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sniffnoyThe single-player modes in Super Smash Bros. games have (since Brawl) been a mix of fun challenge and tedious grind. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate cuts down on both of these. It has, thankfully, cut out most of the grind that made 100%ing Brawl and Smash 4 such a bore; but it also cut out most of the fun parts. The result is, well, mediocre. It's a somewhat fun time-filler, but that's all it is. It is perhaps more a game to convince your friend to buy than a game to by yourself.
The multiplayer of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, is, well, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Personally, I'm maybe getting a bit tired of Smash -- but, I mean, hey, it's Smash. And you can play as Simon Belmont! I mean I never played much Castlevania but I really like his character in Smash, even if his recovery is terrible. I mean... people keep running into my axes. :D And there's even more to be added later. And I hear Shulk might actually be good this time around! I still can't really play him, though. (And I have trouble with the new way of activating his arts.) And everyone is back, and Pichu is apparently good, whoa, and I still can't play Snake at all.
(And there's some great music they added -- have you heard the Smash Ultimate remix of Vega's Theme? -- although much of it is at low probability by default. Oh man, there's so much I'm only 6/7 of the way through setting all the frequencies...)
Anyway yeah -- Smash is Smash, and (if you shell out an extra $20/year) you can play it online even if you have nobody else around. But it's the single-player and co-op modes I want to talk about here.
(And yeah, some of these things can be ignored if you decide to not play that way. But let's say you're playing as the game seems to intend, essentially.)
These modes have several fundamental problems with them, which I would break down as follows -- note that these categories overlap a fair bit:
There are more problems one could list (like the timed aspects of the gacha shit, or the mysterious absence of Home Run Contest, or that some spirits so far seem to be exclusive to certain events), but I'm going to stick with these. So, let's tackle these in order:
1. The existence of a progression system
Why is there a fricking gacha game in my Smash? The game seems to think I want to spend lots of time managing my spirits and little time playing Smash. But the bigger problem is that the one gets in the way in the other -- depending on the spirits you equip and their level, battles can either be boringly easy or frustratingly hard. It's not common to find a spirit battle that's at a good, fun level of challenge, and as the spirits you have get stronger it gets yet rarer. Maybe if you deliberately equip lower-level spirits, but if you go with the autosuggest as I like to (for primary spirits, I mean; I always pick supports manually) it's just not that hard once you have primary spirits of every rank. Breaking into Legend rank is hard, but it's only actually fun in a narrow band -- it's more just frustrating before that.
Basically, instead of challenges each of a particular difficulty that you can do until you get good enough to win, you have challenges that get easier and easier because your spirits are better until eventually they're kind of boring.
2. Needless complexity
There is so much pointless complexity. Why are there two currencies (gold and SP)? Why -- well, I'm not going to go on about needless complexity, because most of my examples of it also fall under one of the following two, so let's move on to those.
3. Pointless tension and pointless costs
A classic rookie mistake in game design is too much tension. "A game is a series of interesting decisions", right? So it's tempting to load up your game with decisions and tradeoffs, because those are, after all, the point. But, some things are really better off not being tradeoffs.
Let's look at how continues work in Classic mode. If you die in Classic mode, you can spend gold to continue at a lower difficulty, or you can spend a ticket to continue at the same difficulty, or you can quit.
This is too much tension. Imagine instead you had to spend some resource to continue at the same difficulty, but not to continue at a lower difficulty. That would make sense as a tradeoff. Why do you also have to spend a resource to continue at a lower difficulty as well?
A perhaps unintentional source of bad tension is the difficulty system in Classic mode, about which I'll say more below. Because doing better raises the difficulty, it may in some cases be better to do worse to avoid a raise in difficulty. (So that, say, you go into the final boss fight at 9.1 rather than 9.5, and thus have an easier shot at reaching 9.9.) That's not something you want to encourage!
There are other frustrating pointless costs too, that don't fall under pointless tension. Why does leveling up a spirit with a snack (or core) cost SP as well? You can have the snacks, but if you run out of SP, you're stuck! Hell why does summoning a spirit cost SP, too? That one makes a bit more sense, I guess, but it's really just frustrating that levelling a spirit also costs SP.
4. Opacity
This is a big one. So many of the game's systems are not just complex but opaque, reducing your ability to make meaningful decisions or act with any sort of goal in mind. What determines how much the difficulty in Classic mode increases, for instance? Who knows!
People complained about Smash 4's classic mode -- as well as its single-player modes more generally -- you know, but I liked it. It was hard, it was fun, and it made sense. You set the difficulty at the start; if you lost, you would continue at a lower difficulty, so to simply win was easy but to win on 9.0 (the highest in Smash 4), you had to get through the whole gauntlet without losing. (It did still have the stupid spending-gold thing, but, whatever.) And it was a hard gauntlet! (More on that below.)
In Smash Ultimate, you can set the difficulty at the start, but not above 5.0; then after each match, the difficulty adjusts depending on how you did in an opaque way. Instead of the simple hard gauntlet of Smash 4, you have this opaque... thing. (It does still seem to be the case that it will never give you 9.9 if you've died -- although if you achieve 9.9 before reaching the final boss, you can spend tickets to stay there.) Winning doesn't feel that meaningful, because it's not clear how your results relate to your performance.
And of course damn near everything related to the spirits is opaque, too, though that causes less of a problem, IMO.
5. Lack of challenge
As I said above, I'm glad they cut out so much of the grind. Oddly, while there's no spot on the challenge board for getting all the spirits, if there were it would be nowhere near the grind of getting all the stickers in Brawl or, say, all the custom moves in Smash 4, because the game has a pretty heavy bias towards giving you spirits you don't already have. And there are no "do X with all characters" challenges this time around (though I beat Classic mode with all characters anyway). But they also cut out so much of the actual challenge. Only a few of the challenges on the challenge board have any real difficulty to them (mostly, the one that requires you to beat the final battle without dying).
As I mentioned above, Spirit fights -- basically the equivalent of the old Events mode -- eventually become easy once you have spirits of every rank. Winning Classic mode with no difficulty restriction is not just easy but trivial, because if you die you respawn with the fight otherwise continuing as it was, i.e., the opponent still has all their damage. Even winning on 9.9 isn't that hard -- it took me some time to do it with Yoshi, but nowhere near as long as 9.0 took me in Smash 4... and when I later went through Classic mode with all the characters, I got a 9.9 with Game & Watch unintentionally. (If only I'd known, I wouldn't have spent so much time trying to do it with Yoshi!) And the famously challenging All-Star mode is gone (I mean, there's a good reason it's gone, but with so little else in the game that's actually hard, that becomes a problem).
So, the equivalent of Events is now easy, Classic is now easy, the challenge board is now (mostly) easy. You can play Adventure mode on hard, I guess, which I didn't try, but somehow I doubt that would really do much to fix things, because you still have the problem of spirits.
There's probably more I could say, but I think that's a decent summary.
Previous Smash games, of course, have had some of these problems too. Brawl had stickers and Smash 4 had equipment. Smash 4 still had stupid stuff where you had to spend gold for no particular reason. Classic mode was rarely very difficult before Smash 4. But -- aside from the original, whose single-player modes were pretty bare-bones -- there's generally always been something hard and fun. Melee, Brawl, and Smash 4 all had Events mode and All-Star mode. Brawl (once you beat the mediocre adventure mode) had its Boss Rush mode. Brawl and Smash 4 both had some pretty tough challenges on the challenge board (I actually never got 100% complete in Smash 4, two of the challenges were just too hard). And of course for the speedrunners and superplayers, there have been Break the Targets, Board the Platforms, and (especially) Home Run Contest.
Now, basically all of that is gone, or rendered easy or eventually-easy or opaque. It's a disappointment.
Really, lately I've been having much more fun with Towerfall. :) It has some tough single-player modes. (Well, Quest mode and Trials mode; Dark World mode can be played alone, but seems like it's really made for co-op; played alone it's only mediocre.) I have no intent of trying to 100% Towerfall, hahaha no way -- beat every level on the hardest difficulty without dying?? Yeah, no way I'm managing that. In Smash Ultimate's single-player you often don't feel like you're in any danger while you're playing (or, alternatively, you don't feel like there's anything you can do to put the computer in danger). But in Towerfall, you die in one hit (usually), and so do the enemies (usually), so it's always tense. Really, I think Towerfall may be better in general at playing the role of chaotic multiplayer platforming game than Smash does in general... except with two players. With two players Smash is better. Towerfall isn't that great with only two, you need more (assuming you're not playing single-player). And of course Smash supports up to 8 players while Towerfall only supports up to 6 (or only up to 4, if you don't have the Switch version).
But, yeah. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. It's fun, and I'm looking forward to the addition of yet more characters! But the single-player is decidedly mediocre, and does not compare well to previous Smash games (or, for that matter, to Towerfall).
-Harry
Next time: Well, Mystery Hunt is this weekend, so... :)
The multiplayer of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, is, well, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Personally, I'm maybe getting a bit tired of Smash -- but, I mean, hey, it's Smash. And you can play as Simon Belmont! I mean I never played much Castlevania but I really like his character in Smash, even if his recovery is terrible. I mean... people keep running into my axes. :D And there's even more to be added later. And I hear Shulk might actually be good this time around! I still can't really play him, though. (And I have trouble with the new way of activating his arts.) And everyone is back, and Pichu is apparently good, whoa, and I still can't play Snake at all.
(And there's some great music they added -- have you heard the Smash Ultimate remix of Vega's Theme? -- although much of it is at low probability by default. Oh man, there's so much I'm only 6/7 of the way through setting all the frequencies...)
Anyway yeah -- Smash is Smash, and (if you shell out an extra $20/year) you can play it online even if you have nobody else around. But it's the single-player and co-op modes I want to talk about here.
(And yeah, some of these things can be ignored if you decide to not play that way. But let's say you're playing as the game seems to intend, essentially.)
These modes have several fundamental problems with them, which I would break down as follows -- note that these categories overlap a fair bit:
- The existence of a progression system
- Needless complexity
- Pointless costs
- Opacity
- Lack of challenge
There are more problems one could list (like the timed aspects of the gacha shit, or the mysterious absence of Home Run Contest, or that some spirits so far seem to be exclusive to certain events), but I'm going to stick with these. So, let's tackle these in order:
1. The existence of a progression system
Why is there a fricking gacha game in my Smash? The game seems to think I want to spend lots of time managing my spirits and little time playing Smash. But the bigger problem is that the one gets in the way in the other -- depending on the spirits you equip and their level, battles can either be boringly easy or frustratingly hard. It's not common to find a spirit battle that's at a good, fun level of challenge, and as the spirits you have get stronger it gets yet rarer. Maybe if you deliberately equip lower-level spirits, but if you go with the autosuggest as I like to (for primary spirits, I mean; I always pick supports manually) it's just not that hard once you have primary spirits of every rank. Breaking into Legend rank is hard, but it's only actually fun in a narrow band -- it's more just frustrating before that.
Basically, instead of challenges each of a particular difficulty that you can do until you get good enough to win, you have challenges that get easier and easier because your spirits are better until eventually they're kind of boring.
2. Needless complexity
There is so much pointless complexity. Why are there two currencies (gold and SP)? Why -- well, I'm not going to go on about needless complexity, because most of my examples of it also fall under one of the following two, so let's move on to those.
3. Pointless tension and pointless costs
A classic rookie mistake in game design is too much tension. "A game is a series of interesting decisions", right? So it's tempting to load up your game with decisions and tradeoffs, because those are, after all, the point. But, some things are really better off not being tradeoffs.
Let's look at how continues work in Classic mode. If you die in Classic mode, you can spend gold to continue at a lower difficulty, or you can spend a ticket to continue at the same difficulty, or you can quit.
This is too much tension. Imagine instead you had to spend some resource to continue at the same difficulty, but not to continue at a lower difficulty. That would make sense as a tradeoff. Why do you also have to spend a resource to continue at a lower difficulty as well?
A perhaps unintentional source of bad tension is the difficulty system in Classic mode, about which I'll say more below. Because doing better raises the difficulty, it may in some cases be better to do worse to avoid a raise in difficulty. (So that, say, you go into the final boss fight at 9.1 rather than 9.5, and thus have an easier shot at reaching 9.9.) That's not something you want to encourage!
There are other frustrating pointless costs too, that don't fall under pointless tension. Why does leveling up a spirit with a snack (or core) cost SP as well? You can have the snacks, but if you run out of SP, you're stuck! Hell why does summoning a spirit cost SP, too? That one makes a bit more sense, I guess, but it's really just frustrating that levelling a spirit also costs SP.
4. Opacity
This is a big one. So many of the game's systems are not just complex but opaque, reducing your ability to make meaningful decisions or act with any sort of goal in mind. What determines how much the difficulty in Classic mode increases, for instance? Who knows!
People complained about Smash 4's classic mode -- as well as its single-player modes more generally -- you know, but I liked it. It was hard, it was fun, and it made sense. You set the difficulty at the start; if you lost, you would continue at a lower difficulty, so to simply win was easy but to win on 9.0 (the highest in Smash 4), you had to get through the whole gauntlet without losing. (It did still have the stupid spending-gold thing, but, whatever.) And it was a hard gauntlet! (More on that below.)
In Smash Ultimate, you can set the difficulty at the start, but not above 5.0; then after each match, the difficulty adjusts depending on how you did in an opaque way. Instead of the simple hard gauntlet of Smash 4, you have this opaque... thing. (It does still seem to be the case that it will never give you 9.9 if you've died -- although if you achieve 9.9 before reaching the final boss, you can spend tickets to stay there.) Winning doesn't feel that meaningful, because it's not clear how your results relate to your performance.
And of course damn near everything related to the spirits is opaque, too, though that causes less of a problem, IMO.
5. Lack of challenge
As I said above, I'm glad they cut out so much of the grind. Oddly, while there's no spot on the challenge board for getting all the spirits, if there were it would be nowhere near the grind of getting all the stickers in Brawl or, say, all the custom moves in Smash 4, because the game has a pretty heavy bias towards giving you spirits you don't already have. And there are no "do X with all characters" challenges this time around (though I beat Classic mode with all characters anyway). But they also cut out so much of the actual challenge. Only a few of the challenges on the challenge board have any real difficulty to them (mostly, the one that requires you to beat the final battle without dying).
As I mentioned above, Spirit fights -- basically the equivalent of the old Events mode -- eventually become easy once you have spirits of every rank. Winning Classic mode with no difficulty restriction is not just easy but trivial, because if you die you respawn with the fight otherwise continuing as it was, i.e., the opponent still has all their damage. Even winning on 9.9 isn't that hard -- it took me some time to do it with Yoshi, but nowhere near as long as 9.0 took me in Smash 4... and when I later went through Classic mode with all the characters, I got a 9.9 with Game & Watch unintentionally. (If only I'd known, I wouldn't have spent so much time trying to do it with Yoshi!) And the famously challenging All-Star mode is gone (I mean, there's a good reason it's gone, but with so little else in the game that's actually hard, that becomes a problem).
So, the equivalent of Events is now easy, Classic is now easy, the challenge board is now (mostly) easy. You can play Adventure mode on hard, I guess, which I didn't try, but somehow I doubt that would really do much to fix things, because you still have the problem of spirits.
There's probably more I could say, but I think that's a decent summary.
Previous Smash games, of course, have had some of these problems too. Brawl had stickers and Smash 4 had equipment. Smash 4 still had stupid stuff where you had to spend gold for no particular reason. Classic mode was rarely very difficult before Smash 4. But -- aside from the original, whose single-player modes were pretty bare-bones -- there's generally always been something hard and fun. Melee, Brawl, and Smash 4 all had Events mode and All-Star mode. Brawl (once you beat the mediocre adventure mode) had its Boss Rush mode. Brawl and Smash 4 both had some pretty tough challenges on the challenge board (I actually never got 100% complete in Smash 4, two of the challenges were just too hard). And of course for the speedrunners and superplayers, there have been Break the Targets, Board the Platforms, and (especially) Home Run Contest.
Now, basically all of that is gone, or rendered easy or eventually-easy or opaque. It's a disappointment.
Really, lately I've been having much more fun with Towerfall. :) It has some tough single-player modes. (Well, Quest mode and Trials mode; Dark World mode can be played alone, but seems like it's really made for co-op; played alone it's only mediocre.) I have no intent of trying to 100% Towerfall, hahaha no way -- beat every level on the hardest difficulty without dying?? Yeah, no way I'm managing that. In Smash Ultimate's single-player you often don't feel like you're in any danger while you're playing (or, alternatively, you don't feel like there's anything you can do to put the computer in danger). But in Towerfall, you die in one hit (usually), and so do the enemies (usually), so it's always tense. Really, I think Towerfall may be better in general at playing the role of chaotic multiplayer platforming game than Smash does in general... except with two players. With two players Smash is better. Towerfall isn't that great with only two, you need more (assuming you're not playing single-player). And of course Smash supports up to 8 players while Towerfall only supports up to 6 (or only up to 4, if you don't have the Switch version).
But, yeah. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. It's fun, and I'm looking forward to the addition of yet more characters! But the single-player is decidedly mediocre, and does not compare well to previous Smash games (or, for that matter, to Towerfall).
-Harry
Next time: Well, Mystery Hunt is this weekend, so... :)
