Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Direct Overview

With Smash Direct over, here’s an overview of their announcements.

New Characters and Echos:

New faces and series to join

Simon Belmont from the Castlevania Lashes out onto the battlefield, with his echo fighter Richter Belmont. Featuring their iconic attacks like the Holy water bomb, Cross, and Axe. Simon’s showcased final smash is Grand Cross. His greatest strength appears to be his Holy Whip, which will have physics applied to it in the game as shown.

Chrom, who appears to be an echo of Ike going off the recovery, and Dark Samus are joining Ultimate too. Nothing too unique other than thier appearance, how much they’ll be different is the air currently.

King K Rool is debuting too, shown at the end of the Direct. Nothing was showcased other than the fact he has a counter move, can ground trap, boomerang attack using his crown, and his smash attack is firing a laser from his castle/island.

New Features:

For music, stages, and characters

• Stage Hazards can be toggled in the options now.
• Music randomiser is back, with chronologically organised listings separated by series rather than entry. With over 900 tracks, there’s over 28 hours of things to listen to. They can be played in through the Switch in a dock-like mode, basically using the Switch as an MP3 player.
• Music playlists can be made.
• Sample tracks on official website, updates in following weeks to its selection
• Rule sets can be made and applied more easily.
• Stages are organised by when they were released.
• Stage selection can be handled with different settings done through the game rather than gentlemen’s agreement.
• Over 103 stages to choose from, omega stages will allow for 8 man brawls.
• There are returning stages from previous games like Melee that have been adjusted, with some retaining their old stylisations from their original debuts.
• Stages can now morph between chosen stages, completely randomised, or by a timer.
• Sudden Death matches will now have a zooming camera that will count as ring outs.
• Stamina battle is part of the main selection now.
• Echo fighters can be either displayed as individual fighters or as togglable icons in the character selection screen.

Combat Change

Su-mash!!!

Mini Smashes are now a thing. Depending on how much damage you taken and dealt, you will build up a meter that will allow you to perform a weaker version of smash. This does mean you can double up on the attacks. Like many other features, this can be toggled in the options.

Battle modes

Some old, some new, lots more smashing.

Squad strike, featuring either 3vs3 or 5vs5, you’ll be able to choose a select number of fighters that can be controlled solely by one person or by different people in a round based match up for team based Smash battles.

Tournament, with a maximum support of 32 participants, this can have varying numbers of CPUs and is designed mainly for parties. In this mode too will feature automatic brackets, saving you the time of adjusting for matches.

Smashdown, the knockout equivalent game mode, two players can only choose a character once as the available roster dwindles to find out who the better player is. So win or lose, once you’ve chosen that character, they’re out for the rest of that session.

Training has been overhauled with launch trajectories being shown on each hit, with the hit percentages being shown, as well as a unique stage with gridlines to help you learn distancing better.

Classic mode, the new singleplayer mode, will return with each figher having their own stages and opponents to face.

Misc/Items listing:

Just for those interested.

Items: Banana Gun, Killing Edge, Bomber Death’s, Scythe, Staff, Ramblin’ Evil Mushroom, Rage Blaster, Pokémon are expanded with more assists.

Pokémon: Alolan Exeggutor, Abra, Solgaleo, Lunala, Mimikyu, Pyukumuku, Vulplix and Alolan form, Marshadow, Ditto,

Assist trophies: Zero, Knuckles, Krystal, klaptrap, Lapp’n, Chef Kawasaki, Gray Fox, Nikki, Shovel knight, Moon, Bomber-Man,

Takeaways:

Looks like there might be seconds before launchs.

It seems like Sakurai-san is still holding a lot of cards at play, with more up his sleeve. Things like boss appearing in stages feels off for an announcement to gloss over. Also, more stages are looking to appear/be announced too. Seen briefly was the introduction of Rathalos seen in Ancestral Steppe that was in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. Also, going off their UI. There’s easily the possibility of new characters being released. With the popularity of Monster Hunter and its series appearances, the possibility of maybe related characters being in the game either as trophies, assists, or even playable characters is a possibility.

Lots of news, and with how many stages were showcased, simply typing them wouldn’t do them any justice. Please skip to 9 minutes for their show reel section. Anything in this that hypes you? I know the urge to buy a Switch is strong now.