Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a loving tribute to Nintendo and gaming history. A terrific multiplayer fighter in its own right, even single-player fans have plenty to love this time. Extra DLC characters will flesh out the already enormous roster of famous fighters and will keep Switch owners occupied for a long time.
The Super Smash Bros. series has evolved dramatically since it made its debut on the Nintendo 64 back in 1999. What began as a party game soon morphed into a full-fledged competitive fighter, but Nintendo and director Masahiro Sakurai never forgot what made it so successful: fandom.
Whether you love Pokémon, Mario, Zelda, Splatoon, or even Final Fantasy, Super Smash Bros. has something to offer you, and in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the number of options you have is downright ludicrous. It certainly lives up to its Ultimate name, and it has instantly become one of the Switch’s must-have games.
Forget about checking a roster list to see if your favorite character made the cut – Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has every single fighter in the series available to play, even if they share an identical move-set to someone else. There are more than 70 different fighters to choose from, and though it can be a little overwhelming to pick your main and start honing your skills, it’s impressive that the development team would even consider such a feat.
Prefer Young Link to his replacement, Toon Link, or want to use Mewtwo instead of Lucario? You won’t find much difference in their styles, but that comes secondary to just living out your fantasy of controlling your favorite character in a massive brawl.
Like all other games in the series, you don’t start with all the characters right off the bat, and in Ultimate, you’re going to need to set aside quite a bit of time to unlock them all. Being limited to just a handful from the start does seem a little incompatible with Ultimate given its premise, but you don’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get your favorites.
Playing the game as you normally would prompt random challenges from new fighters. When you finally get that one newcomer you’ve been itching to try out, it’s like opening a new present on Christmas morning, only its one you can beat you up and will leave you disappointed if you can’t win.
There are, however, likely to be some Nintendo fans annoyed by how far the roster skews towards a few key series. The number of Pokémon you can use is now at 10, if counting the Pokémon trainer as three, and there are seven Fire Emblem heroes. Of those seven, all use swords, and four have blue hair. Mixing in a few different types of heroes would have been welcome, though with the game’s design philosophy this means it would have likely ballooned the roster even more.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate ’s kitchen sink approach extends to the stages, with more than 100 available at launch. All of them support special Battlefield and Omega variants, so competitive players don’t have to look at the same boring backgrounds for hours on end.
Among our favorite new stages are Great Plateau Tower from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Dracula’s Castle from Castlevania, both of which perfectly replicate the tone of their original games without sacrificing playability.
