super smash bros. ultimate - 6/10
everyone is here, and yet i'm still mentally checked out
it's the new smash. play it if you like smash casually.
as an ex-comp melee player (nothing big time, just fun brackets on smashladder back in the day), this game feels like it's trying to satisfy everybody in the gameplay department, by positing a balance between sm4sh and melee. for the most part, it feels fine, but...
it just feels so soulless? i don't know how quite to articulate it.
instead of a celebration of every little thing, with tonnes of extra features and trivia and such as featured in... well, every other smash game, this game opts to eschew trophies and biographies for... pngs.
i cannot explain how much world of light conceptually bores me. it has two hard-ass cg cutscenes, but because sakurai lives in the fucking year dot still, we can't have too many cutscenes, or a story at all for that matter, because god forbid, they might leak on youtube a bit early. shock horror!
not only that, but trophies, and their long descriptions and detailed 3d models being replaced with textless pngs is an inarguable downgrade. haha, yes, it's funny, ness's dad is an invisible spirit, or paz has a bob-omb equipped. but that's just it; it's good for a cheap, quick laugh before you keep grinding the endless, samey gauntlet of fights that await you with little variety or, well, reason to keep playing them, really.
spirits award you with a png.
trophies award you with a 3d model, a description of that character, and a brief list of games they appeared in. that, and it was likely obtained from a side-mode, whether that be catch the trophies, or coin shooter, or hell, even master/crazy orders, there was at least some variety in obtaining them and some reason to do so; they were a catalogue of interactable memorabilia of some of gaming's most iconic, and sometimes most forgotten, characters, all to you and all for the studying.
that's not even to mention the woeful dlc balancing; effectively every dlc rose to be a top-tier overnight on their release, and some haven't come back down and thus have left the metagame stagnant for years. steve is a crazy pick for smash, yes, but it's not quite so cool when he's been basically the only pick made by anyone who wants to win the game in the past 4 years of the game.
the basegame would have decent balance, too, is the worst part; no worse than a regular smash, anyway. but instead of embracing the everyone is here and just calling it a day, i now have to live with the matchup of, say, snake vs steve being something that occurs and is almost invariably won by steve. though, again... what matchup isn't?
i am very conflicted. i want to like this game, as it hasn't any shortage of memories made for me; i have played this game far more consistently with friends than i ever did with melee. but it ultimately doesn't provide me with the same enjoyment that i get from melee, that force that brings me back to melee every now-and-again. my switch has been collecting dust for months because i haven't booted it for the one reason that i got it originally (outside of animal crossing), smash. this game bores and fatigues me every time i play it within a terribly short period. i truly wish i could enjoy this game more, but it is so dependant on you not wanting anything but core smash, and a watered down, still neutered version at that.
i think it is perfectly average. again, if you want a family party game, or just like smash as a regular person and not a sweaty trans girl nerd like i, then go for it. otherwise... stick to slippi, yeah?
