What makes Super Smash Bros Ultimate so popular?

What is ‘Smash Bros’?

‘Super Smash Bros’ is a fighting game series published by Nintendo, its most known for its characters being pulled from other Nintendo franchises such as ‘Super Mario Bros’ and ‘Fire Emblem’. The series was created by the Japanese developer Masahiro Sakurai in 1999, and he has directed each game in the series since.

A Quick History

The first Super Smash Bros. 64 game released in 1999 for the Nintendo 64, it was a great start to the franchise, with it featuring 12 characters and gaining high praise from consumers at the time. When Nintendo released the GameCube, they needed games to release along with it, so they asked Sakurai to create a sequel to Smash 64 for the GameCube’s release, but there’s just one problem with that, the GameCube released in September 2001, only 28 months after smash 64 released.

In the end, Super Smash Bros Melee has a development time of 13 months, but despite having such a small development time, Melee had a larger roster size with 26 while also adding so many more items, stages, game modes and mechanics, the short development time might have been a blessing in disguise as Melee ended up being the best-selling game on the GameCube. It is honestly amazing how much more melee was able to add on top of its predecessor in such a short amount of time.

The third instalment to the franchise was released in 2008 for the Nintendo Wii, under the name ‘Super Smash Bros Brawl’. It was the first game in the series to not be solely developed by HAL Laboratory, this time several different companies collaborated for its release. Once again, more items, stages and game modes were added, and the roster size expanded with 39 characters being available, with two of them being third party characters. The two characters were Sonic from the SEGA owned ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ franchise and Solid Snake from ‘Metal Gear Solid’. This was the first time a non-Nintendo character was playable in Smash. Smash Bros Brawl was also the game in the franchise to have online play.

‘Super Smash Bros for Nintendo 3ds and Wii U’ is the fourth (and technically fifth) game in the franchise and was released in 2014 for the 3ds and Wii U, with the title of the game matching the console you play it on. Smash4 took some big steps for the franchise: for starter, both versions of the game were the first in the series to receive updates after release, these updates included bug fixes, character adjustments and even DLC characters and stages. The 3ds version was the first game to be on a handheld device, and the Wii U version was the first game to be on a HD console. This time around the roster size had 49 available characters from launch, and 7 more characters were added through DLC, 5 of the newcomers were 3rd party characters.

The sixth instalment was released in 2018 for the Nintendo Switch with the name ‘Super Smash Bros Ultimate’. It is by far the biggest game in the series with there being 74 characters to play as in the base game and 12 characters being downloadable, making the final roster a whopping 86 characters.

How Does ‘Smash Bros’ Play?

The Super Smash Bros series don’t play like your traditional fighting game. Most fighting games use a health bar that the player needs to get to zero to win, they can lower this by using a wide range of attacks that can combo into one another with various button inputs. Smash Bros differs from this system by getting rid of the health bar and instead using a percentage that increases when taking damage, this percentage increases the distance the player gets launched. The goal is to launch the opposing players into the ‘blast zone’, the blast zone is a box that surrounds the stage, when a player enters the blast zone, they die and lose a stock. This change opens the door to multiple different gameplay options.

The Smash Bros ‘Ruleset’ is something that gets discussed greatly in the community. The ruleset refers to how a match is played out, the default ruleset for Smash games is usually 2-minute timer, free-for-all, any stages, and all items (with minor adjustments in each game). This ruleset, although playable and completely enjoyable, is rarely used, because of the other options available to make the perfect ruleset for each individual player. Example of another ruleset would be the ‘Tournament Ruleset’ which is what people play on when they want to take games a bit more seriously, they vary across each game but usually it consists of 3 stocks, 7-minute timer, 1v1 or 2v2 (with team attack on), limit or legal stages and no items. This ruleset is designed to be as competitive and as far as possible, that is why there are no items and that there is a limit selection of stages.

Rulesets being able to vastly change how players play their games is entertaining enough but the game doesn’t stop there with its replayability, like most fighting games, the Smash Bros series features several different single player modes to keep players entertained when not playing with a friend. Every game in the franchise has a ‘Classic Mode’ where you play a few games against computer players and then fight a final boss, it plays as your typical fighting game story mode, hence the name ‘Classic Mode’. Some game modes make use of platforming mechanics by adding a big map that the player must run through and get to the end of while defeating enemies, in Melee and Brawl this is called ‘Adventure Mode’. Smash Bros Ultimate has ‘World of Light’ which is an onslaught of a bunch of unique challenge fights that you need to win to discover more of a world map.

The Characters & Franchises

The biggest appeal of the Smash Bros games is the characters they bring together, having big and iconic names attached to a game is guaranteed to boost its popularity. There are instances outside of Smash that can also show this, for example, Jump Force is a very popular arena fighter game that features multiple characters from the Shonen Jump manga. This can even extend beyond gaming; the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become incredibly popular due to the Avengers movies crossing over people’s favourite characters so that they can interact in interesting ways. People love to see their favourite characters interact with characters they usually wouldn’t interact with.

The first Smash Bros game is relatively tame when comparing its roster size to the franchises more modern releases. Smash Ultimate has 86 characters which is more than x7 the amount of characters Smash 64 had, this obviously means that Smash Ultimate gets a wider audience, especially so when you consider that more and more 3rd party characters are getting added to the games roster. Smash Ultimate also has collectable Spirits that can have different gameplay effects, it also acts to represent more franchises in the game without adding them as main fighters. There are 1367 spirits in the game that can be collected, this makes it so that there are over 190 different franchises represented in Smash Ultimate. Truly a wide reach.

Apart from characters and spirits, there are other ways for a franchise to get represented in Smash. And that would be as an assist trophy and a stage. Assist trophies are perfect for a character that could fit into smash but not as a fully playable fighter, it’s a character that can be summoned into the match when a character picks up an assist trophy. Stages are what the characters fight on, they are great for taking players to iconic environments and areas from represented games, from the wide-open fields of the Bionis to the close quarters of Pokémon Stadium, seeing characters fight on these environments can really be something.

The Community

A video games community is vital for its popularity, a regular playerbase can keep engagement and interest in a game for longer. Seeing as Smash bros uses characters from multiple different franchises, it brings in fans from those franchises, widening its community. The Smash Bros community is a perfect example of a community boosting a games popularity.

The Super Smash Bro Melee community is having been playing their game since its release back in 2001, since then the popularity of melee has only gone up due to the passion and dedication of its playerbase. The history of Melee alone is big enough to have multiple articles about it, which is why in 2013 a 9-part documentary called ‘The Smash Brothers’ released. The game has only grown since then with it pulling in multiple live viewers for each major tournament.

Despite being a console-based series, Super Smash Bros has quite a strong modding community. Most of the time these mods are just slight visual changes or new music but sometimes there are mods that fully change the way that the game is played, the most popular example of this must be ‘Project M’. Project M is a mod for the game Super Smash Bros Brawl on the Wii, its purpose was to bring the slower speed of Brawl into the more competitive speed of Melee. The mod is basically a brand-new game with it adding new music, stages, alternate skins, mechanics and even brand-new characters.

(Picture taken form Evo 2016 livestream)

Conclusion

To sum up, the Super Smash Bros franchise has a long history of high-quality games. With each release the games only expand upon what makes them so loveable, their large cross-over and fun gameplay mechanics. Smash Bros does not play like your typical fighting game with it choosing to go with a more party casual style but due to its flexible rulesets, it can be played in a competitive way as well. The Smash Bros community love their games and keep it active with regular tournaments.