Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Director Reveals How Players Will Unlock Characters

Earlier today, the director of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Masahiro Sakurai, revealed some new information about the forthcoming game, including how its initial pitch came across, what tempo fans can expect and so much more.
But one detail a few people might have overlooks regards unlocking fighters within the game. As you probably know by now, Ultimate has an incredibly loaded roster; and there's a good chance you'll need to unlock a few combatants to use them within the game.

Said Sakurai, "The number of fighters that you can use from the beginning will be limited to those you could play as in the Nintendo 64 game. That way, the player can enjoy unlocking the characters one-by-one like in a typical fighting game; unlocking them all is a fair challenge, and some might be a little difficult, but most can be unlocked without any major difficulty.

"In my own experience, when I play fighting games I often quit before I've unlocked everybody, even if there are many that I haven't played as. The more characters there are, I feel like it's easier to quit without playing as them all, so I felt that simply increasing the number of characters in the roster wasn't necessarily a good thing.

"But on the other hand, Super Smash Bros. is a character-based fighting game, and a lot of people look forward to fighting as their favorite character; that was a particular subject we grappled with when deciding to have everyone appear."

It's interesting to see how this game is working on an unlock system that starts back with the origins of the series and possibly works through other entries, like Melee and maybe even Brawl before getting to the current level of play. That, combined with the trophies you're sure to unlock over the course of the game, will keep fans coming back for more, on top of the fights you'll be able to partake in.

These features were touched upon briefly during Nintendo's online E3 presentation (which you can watch above), but it'll be interesting to see how they take effect in the final release. We can't wait to give this system a try and see what all we can unlock.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate releases on December 7 for Nintendo Switch!