Super Smash Bros. is the fighting game series for people who like video games in general more than traditional fighting games, such as Killer Instinct or Street Fighter. It started as a battle royale for Nintendo's All-Stars, but has since evolved into a collection of some of gaming's favorite characters. The last game in the series, Super Smash Bros. (commonly referred to as Smash 4), was released on both the Wii U and 3DS. Now, with the Nintendo Switch, those two versions have been merged and expanded into a full-fledged sequel you can play at home or on the go. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate ($59.99) for the Nintendo Switch is the biggest game in the series, with a massive single-player campaign and an insane amount of options for multiplayer. Nintendo still makes a few missteps with online play, but this is still a must-have Switch game and a PCMag Editors' Choice.
How to Smash
Mechanically, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is nearly identical to Super Smash Bros. ($48.02 at Amazon) on the Nintendo Wii U. You move your fighter with the left analog stick, tap the A button to attack and pick up items, and hit the B button to use special moves. The other face and bumper buttons let you jump, grab enemies, and block incoming attacks. Tilting the analog stick in different directions while pressing A performs different attacks, and doing the same thing while pressing B produces different special moves. You can also tilt the stick and hold A down, or flick the right analog stick, to charge up a super-powered Smash attack that sends enemies flying.
It's an accessible, simple control layout that ignores fighting game conventions like complex inputs for special moves and combos. You don't need to twist the stick around to get Link to fire an arrow or Samus to use a screw attack; you just tilt the stick and press a button. It makes combat less a matter of input execution and more a matter of timing and range.
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The simplified inputs leave a lot of room for additional factors that are too chaotic for conventional one-on-one fighting games. Items can appear in the stage, hazards can sweep through and cause damage, and you can even summon additional video game characters to fight for you. All that, and eight players can fight at once—something you don't see in Street Fighter V ($14.99 at Amazon) or Soul Calibur VI .
Matches usually involve knocking your opponents out of the stage, either by getting them to fall off a platform or by hitting them so hard they that fly off the screen. Every fighter has a damage level, and the more damage they sustain, the more vulnerable they are to special moves and Smash attacks. When a fighter is damaged enough, a good Smash will launch them into the background, the sky, or even smacking against your screen. For a slightly more conventional experience, you can optionally engage in Stamina Battles, in which each fighter has a set number of hit points, and loses as soon as they run out by taking damage.
![How 'Super Smash Bros. Ultimate' nails every aspect fans love about the series](https://zmgvideos.mashable.com/cms/2018/12/448c1cd9-9ba3-f410/uploaded_thumbnail.jpg)
Besides choosing between smashing opponents off the screen and draining their health to win, you can set a wide variety of different options for your matches. You can set a time limit for each match, give each fighter a certain number of "Stock" (the number of times they can be knocked out), choose how often items appear (or if they appear at all), individually enable or disable each item in the game, use different levels' unique designs or lock them into the flat "Omega" or consistent and platform-filled "Battlefield" layouts, and add even more granular rules to your matches. You can save each unique ruleset and load it whenever you want to play using those specific settings.
Combat is fast, satisfying, and varied. While each character has a limited number of moves, they all feel unique and apply to very different situations. Knowing when to trigger Marth's counter or how far Kirby's hammer attack reaches is vital, but once you master those details, any character can be unstoppable.
All the Warriors
This is the biggest Super Smash Bros. roster yet. In fact, it might be the biggest fighting game roster ever (not counting homebrew Mugen games). Every character that was ever playable in a Super Smash Bros. game can be found here, along with some new fighters. There are the classic Nintendo characters from the first game and Melee, including Donkey Kong, Kirby, Link (The Legend of Zelda), Mario, and Samus (Metroid). There are the third-party video game characters added in Brawl and 4: Mega Man, Pac-Man, Solid Snake (Metal Gear Solid), and Sonic the Hedgehog. There are the DLC added in Smash 4, like Bayonetta, Cloud (Final Fantasy), and Ryu (Street Fighter). And, new for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, there are King K. Rool (Donkey Kong Country), Incineroar (Pokemon), Inkling (Splatoon), Isabelle (Animal Crossing), Richter and Simon Belmont (Castlevania), and Ridley (Metroid).
In total, there are 74 different fighters, including seven "echo fighters," characters who share the same move sets as preexisting fighters (Daisy with Peach, Dark Samus with Samus, Dark Pit with Pit, Lucina with Marth, Chrom with Roy, Ken with Ryu, and Richter with Simon). Another fighter, Piranha Plant (Super Mario Bros.) will be added next year to bring the full roster to 75, or 70 completely unique fighters. Nintendo also plans to add five more fighters as DLC for $5.99 each next year, starting with the complete surprise of Joker from Persona 5 (a PlayStation 4 exclusive game).
That's a lot of characters, and it's hard to master them all. Most players will be drawn to fighters who have move sets they like or are simply from video games they like. I've taken a liking to Solid Snake for his remote control missile and Simon Belmont for his long-reaching whip smash attack and variety of special weapons for enemies in the air. Marth is also a useful backup when I need a hard counter attack (down-tilt special) to use against quick melee fighters like Little Mac.
You won't be able to play with all of these fighters when you start the game, though. To avoid overwhelming the player, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate starts with a fairly modest roster of the series' core Nintendo characters and requires everyone else to be unlocked through playing. Fortunately, unlocking these characters is pretty fast and loose. Unfortunately, unlocking these characters seems pretty random if you don't want to play through the World of Light single-player campaign (explained below).
Playing normally, every so often a new challenger appears and you're dropped into a fight with them using the character you were using in the previous match. If you beat them, you can use them in the game. If you don't, you can try to fight them again by selecting a glowing door in the Games & More menu for a rematch. The rematch option is helpful, because sometimes unlockable characters are brutal to fight, and you can easily find yourself facing them with a fighter who isn't best suited for them. Unfortunately, you only get one rematch for each fighter, before you need to keep playing the game to make them eventually challenge you again.
You can also unlock characters by playing through the World of Light mode and fighting them there, with unlimited rematches and plenty of options to give you an edge.
World of Light
Super Smash Bros. Brawl had a lengthy single-player mode called Subspace Emissary, but Smash 4 didn't have any significant campaign, and it seemed that Nintendo had simply lost interest in creating big, engaging solo experiences for the series anymore. That assumption has been proven very wrong with World of Light, a massive single-player campaign for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate that can easily last 12 to 20 hours.
A mysterious being called Galeem attacks the entire Super Smash Bros. universe, absorbing nearly every character who has been in the series. Only Kirby manages to escape, and he finds himself overlooking a new world rebuilt by Galeem and populated by spirits controlling copies of the game's characters. He has to fight his way through these copies, beat the corrupted forms of the game's other fighters to recruit them, and eventually take on Galeem itself.
The World of Light mode takes the form of hundreds of different battles scattered across a giant map that looks like a patchwork of different video game locations. There's Pac-Man's maze, Yoshi's island, a military base, the Animal Crossing village, and even Lumiose City from Pokemon X and Y. On here, you'll fight spirits controlling characters in the game, often with different variables affecting each match. The floor might be poisonous, or the enemy might be giant, or only be certain items will appears.
On top of that, the strength of the spirit itself, shown as a number, determines how much damage they can deal and take. Fortunately, you recruit every spirit you beat and can equip them to give yourself new powers and abilities. Primary spirits determine your initial attack and defense numbers (the total of which are your overall strength, like the spirits you fight), and how many support spirit slots you have. Support spirits take one, two, or three slots each, and they give you additional abilities like starting matches equipped with an item or making you immune to certain effects. Primary spirits can also be leveled up through fighting or enhancing them with items, which improves their stats. It's an RPG element that adds an additional level of strategy and item collection to the game.
The spirits aren't simply faceless ghosts, either. They're characters and objects from different video games. The number of playable characters, at 75, is already a lot, and dozens of assist trophies and Pokemons to summon in battle add even more, but that doesn't compare with the hundreds and hundreds of spirits you can collect. You can find everything from the famous (Metal Gear REX from Metal Gear Solid) to the incredibly obscure (Yakuman Player, the box art from the Japan-only Game Boy mahjong game Yakuman). You can collect spirits in other game modes, but you won't be able to equip them and use them to modify your character unless you enable that feature. And because they can wildly unbalance matches, don't expect to see them in online play.
The spirits themselves are a bit light on content. Besides the stats and abilities they provide in the game, they only feature a piece of flat art to represent them and a note about what game series they come from. There's no flavor text or 3D model to rotate and look at closely. Some additional details, like the assist trophies in previous Super Smash Bros., would have been very welcome. Without that extra context, the spirits seem little more than collectible stickers.
Smash Alone
Besides World of Light, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has a handful of other single-player game options. You can, of course, play standard matches with any modifiers against computer-controlled fighters with different difficulty settings. You can also play the "Classic" mode, which takes you through several varied matches, a bonus stage, and then a fight against a boss. You can adjust the difficulty rating here from 0.0 to 9.9, with harder difficulty levels offering better rewards like spirits and in-game currency for buying items, spirits, and costume pieces for your Mii fighters (Mii Brawler, Mii Gunner, and Mii Swordsman, introduced in Smash 4). There is also a training mode for practicing with different characters, and Mob Smash, which pits you against an entire army of fighters.
You can also listen to the game's massive soundtrack, consisting of over 700 songs from different series. It isn't technically a gameplay mode, but custom playlists and the ability to play music with the screen turned off turns your Switch into a very useful video-game-only music player. It's a shame Bluetooth earphones and speakers don't work with the system, though.
Smash Your Friends
The heart of any fighting game is its competitive modes, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate serves these well. You can play locally or online in matches of up to eight players (online play requires a Nintendo Switch Online subscription). Locally, you can choose individual matches or set up squad strike fights of teams of three or five facing each other, or create one-on-one tournaments of up to 32 players. A handful of special fights are also available, including cooperatively fighting through the entire roster in Smashdown or making everyone fight with huge or tiny bodies (or with everyone invisible, or everyone moving really fast, or more) in Special Smash.
Online, you can choose between Quickplay matches or Battle Arenas. Quickplay drops you into individual matches, either on your own or with a local friend on the same system as your partner. You can choose to prioritize a specific set of match types like stock or timer, or jump into the first open match the game can find.
Battle Arenas are waiting rooms for up to eight players, where matches rotate between them. They can be one-on-one, two-on-two team battles, or three- or four-player free-for-all fights, with different rules for which players get shuffled out of the match so someone who's been waiting can join the next one. Battle arenas can be public or private, and you can set the skill level to limit players to Smash neophytes or experts. Players waiting for their turn can spectate on the current match, watching the action even if they aren't participating.
As you fight and win online, you earn Global Smash Power, or GSP. The higher your GSP, the better you are at the game. When your GSP gets high enough, you can join Elite Smash—matches limited to only high-scoring players. It's an interesting way to gauge your skill level, but it feels very amorphous without more formal rankings, tiers, or leagues like in Splatoon 2. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate desperately needs a more comprehensive online competitive experience, with support for massive tournaments and ongoing leagues. Hopefully Nintendo will add those features in the future.
Voice chat doesn't exist in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. You can use the Nintendo Switch Online app to talk with other players in your game through your smartphone (and you do need Nintendo Switch Online to play online at all), but at that point you get more options and better service with a comprehensive gaming VoIP system like Discord. In fact, one Battle Arena I joined was straight-out called "Discord is (user name)" to get players to join it.
Ultimate Is Appropriate
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the biggest game in the series, with loads of fighters and features to play with both online and offline. The online play has a few wrinkles that may frustrate competitive players, but the wealth of content still makes this a must-have game. It's an ideal fighting game to get all your friends gathered around the TV to enjoy, without worrying about the extensive technical execution requirements of more "serious" fighting games like Street Fighter V.
Anyone you know who enjoys video games is likely to find at least one Smash Ultimate character that appeals to them. It takes everything that made Smash 4 on the Wii U so compelling and expands on it—with the added Switch benefit of handheld mode. All this makes Super Smash Bros. Ultimate an Editors' Choice for fighting games on the Switch.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch earns its title, standing out as the most comprehensive Smash game to date.
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