Super Smash Bros Ultimate

So the new Smash Bros came has been out for a little over a week. Its one of the greatest games I've ever played. A few months ago I was reading more than gaming but now I'm back gaming a lot, due in part to this game. Things have changed. This game is amazing. I'm going to copy a quote that I saw on the back of the Final Fantasy 7 Greatest Hits edition for Playstation back when I was in middle school: Quite possibly the greatest game ever made. The same could be said for Smash Ultimate. 

The freaking roster in this game is insane. There are 74 playable characters in this game. Which says to me that there's no way they can balance this game. Balancing is the process the developers do to make sure no characters are better or worse than others. I don't think there's any real cohesive way to do that in a game with almost 80 characters. But I ain't complaining! 

All the main heroes and villains are here: Mario, Bowser, Link, Samus, Ness, Kirby, Yoshi. And then there are tons of new characters too: Inkling, Ridley, Simon Belmont, Dark Samus, Chrom, Ken. Simply because of the 74 characters you can never get bored. If you lose with your best character you still have 73 other ones to try against your opponent, with endless possibilities with your combos. I play a lot of Ridley right now but I've also been playing a lot of Fox. 

The gameplay is your bread and butter smash. However, the physics in Ultimate actually seems a bit faster than its predecessor, Smash 4.  Perfect pivots seem easier to do. Characters run faster. Slow characters don't seem as slow as Smash 4. In Smash 4 Gannondorf seemed like an elephant. In Ultimate he's more like a rhino. The combos from the old games still work in this game and the strategy remains the same; knock your opponent off the stage and 1) KO them with an attack or 2) edge guard them so they can't make it back to the stage, resulting in them falling to their death. 

My friend's best character is Yoshi and he wins against me using the same tactics from Smash 4, usually a spike off the ledge. Some characters get new moves too. For example, Kirby got his fireball dash attack from Melee (Smash's Gamecube version). Using combinations of old strategies from the classic games and new moves from here you can create interesting new strategies and ways to play. Nintendo has made an art form out of kicking tail. 

The soundtrack to this game is pure bliss. It contains mostly every song from mostly every famous Nintendo game. You can change the music on every stage. The music grows on you. Once you play the game for about a week you start to memorize the music and it gets stuck inside your head (my experience). However, the music is so good here that I can hardly be upset, this music is great! 

There's only one bad thing I can say about Smash Ultimate. Its just the fact that you can clearly tell that Nintendo doesn't put much effort into their online systems. Sure, the online experience is 'free', but Nintendo's free means laggy servers. You can't play Smash Ultimate four players online because the game will lag and 'break' (lag so hard you can't do anything). 

Not only that but I've also heard bad lag stories with people even using the wired connection over wireless. This is 2018, wireless gaming is a norm. The fact that Nintendo can't get this right is a little pathetic. Yes, I'm being harsh. But you see, I'm a connoisseur who's been playing Smash since 64 days in grammar school. 

But that's not all. "The matchmaking process was further criticized for making it difficult for friends to join matches over random players, and not allowing multiple local players to join in online matches. Fans of the series had complained so much on Ultimate's Reddit page that the administrators forwarded all complaints to a separate thread." (wiki) 

But despite those negatives the positives overflow here. This game is so great that I've been playing it nonstop since December 9, when my friend got it. Because he has a Switch and I don't, I can only play it at his house. Even after playing it many hours almost two weeks straight, I don't feel bored. This game has a very good new car smell, so to speak. Its captured the zeitgeist, a moment forever trapped in time, in 2018, a golden age of video gaming. As a hardcore Smash 4 player who went to tournaments, I look forward to continuing my Smash tournament runs in this game. And although I'm too broke too afford a Switch this holiday season, I'll eventually get a Switch when the price goes down, and I'll own this fantastic work of art. 

You done did good Nintendo.