super smash bros review
As its producer Masahiro Sakurai himself recognized, the existence of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a miracle. Seeing Mario and Zelda take on Ryu from Street Fighter or Cloud from Final Fantasy on a battlefield taken from Metal Gear Solid is both strange and wonderful that only the Smash Bros. series. is able to offer - and Ultimate is undoubtedly the most ambitious and successful part of the franchise.
With 74 fighters, 108 courses, nearly 1,300 Spirits to collect and an Adventure mode playable solo with a lifespan of 25 hours, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is far more comprehensive than its four content predecessors. If some additions remain questionable and could easily have been sacrificed in order to make the proposed experience even more solid and coherent, the new mechanical and visual joys that it introduces prove to be excellent and prevent it from falling into repetition. This new album integrates everything I had always dreamed of and represents the ideal sequel to Switch.
Smash Bros. has always been a fighting game capable of satisfying two types of players whom everything seems at first sight to oppose: those who wish to take part in exciting and chaotic confrontations up to eight players and those who prefer tense matches requiring excellent reflexes and a high level of skills. While competitive players will probably choose to deactivate the objects and favor a stage without any structures like "Final Destination" (or the "Omega" versions of the other stages offered, functionally identical), others will probably find that the random objects, deadly environmental hazards and other epic special moves (Final Smash) are essential features that make Smash Bros. great. These two approaches - and all of the intermediate configurations - coexist beautifully in Ultimate.
Getting started with Smash Bros. prevents its competitive and technical side from becoming too intimidating
More ambitious than any other part of the Smash Bros franchise, which celebrates its 19 years of existence this year, Ultimate brings together as many iconic video game characters as possible - and not only protagonists from Nintendo licenses, as it was originally case. This allows you to give free rein to your wildest player fantasies. It is roughly a competitive fighting game taking advantage of a real "digital toy box" that will bring back many memories for most players.
The game is also very accessible, since once your favorite character selected and the fight launched, you only need the left stick and two keys to make most of the shots of a fighter. Unlike Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat or Tekken, combos turn out to be extremely simple and you generally just need to press the A or B key while tilting your stick in a certain direction to take them out, which allows you to discover their different techniques in playing rather than consulting their movement list or spending time in training mode.
The fact that fighters do not have health bars makes Smash Bros. particularly accessible and prevents its competitive and technical side from becoming too intimidating. You don't empty an opponent's life bar, but increase their percentage - the bigger they get, the easier it is to send them flying out of the map with a powerful attack, synonymous with knockout. Although it is always scary to have a high percentage, this bias prevents the feeling of condemnation, which occurs in traditional fighting games when your health bar is dangerously reduced, from settling. Simply put, you always have a chance to turn things around in Smash Bros.
Although this easy-to-access side is important, those looking for demanding and technical confrontations will have something to do with dodging, tankards, shields to be triggered at the right time and other air attacks to be used strategically - the use of which evolves according to each character's abilities, attacks and weights. The grip of a tiny fighter like Pichu proves to be very different from that of a castagneur like Bowser, and it is absolutely vital to learn their subtleties, both by playing them and by fighting them. Players looking for technical clashes have access to a large number of combos and cons, and it seems that Nintendo is more concerned than ever by this approach, by making it a point of honor to look after the competitive side of the title.
None of these are unique to Ultimate, but I think it's important to point out that all of the essential ingredients in the Smash Bros. are here together and more effective than ever. If the framework and DNA of Super Smash Bros for Wii U are present, this new component does not look anything like an ordinary portage or a "Deluxe Edition". The Wii U having sold badly enough, I would not be surprised that many players simply skipped the previous episode, but Ultimate does not rely on this assumption and never resembles a vulgar recycling of ideas .
Ready for destruction
Overall, Ultimate fighters appear slightly faster and much more punchy than in the past. Sending an enemy waltz with a Smash attack is almost akin to shooting in a balloon, with fighters flying quickly on impact and then gradually losing speed. This helps to remove much of the ambiguity about whether or not a hit will turn into a knockout, limiting the frustrating moments when you slowly drift into unexpected death (a speed camera also appears when a player is found off the screen to find out how far it is from the limits of the map and the destruction zone - a new feature that I appreciated, but which can perfectly be deactivated).
During one-on-one combat, or when there are only two fighters left on the map, you are entitled to an epic zoom effect when you place a move with a very high chance of causing a knockout, a similar treatment to the one who benefited from the terrible KO Punch of Little Mac. This is a welcome addition that makes Smash attacks even more enjoyable, and makes it easier for you to know if your opponent is likely to recover from this attack.
Custom rules are a welcome addition, but make changes on the fly more tedious.
Many of the Final Smash attacks are also easier to perform. Some of the more inconsistent ones (Pac-Man, Pikachu and Donkey Kong in mind) have been modified and are now more reliable, while those which trigger an animation and block enemies in order to cause fixed damage are now more widespread. These attacks now seem less unbalanced when you activate Smash Balls (which are now almost difficult to catch), and the introduction of an optional Final Smash gauge that recharges slowly and allows you to trigger a less devastating version at the same time. new exciting opportunities to chain these devastating attacks during a match.
Fortunately, if you don't want to play Smash Bros. in the same way as me, it is now much easier to adjust the rules of a match in Ultimate. You can now create and save custom rule sets so that you can reuse them whenever you want. And their number is not limited: I used one by default, another for the use of the Final Smash gauge, a third which deactivated environmental dangers and the use of objects, and a last one where only available items were Poké Balls. Being able to save custom rules is a real boon that allows you to save precious time and play in a different way as soon as you feel like it, but it also makes slight modifications made on the fly more tedious (if you want to add an extra life for a round or two, for example), and it made me regret that a compromise had not been found.
The possibility of going from one stage to the next in the middle of combat quickly became one of my favorite new features in Ultimate. This morphing function allows you to choose two stages on the selection screen, and to determine the duration after which the map will change during a match. This is a fantastic way to discover the specifics of some 108 cards available in Ultimate, which also allows you to start on a large card and then move on to a smaller one when a good part of the fighters have been eliminated. - just try not to be at the end of the stage when this happens, just to escape an unjust death.
However, the screen for selecting courses is not very ergonomic. It is literally a giant grid made up of tiny images classified according to their date of appearance in the Smash Bros. franchise. I much prefer this to having to scroll through the stages one by one, as is the case in some games, but there is such a mass of levels on the screen that I have unintentionally abandoned some and took a long time to get my hands on those I was looking for. This is a fairly minor problem, but I would have liked to have been able to sort them alphabetically or by game, or at least be able to mark my favorite internships.
The levels themselves are generally well thought out. Unlike the characters available, we do not find all the levels that appeared in the previous parts of the franchise (I don't care what purists may think, I miss you Poké Flotte!) But the range offered is more than complete . It is still a shame that only four stages are entirely new, but the arrival on Switch of levels once exclusive to 3DS versions, such as Tortiland or Paper Mario, more than compensate for this state of affairs. Some of the historic levels of the franchise are also making a comeback and benefiting from visual improvements offering them an absolutely fantastic rendering, in particular Fourside and Corneria from Super Smash Bros. Melee.
There are, however, some disappointing internships in the lot that made me wonder why these had been privileged for the benefit of others. Globally, the only interest of really awful levels like Pac-Land or the Cave in Peril comes down to their Omega and Battlefield versions - the selection of available cards would probably not have suffered from their absence and would have been more homogeneous.
Similarly, while new nice objects like the Beastball or the Rage Blaster have been added, others absolutely stupid and unbalanced, like the Galaga Ship or the Scarab are always in the game. Since Ultimate gives you the ability to easily turn them off when you create your custom rules, the aforementioned items and stages are not a real problem, but you have the unpleasant impression that Nintendo is focusing more on quantity on the quality when it comes to establishing these lists.
Choose your fighter
I am however delighted that the Japanese firm has adopted this approach for the roster of Ultimate characters. Giving us access to all of the characters in the franchise, for better or worse, is an ambitious decision that deserves to be commended. The impressive gallery of characters from Ultimate is simply incredible, with an impressive number of iconic titles and styles of play represented. The choice to classify certain characters as “Echo” fighters rather than new characters is also appreciable, and prevents glorified reskins, like Daisy or Maleficent Pit, from taking the place of another character in the list.
Giving us access to all the characters is an ambitious decision that deserves to be welcomed.
Six completely new non-echo challengers have joined the fight, and six more will land as DLC sometime in 2019 - the Piranha Plant will be free until January 31, before becoming a paid DLC like the other five, which will also add new internships. None of them is particularly original according to the very high standards of the Smash Bros. license. in the matter, but all have their own specificities and seem perfectly at their place in Ultimate.
The most outstanding of them remain unquestionably Simon Belmont of Castlevania (and his echo Richter), and King K. Rool of Donkey Kong. Simon's abilities are extremely faithful to those seen in his original license: he launches axes, boomerangs and explosive vials of holy water and has whip attacks rewarding precision and sense of timing. While King K.Rool handles like the gigantic and crazy crocodile that he is: a delicious and terrifying mixture of madness and brute force.
Marie d'Animal Crossing has an obvious charm, but her limited set of movements sometimes makes her look like one of the villagers of her original franchise, while the Inkling proves to be refreshing with its ink gauge system ( tricky to manage and not very intuitive anyway) to be recharged over the fight. Whether they sound familiar or new, each of the 11 new fighters and Echoes joining the Ultimate roster represents an original and welcome addition.
Do not expect to embody one of them from the start. Although there are a total of 74 fighters, you only have access to 11 of them at the start of the adventure - the original eight characters from the first Super Smash Bros. released on N64, plus three custom Mii fighters you created. However, it is not very complicated to unlock others - about every few games, a new protagonist appears, and you can also track them in the Adventure and Classic modes - but with such a roster, it it will probably take a minimum of ten hours to fill your list of characters by playing only in multiplayer. There are many unsavory ways to speed things up, but naturally enriching my collection by playing with my friends was much more exciting.
The more you play with other players, the faster the characters unlock, and Ultimate has blown the barriers between four- and eight-player Smash (versus) modes. If playing with more than four people was previously relegated to certain large specific cards, this is no longer the case. The eight-player smash mode is always a joy, but the possibility of being able to involve a fifth in the action in a transparent manner remains appreciable.
If you're not connected to chaos, playing one on one is always that easy. We are witnessing the appearance of small novelties, such as the number of lives remaining for each player highlighted on the screen each time one of them dies, and we are also witnessing the arrival of a new one. very nice mode called Smash en Bande which allows you to choose three or five different fighters and to participate in a "Best Of" match - a mode which also allows you to participate in a match against one where each of your lives represents a new fighter.
Team Spirits
If multiplayer is the main attraction of Smash Bros, the most striking novelty of the single player mode of Ultimate remains undoubtedly the new system of Spirits. There are almost 1,300 Spirits in this Switch section: all of them are characters or striking elements drawn from video games as famous as Super Mario Bros and as obscure as the Game Boy Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru released in Japan 1992 , and all are represented by an illustration from their respective source materials. While I miss the detailed trophies from previous Smash Bros. franchise titles, the incredibly large selection of Spirits represents an interesting compromise - further evidence of Nintendo's tendency to focus on quantity rather than quality.
There are almost 1,300 Spirits in this Switch component: all of them are characters or striking elements of the video game.
Although it is still very nice to have so many Spirits available, their use sometimes seems exaggerated. In some game modes, you can equip one Primary Spirit at a time (3 types are available and have their own weaknesses like Paper, Pebbles, Scissors) and up to three Support Spirits, which offer you buffs or new abilities can for example immunize you against poison or electricity. Primary Spirits can level up by fighting or giving them snacks (which cost you Spirit Points) or by using the Spirit Kernels you get by giving up Spirits you have in duplicate - you can also use them to summon new Spirits, but you will need very specific kernels to do so.
Optimizing your team of Spirits in the Adventure Mode (The Glow of the World), or while you collect them in the timed and random mode called Table of Spirits, is fun, but navigating through this system turns out to be a real wound. As with the course selection screen, the menu allowing you to organize and equip your Spirits is like a long list that can include several hundred Spirits. There are many filters to help you find specific abilities more easily, such as immunity to certain types of damage, but if you're looking for a very specific effect - like starting a fight with a laser sword - and you don't remember which obscure character he belongs to, you'll probably have to go through the entry-by-entry list to get your hands on it. Because of this problem, I usually kept a few that I found particularly powerful and used automatic recommendations the rest of the time.
The most impressive aspect of Spirits is undoubtedly the fights you have to win to get them. Almost all Spirits have a unique battle that takes over the Ultimate roster and uses various visual effects to represent the character in question. Some are fun, like Snorlax, a kind of gigantic gray King K. Rool that does not move an inch, while others are stimulating and take over the universe of the games from which they originate, like that of Dr. Wily , who first sees you face eight Mega Man in a row in an endurance game, before a Dr. Mario appears on the screen.
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