On November 8, Nintendo hosted a press conference in regards to the upcoming release of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in New York City.
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The event kicked off with a slide show presentation for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, guided by JC Rodrigo, manager of product marketing at Nintendo’s Treehouse team, before members of the press went hands on with “a near final version” of the upcoming game, including all “announced fighters that will be available on day one.”
The presentation emphasized how massive of a video game crossover Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is. “You can have Pac-Man throw a Pokรฉball at Pikachu and have Marth punch Donkey Kong in the face while Yoshi runs around pooping everyone’s eggs in a Castlevania stage,” Rodrigo said. “It’s like this giant crossover.”
The game includes a total of 74 playable characters. This is before the five characters which have been predetermined to be available via downloadable content following release. Each download will include a character, a stage, and music. Gamers looking for more information regarding the specifics of those contents can wait until release to make any purchases as the identities and locations will be revealed. Any character who has ever been playable in a previous Smash Bros. game is going to be playable in Ultimate.
Piranha Plant, a new character, is a playable fighter with a free offer when gamers register the game before January 1. “He is very different.” “It is not a normal archetype. It’s not some carbon copy. It’s very different. I’ll keep it at that.”
“There’s over 100 hundred different stages in the game and they range from all different types of video game franchises,” Rodrigo said. “Pretty much every fighter has a stage they can call their own…There’s also different forms of each stage so there’s technically over 300 stages.” With a new preset, players can go from one stage to another in the middle of a game, a setting put in place before a game begins. “You can play multiple stages at one time.”
Abundance seems to be the theme with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, including when it comes to music. “The whole thing about music, over 900 tracks in the game sounds silly, what game has 900 tracks? It sounds kinda weird but I will say it’s pretty sweet,” Rodrigo enthused. “Take a look at who is writing those!” For gamers who are truly passionate about the music, they can take their Nintendo Switch with them on the go and listen to the music in their headphones.
The attention shifted to the most unique new feature of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: Spirits Mode, which Rodrigo dubs, “a new way to play Super Smash Bros.“
Spirits Mode will be Smash‘s way of embracing an RPG style of play.
“What is a spirit? A spirit is an item that augments your character’s abilities for the parameters of the match,” Rodrigo explained. “Spirits can equip you with weapons to start the match. Spirits can increase gravity by 20% for the match to open the door for different combinations that weren’t available before.”
In true Smash fashion: to get the spirit, you have to beat the spirit. Ultimate will introduce World of Light, a long form single player mode where you take on certain challenges to unlock certain spirits. These spirits can then be applied to multiplayer matches, though all parties would have to agree to playing with Spirits activated, thus changing the game a bit from its classic Melee brawls.
“Spirits is gonna change everything,” Rodrigo said.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is available on December 7, 2018.
