Smash has been part of my life for a long time. It's the one fighting game that I think I'm legitimately good at, particularly at Melee (I won our college's Melee tournament more than a decade ago-Sheikh for life). I first played the game at a Toys 'R Us and was immediately captivated by the brashness of the concept. Pikachu fighting Star Fox? Count me in. There are plenty of games with great concepts that don't pan out in their execution, and I've reviewed some here that I though would be really excellent but ended up being trash (Project X Zone comes immediately to mind). Super Smash Bros., however, didn't just try to take Nintendo characters and shoehorn them into a game with traditional fighting mechanics, but instead was innovative at every step of the design process with speeding up player movement, making individual mistakes and successes mean less due to the large number of hits you need to take to die, to simplifying character move inputs to encourage introductory players, to a diverse number of stages with a vertical and horizontal play stage dwarfing that of other fighting games. The first Smash is brilliant. The sequel is perfect. I honestly don't care terribly much for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but that is much like my dislike of the worst Pokemon games (Diamond and Pearl)-even the worst Pokemon game is still better than 95% of the RPGs put out in the history of humanity. I hadn't spent too much time in Smash 4, also known by its more ponderous full title referenced in the title of this post, but I decided to dive in for two reasons. First, I just missed Smash. I'm honestly too good at Smash to play with my family or the friends who live near enough me to play. Everyone just gets tired of losing. Second, I knew Ultimate was coming out in a few weeks and wanted to dust off my (very dusty) skills to prepare for Online play. Smash 4 was very fun, although I admittedly didn't play it a ton. I beat All-Star Mode, Classic Mode a few times, unlocked a few characters, and tried out some of the new ones. It was my plan to buy Ultimate in January, after the shock of paying for all of the Christmas presents wore off. But then my brother-in-law won bro-in-law of the decade award and got me the game for Christmas, and I was off and running sooner than I thought. This review will focus on Ultimate, but I wanted to note that I finished Smash 4 for my 50 games in the year count.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is very fun. It's definitely significantly different from 4 in that there is a remarkable balancing out of the characters, where few of them felt like trash when I played them. There was a large effort to balance out the larger characters in particular, adding some additional tools to their toolbox while also normalizing some of the jumping between the smaller and larger characters. I struggle evaluating the game fairly because I am SO attached to Melee. Compared to Melee, a lot of the typical process I would follow in dismantling my opponents has been significantly nerfed. Running attacks now do the same damage, but send people farther at lower damage levels, making it difficult to follow up with quick mid-air attacks. This encourages a more iterative type of combat, in which you hit a move, send them flying, wait for them to return, and reengage. I prefer the Melee approach due to familiarity, but have to admit that it didn't feel terribly fun when you were completely locked up by unavoidable followup attacks by a skilled player, so I understand why they made this change. In addition to running attacks, they've also made the same changes to the throws, where automatic followups like Link's down throw into an Up + B simply doesn't ever work anymore. A lot of the "rust" I felt wasn't so much that I was bad at the game as much as it was unlearning some of the automatic habits I'd built up over years of playing Melee at a fairly high level. Given a few more months, I'm sure I could find some more fluid grace in the playstyle in Ultimate, but it did feel a bit stilted and lacking action in those moments where you are simply waiting for your opponent to return. They also nerfed the off-stage action significantly, with midair attacks launching your opponent a far more limited distance, and seemingly removing any sort of spikes through which you could land the perfect shot and send your opponent plummeting to his death. I always liked that high risk, high reward element of Melee, so I'm sad to see it gone. I'll have the keep playing to see if I can find the art in the game that delighted me so much in Melee.
The character roster is just tremendous. I think this is the most balanced Smash, ever, and it's not particularly close. I've played online matches against many characters, and never found any of their designs particularly unfair in the way that you would unavoidably struggle with some of the top tier characters in Melee, or even worse, in Smash 64. With such a huge roster, it's unavoidable that there are going to be characters that are disadvantaged, but online balancing should help that out, and the fact that it launched in such an excellent state, balance-wise, is great. They also included a few critical characters to Nintendo's history, most notably Simon Belmont, who represented big gaps in the roster. Ryu Hayabusa needs to be next, but it kind of stinks that they also have Ryu from Street Fighter! How are they going to name them? Other DLC characters that need to make it are Banjo & Kazooie, Mallow (forget Geno), and an actual Final Fantasy character from the Nintendo era (my vote is for Paladin Cecil, or perhaps Terra).
The controls and visuals are all fantastic, and I adore that they have given you the option to use the old Wii U adapter to connect your Gamecube controllers to your Switch for play. The music is, as always, excellent, with lots of tracks from your favorite games remixed in delightful ways. The Wii U version had an astounding 15 hours (!) of music, so I can't even fathom how long the soundtrack from the Switch version is.
The single most disappointing thing about Ultimate is the very spotty online server performance. Smash is a game that requires an extremely responsive server, and Smash ain't even close. One of the reasons why Street Fighter V and Mortal Kombat XL control so slowly is that the slow movements allow the servers to cheat and catch up a bit, if I understand the tech correctly. So I understand that making Smash online work is difficult, but it's legitimately reprehensible at the moment. I would hope that, given the fact that online is now paywalled, Nintendo is investing heavily in their online infrastructure to fix the issues, but as for now I completely stopped playing online.
This game is alive and thriving, very fun, and filled with promise. I think the structural things about the mechanics are real weaknesses, they're disappointing, but they're not going to be fixed because they're a feature, not a bug. They're reactions to a style of gameplay in Melee that many fans found off-putting, so I understand. I think you can make a game that has really quick and constant combat while also giving defensive options, but this game definitely went towards a quick skirmish 'n watch style of combat that I find significantly inferior to to my beloved Melee.
The online struggles, however, are something that can definitely be fixed, given enough time and money. I hope that they do, because I really feel like getting into competitive Smash has never been more accessible, and the huge balance character roster would make doing so really fun. I'll give the game a 8.8/10.
Up next is another fighting game I beat over the Christmas break, and it's definitely not because fighting games are quick to beat and I needed to wrap up a few to meet my annual goal ;)
-TRO
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