Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Don't mind at all! And welcome! We're happy to play host while you're getting the technical issues sorted (I know how much of a pain forum backend stuff can be)

In the mean time, I'm lacking sleep, as I stayed up way later than intended playing this last night. It's better than I ever hoped for, and then some

edit: on second thought, I've created a dedicated Smash subforum. Have at it yall!

Hmm, I read it as "characters new to the series" which, I mean, they'd have to be, considering every playable character in the series is already in Some of the people I would have liked are already Assists, so that's unfortunate, but I don't think we need rule out anyone already represented purely by spirits.

This game plays like condomless sex.

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Played from eleven-thirty to the early morning last night and then a few hours more today in between picking up my new son (a.k.a. a Ridley amiibo) and remembering to eat for the first time in two days. All that time other than one one-on-one CPU match and a runthrough of Pikachu's Classic Mode I've spent in World of Light; I know how to unlock K. Rool as quickly as possible, but I'm opting instead to wait until I run across him and Ridley in World of Light with bated breath knowing that when the moment does come it'll be all the sweeter. (Likewise, despite online play trumping even World of Light as the mode I've been most excited for, I'm not buying Switch Online and jumping in until I've done everything in World of Light, unlocked everyone, and gotten in some good practice with my two new mains so that when I do jump in, I'll be good and ready.)

Some months back, my gnawing impatience for Ultimate drove me to spend the interim period playing Melee for the first time, and in my subsequent rundown of my experiences with it on The Other Forum, I noted that the sheer ingenuity behind the Event Matches made them the unexpected darkhorse of the game for me. There was a point an hour or two into World of Light where I reflected that though I was having fun, it might have been my least favorite out of the series's various takes on Adventure Mode, since even the Melee Adventure Mode levels that were "just regular fights" rather than full levels still displayed a lot of the same ingenuity that went into the Event Matches, and even Subspace Emissary had the glorious postmodern mess that was its cutscenes.

But nearly eight and a half hours later? I'll hold off on saying for sure whether or not I still end up preferring Melee's approach until after I'm completely finished with it, but as I continue playing I find myself only having more and more fun the more I continue delving into World of Light. How exactly Spirits work is still confusing a month and a week after we first learned about them, but coming slowly to grips with all the little intricacies has actually proven one of the most rewarding parts of the experience for me (and will continue to be so probably throughout the rest of my time with it, since there are still several Spirits-centric systems I have yet to understand) - which is really saying something, since Break the Targets (RIP, even a game as unreal as Smash Ultimate will never be complete with you gone) and Trophies are really the only two things about previous Smash games I find remotely as engaging as the core fighting mechanics (and fanservice, of course). Finding which Spirits I find myself naturally gravitating toward over time, trying to tough it out with ones that are useful all the time but sometimes swapping one of them out for others that are so situational I very well might never use them beyond the one time, juggling the choice of sticking with one I've spent a lot of time leveling up against starting over with a new one that shows promise but having to potentially struggle with some of the tougher fights (Ashley seriously took me like an hour and now I'm addicted to her theme song) until it gets trained up to a decent enough degree, throwing myself at some fights a dozen or two times before I make the call to come back only after I've unlocked exactly the right fighters and Spirits for the job.... And that's not even mentioning what a joy it is to, say, slowly find more and more ways to interact your way through the overworld (and I *will* call it the overworld and not just the map screen, because it turns out what could have so been easily been just a series of roads halted every two feet by Spirit matches and nothing else is instead structured almost like one of the top-down Zelda games [complete with dungeons]). The fact that an experience this intricate is merely a single mode in a game so jam-packed with content (be it in the form of other modes, fighters, stages, items, ancillary objectives, and more besides) is actually kind of staggering.

The point has been made several times by others that the Spirits trump the Trophies despite the downgrade from 3D models to glorified JPEGs because of the fact that they have robust gameplay functionality attached to them, and yet as I keep going I find myself missing Trophies almost more than ever - not because the Spirits are a bad replacement, but because they're almost too *good* of one. Whenever I come across the Spirit of a character I'm familiar with, every single time I'm struck by exactly that same sense of appreciation Melee's Event Matches fostered so well. The Chorus Kids being a trio of Sing-spamming Jigglypuffs; or Porygon being represented by Little Mac's wireframe skin paired with the blocky Virtua Fighter Assist Trophy; or Ellie's Spirit powering up any attacks that involve water; or the team of Espio the Chameleon, Charmy the Bee, and most of all Vector the Crocodile being played by Sonic, Pichu, and K. Rool respectively while the magnificently cheesy theme song to Sonic Heroes blares all the while in the background.... The way the game implements every single character I recognize is pure gold - which is why it's so disheartening that a good 90% of the Spirit characters are ones I only know by sight or name in the relatively uncommon event I've ever heard of them at all, because I just *know* my appreciation for their battles and Spirit attributes would increase exponentially if they had even one- or two-sentence bios attached to them to clue me in on what all these intricate little touches are meant to represent. Sure, I can just look up the characters who strike me enough to get me to do so (the aforementioned fight against Ashley pairing her with a red, mini-sized Ridley became retroactively ingenious when I found upon skimming her WarioWare Wiki page that she has a little winged devil as a sidekick), but there are over a thousand different Spirits in this game; I'll never take the time to look up every single one of them on the internet, but I absolutely *would* read the in-game bios of every single one of them if only they existed. It's a genuine flaw, but I must admit I find it strangely heartening that an issue that's proving this pervasive to me stems from the knowledge that Ultimate is even better than my knowledgebase allows me to realize.

...And even having unpacked all of that, there's always the knowledge lying in the back of my brain and whispering to me that between Classic Mode, completing Challenges, messing around with the music player, coming up with Mii Fighters modeled after people besides Adolf Hitler (the latter being not as fun of an exercise as it used to be, for obvious reasons, but I did get some good gratification out of giving him a pair of cute little devil horns and determining which of the Mii voices they provide most sounds like him), creating cool screenshots, having free-for-alls with my sister and brother-in-law, and digging as deep as what limited skillset I possess allows into competitive online... even all the memorable and engaging experiences I've had already are less the tip of the iceberg than they are a mere splinter of that tip. These next few months are going to be INSANE.

Tell me about it. I've been playing with the Dual Joycons, and holy crap my thumbs! I might have to get the Gamecube adapter. Anyways, I've been enjoying our DK boys especially the King. Diddy, while still good, has definitely been nerfed. Ryu and Simon are fun. And I haven't unlocked Ridley, Ken or Mega Man yet. My first spirit was some dude named Aeron, I believe. I don't know what he's from. I wish they had added, at least, some descriptions for the spirits.

Speaking of the Pauline cameo...