities of light and darkness are fighting…for some reason...and they go after all the video game characters…for some reason…and they’ve created evil copies of the video game characters…for some reason…

I mean I beat story mode and I still don’t get what the plot was supposed to be. Nothing’s really explained. I could probably go look it up, but should I really have to? Would you watch a movie where after watching it you had to have the plot explained to you by a Google search? And there’s so few cutscenes. I’ve beaten it once, so there may be more if I beat it again and do one of the other possible endings, but I only saw about two main cutscenes at the beginning and at the end. Very lazy when a game from ten years earlier has more cutscenes, and better ones. The story mode consists of just battles, no side-scrolling levels or anything like Brawl had. The battles all have gimmicks. Ultimate introduced something called “spirits”, which are just stock art of various video game characters that you collect and they give you different perks (such as start the battle as giant, stronger sword strikes, higher jumps, etc.), helping you cheat against computer players that are also using spirits and cheating. It reminds me of the days of Game Genie and Game Shark. You mainly just have to out-cheat the computer by selecting the right spirits to counter theirs. There’s a limit to how many spirits you’re allowed to use at once, stopping it from becoming too cheap. It’s kind of fun, but is it really necessary? Brawl has a similar concept in their story mode, with “stickers” that gave your characters perks, but it was less central to the overall game. Trying to get the stickers to fit inside the circle they gave you did always annoy me in Brawl, so I do think the Spirit system they came up with is superior to that. But really, I don’t think it should have become the whole point of the story mode. I like plot.

Classic Mode

            A pro for Ultimate here is how personalized Classic Mode is for each fighter. Some of them were quite unique and fun. But a con is only having one, rather dull bonus stage where you collect light orbs while running from an advancing black hole. Older Smash Bros. games had two or three bonus stages, with things like shoot the target and such. Brawl and Melee were more varied in that regard. And I hate fighting both Master Hand and Crazy Hand at the end of the mode, which almost always happens. But that’s just me being a wimp when it comes to game difficulty. Sometimes you get different bosses at the end, but like 8 times out of 10 it’s those damned hands, ruining a perfect run by killing me and making me lower my score to restart.

Character Roster

            Well, it was nice to see some old favorites come back who were left out of Brawl, such as Roy, Young Link, and Mewtwo, who in particular a lot of people missed, and his absence was a big reason some people didn’t like Brawl. As an aside, I personally have always been indifferent to Mewtwo, but that’s because of my aversion to Pokemon back when it was at the height of its popularity. I was just fine with his replacement in Brawl, Lucario, who I gravitated toward thanks to his resemblance to the God Anubis. I never bought into the mystique of Mewtwo. I know, blasphemy. Anyway, I digress. It was cool to have Pac-Man and Mega Man appear. I’m a big fan of the Fire Emblem series so it was cool to see all these characters from that series (although even I’ll admit, perhaps there were too many Fire Emblem characters). I do wish they had fewer sword-wielders from Fire Emblem as the game always features a variety of weapons such as bows, lances and axes, and I wish they had more characters from older games instead of just shilling the new ones. For example, Lyndis has been an assist trophy since Brawl, I’d like to see her as playable as I loved the game she was from on the Game Boy Advance (although she’d be yet another sword-wielding character). Soren from Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn and Path of Radiance is another character I’d rather see (for obvious reasons, if you know my name). 

However, some of the additions are questionable. Most notably, “Dark” Samus and “Dark” Pit. They’re the same character as normal Samus and Pit, but darker and edgier. It was fine when Pit had a black alternate costume in Brawl, it didn’t need to be a whole separate character. Even if they appear in the original games somewhere, it’s just not creative. The “dark version of the hero” trope is so overdone. They could have used that slot for another character from their games. There must have been someone more worthy of those two slots. There have been complaints about clone characters going back to Melee. You would think by this time they would have taken action to curb the complaints, but Ultimate has more clones than even Brawl. A lot of the Fire Emblem characters handle almost the same, the Castlevania characters are almost the same in terms of their move set, the Street Fighter characters too, etc. Then you’ve got characters that most likely no one asked for, like the Duck Hunt dog. The Ice Climbers were other characters like that, who almost no one had heard of before they appeared in Super Smash Bros., so it’s not like that’s unique to Ultimate, but it’s still a point against it. I don’t think there needed to be more than one character from Animal Crossing either, but maybe that’s just my personal preference. I groan whenever I pick random on character select and get an Animal Crossing character. They’re some of the weakest ones.

            Another aspect I’m a bit sad about is that there’s DLC. I’m old fashioned, I think if you buy a video game you should get the entire game. Many game companies will release an unfinished game and try to squeeze more money out of consumers to get the rest of the game. That Nintendo is getting on board with the DLC trend is troubling. We have extra characters who are essentially behind a pay wall. I ended up paying to get Byleth from Fire Emblem: Three Houses (a good game that I also own, although not my favorite Fire Emblem title), but that’s the only character I plan on getting, unless they bring in Tails from Sonic the Hedgehog or Waluigi, a character I actually like instead of someone I've never heard of. The DLC isn’t as out of control as it gets in some other modern games, as the game is still perfectly playable without the DLC and has plenty enough characters, but I still don’t like that it exists.

            In short, even though it has more characters than Brawl, the roster was inflated with characters that are clones of one another, or useless joke characters you don’t want to play as unless you want a self-imposed challenge. If I didn’t complain about a character here it means I’m okay with them. In particular I like this new version of Princess Zelda. I do have a private wish for more Sonic characters (I mean, other third party games got multiple characters), but that’s just me being a Sonic fanboy.

 The “Final” Smash

           

            The Final Smash was introduced in Brawl. Basically, if you can break this neon-colored “smashball” that floats along the screen you can perform a special move that will usually knock out your opponent, most of the time. I’ll admit some of them could be cheap (Sonic’s “Super Sonic” mode let you fly, be invincible and deadly to the touch for an overly long time, and that damned giant tank the Star Fox characters got always pissed me off). They could have just changed these extra cheap final smashes. But in Ultimate, the “final” smash has been weakened to the point where it shouldn’t even be called final anymore. You’ll rarely if ever KO anyone with it. In Ultimate, you don’t have to necessarily break a smashball to do it anymore, you can do it after this final smash meter fills as you fight; which is annoying, as it essentially lets a player who’s gotten the upper hand on you kick you when you’re down. The final smash originally leveled the playing field, but this undermines that purpose. There didn’t need to be a meter. The smashball still exists, so you do still have a chance if you’re on the losing side. It has been accompanied by a completely unnecessary fake smashball that explodes if you break it. Once you’re able to tell the difference between a real and a fake one you’re never going to go after it anyway. So why does it need to exist?

Also, if you don’t know exactly how a character’s “final” smash works you’ll likely miss your target. Even if you do know how to use a character’s final smash, you’ll often miss anyway because it’s easier to get out of the way with most of them. They don’t all require precision, but a lot of them do. They’ve been weakened so much that there’ve been times where even when I have connected with it, it only ended up doing about 10% damage. They usually survive. It’s almost always completely useless unless your opponent is already on the verge of being KO’d. I have a sneaking suspicion that Nintendo listened to the competitive Smash community who like to suck the fun out of everything they touch, and watered down the final smash in order to appease them. Can’t have these filthy “casuals” stand a fighting chance against these superior warriors that forgo having a life outside of competing in video games. You know, I play games for fun. I don’t like overly-difficult games. I admit it. So what? I’m hardly alone in that. Couldn’t they have just made a separate Super Smash Bros. game for these hardcore people that think fun is for the weak, and a regular one for the more than 90% of the rest of the players? Ah, but there’s an even simpler solution. In Brawl if you were one of these anti-final smash elitists you could simply switch the smashball off and not have it. And that was just fine. No one had a problem with that. There was no need to water down the final smash to appease the elitists who can’t handle losing to normies.

           

Stage Builder

            I have such fond memories of the stage builder in Brawl. I built labyrinths, themed stages, little torture chambers with spikes and conveyor belts. It was fun. Especially when I found this program that allowed me to hack the stage builder and build what I wanted without limits. Thus far I’ve been disappointed by Ultimate’s stage builder. No spikes, no drop-blocks, no conveyor belts, no thin ground that you’re able to pass through. You can make things in any shape you like, in a program that kind of reminds me of MS Paint, but I miss the old features. I suppose you can now substitute spikes for lava, wind on an ice surface for the conveyor belts, and moving or exploding blocks for the falling blocks. Plenty of music to choose from too which is nice, but I don’t know. It’s just not the same. They’ve gotten rid of too much. I don’t know why either. But again, maybe I just need more practice in stage building. I’m going to gradually try to rebuild my old custom stages one by one and see if I can get it close to the original. I might be able to make stages as fun as the ones I did in Brawl. Let me illustrate by showing you some of my classic masterpieces from Brawl, and what I was able to come up with in Ultimate.

These are some of my hacked stages on Brawl. Let's have a look at the Painstation 2.

Look at this beautiful torture chamber! Mwahaha!

This was one of my Labyrinth stages. I tried my best to replicate it in Ultimate below.

There's no dropping blocks, but I can make the walls move now, which is a plus. 

And here's the Painstation 3. No spikes, but at least we have lava.

No Real Payoffs

            This is a more minor qualm, but I didn’t feel like there was much of a payoff for beating story mode and classic mode. I went through as every character in classic mode, thinking I’d get something, but I got nothing. For a while when you play classic mode you get challenged by a new fighter at the end and if you win you unlock the fighter as a playable character. But after you unlock all the fighters, it’s like what more is there? Where’s the replay value? If I remember in Brawl, I was still unlocking stuff a year or even two years later. I haven’t had Ultimate very long but I’ve already almost unlocked everything.

No Explanations for Who These Characters Are

            The first three Super Smash Bros. games had intricate profiles on each character. It would tell you what game the character originates from, and briefly explain their backstory. In Ultimate all you get are little snippets of information on each character, and you have to really dig through the menu to find it. I still don’t know who these ink kids from Splatoon are, or who each Fire Emblem character is, or what’s the deal with that Tasmanian Devil Pokemon, Incineroar or whatever. I don’t know why they chose to forego that this time. It’s similar to how none of the Nintendo Switch games I’ve had so far include an instruction booklet. Did they figure just because we can just look things up on the internet now, they don’t need to bother with it?

Conclusion

            So, these are the main reasons I think Super Smash Bros. Brawl was overall a better game. A lot of this comes down to personal preference, as I’m the type who likes items, final smashes, and complex stages. And the story mode in Brawl had a lot more effort put into it. Ultimate removed a lot of what made Brawl so great. Again, perhaps some of these changes date back to the Wii U Super Smash Bros. that came out between Ultimate and Brawl. But still, you’d expect a game that came out ten years later to be an improvement in most if not all aspects over a game from ten years prior. Not really, in this case. It’s still a fun game on its own, like I said, but in comparison to Brawl, it was a bit disappointing.