Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has 66 playable fighters to unlock. Of all the ways you can do this, there’s one method that’ll save you many hours and let you get the full 74-character roster much faster.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate offers a lot out of the box. All 103 stages and over 700 music tracks are available from the moment you turn on the game. What isn’t available at the start, however — and this is a big one — is every fighter. While the full roster includes 74 playable characters at launch (76 if you count Pokémon Trainer’s three Pokémon separately), only eight are unlocked from the get-go. So many worlds to play in, so few combatants.
There are myriad ways to unlock fighters — the single unifying gist is that the more you play Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in any mode, the more characters you unlock — but there is one method that is much faster than others, though it requires you to spend a bit more time in the Nintendo Switch’s menus.
When you first boot up Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, your roster includes eight of the 12 playable fighters from the original Nintendo 64 game: Mario, Donkey Kong, Link, Samus, Yoshi, Kirby, Fox and Pikachu. (Ness, Luigi, Jigglypuff and Captain Falcon are part of the group of 66 that needs to be unlocked.)
Each of the eight characters starts with eight different costumes. Some of those are simple palette swaps, while others are a bit more involved — Mario, for example, has his wedding suit from Super Mario Odyssey, while Pikachu has the usual variety of headgear.
Step one is playing a few rounds of Ultimate. Simple enough, yeah? In our testing, the first unlock happens within 8-10 minutes of game time, which is time spent in matches, not menus. The game counts these times separately; to see both “Play Time” and “Smash Bros. Powered Time Count,” from the main menu go to Vault, then Records, then Stats.
At the end of whatever match crosses the total play time into that territory, once you click through the postgame stats recap, the familiar siren sound should ring along with a silhouette of the fighter to unlock and an also-familiar line: “A new foe has appeared! Challenger approaching.”
Now all you need to do is beat the challenger. Don’t you worry if you lose, though: There are ways to try again (more on that later).
Repeating this method means you don’t have to wait an additional 10 minutes before being offered another character to unlock, which drastically cuts down the time in between. Why does this work? Our best guess is that Nintendo wanted to make sure you felt rewarded every time you booted up the game. Whatever the reasons were, 90 percent of the time, it worked every time.
Though it may seem random at first — it certainly did to us — there is an order to when you unlock characters using the playtime/ reset method above. Note that the unlock order is different for Classic Mode (more on that later) and World of Light (based on map location and when you face the fighter), so you can use those methods to unlock certain characters earlier.
