Smash Bros. is a setting where Duck Hunt and Olimar are fighting with Sephiroth. Any attempt to make a serious goddamn story around that is misguided and stupid. A Smash story should be fun and ridiculous.
So far, Smash has botched it twice, trying to sell stories about cosmic horror entities trying to dominate existence or collapse reality or some ****.
World of Light had a fantastic premise, you could make a great story out of the concept of Kirby going around and saving his friends alone. The problem is that instead of focusing on the characters, which people are actually here for, 90% of the screentime is dedicated to the two abstract celestial beings having a grudge against one another, with the fighters coming second and just... standing there.
I'm not kidding when I say it almost felt suffocating to watch those cutscenes. They feel like they were deliberately shot to feature the fighters as little as possible.
These five images display (and I'm not exaggerating here) literally every scene that involves the fighters from World of Light (excluding the intro). That's it. Three of them feature just Mario, and the other two feature a handful of fighters barely reacting to the situation. It's a total 180 from the fighters acting like themselves and using their abilities in the opening cutscene. They didn't just drop the ball, they sent it to hell.
This is not something that happens on accident and I am 100% confident they did this intentionally. They can control when we saw the opening cutscene. They can't control anything after that, so might as well make them as lame an uninteresting as possible, amirite?
I really wish each mandatory fighter (there are 21) had a small little cutscene of them being freed from Galeem's control and interacting with Kirby. Would that be so hard??
Another thing is that Smash story modes don't know how to end themselves. Brawl's ending is nothing, everyone just stands there. In Ultimate we didn't even get that, instead we're treated to a screensaver that honestly feels more like a middle finger to the player than anything.
WoL: "Congratulations sir! You just trudged through 30 hours of PNG battles!"
The Players: "Heh, great! What do I win?"
WoL: