The Roller Coaster That Was Ultimate; A Restrospective

[pap64]

PICTURE IT; March 2018

Nintendo drops a Direct. It announces a ton of new games for both the Switch and 3DS, including some that were shocking, like Undertale, Crash Bandicoot Remake, and the Octoling expansion pack! That was all good, but then we see footage of the Inklings fighting each other, when all of a sudden, it goes black, the Inkling girl looks back, is shocked and we get this image...

And that was followed with the year 2018...

Yes sir, we would be getting a new Smash game, not in 2019, not in 2020, but IN 2018!!! This sparked one of the MANY, MANY debates this game cause, like "this game must be a port because there is no way a new Smash would come out on the Switch when it's barely a year old!". The only thing confirmed was that the Inklings would be newcomers, Link would be in his Breath of the Wild costume, and it's coming in 2018.

Cut to E3 2018 when we finally would see what this game would be all about.

And man, what an announcement it was. I understand where people are coming from if they are not Smash fans; Nintendo didn't really show off that much at E3. But let's be real; this announcement WAS all that they needed for E3 because they knew that we would all drop our collective pants at everything that would be announced;
- ALL characters returning, including DLC third party characters
- Massive buffs, nerfs and patches announced for the characters
- AND RIDLEY IS FINALLY IN THE GAME

From this point on, the hype train was beyond speed of light, because not only would we be getting all of the characters back, we were getting new ones, and highly requested ones at that, characters that we swore would never appear because either Sakurai said would be hard or some licensing issue was in the way. The possibilities were endless, which lead to something the community both loves and dreads...

LEAKERS

I have been in the Smash fan community since the Melee days, and I have never seen a Smash game gain so much of a leaker culture like Ultimate has. Yeah all Smash games had their share of fake leakers and leaks that were on the nose, but Ultimate just exploded. You couldn't go on YouTube and look up Smash Ultimate without having 10 links to "REAL LEAK FROM CREDIBLE SOURCE!" videos. But in turn, it showed how much potential Ultimate presented us; it was gonna be so massive that we couldn't help but let our imaginations run wild.

Now we cut to the August Direct...

- LUIGI GETS KILLED
- SIMON BELMONT CONFIRMED, THE LEAKS WERE TRUE
- THIRD PARTIES CAN HAVE ECHOES TOO NO WAY
- KING FREAKING KEITH ROOL FINALLY MADE IT IN

Just reading that last sentence makes the 20 something in me just say "THAT IS A LIE AND YOU KNOW IT!', but here we are. This WILL be the Ultimate Smash game. Sadly the announcements would slow down and be quiet....until a leak happened, a leak so convincing that it split the fanbase in half. That's right, I am talking about...

THE GRINCH LEAK

We lost a lot of good men in the leak wars. I may not have explored all other game fandoms and their leaks, but I think no Smash leak will ever beat the impact the Grinch leak has left because it was such an elaborate hoax that it took people until the November Direct to finally confirm it fake. Those weeks were easily some of the most agonizing for the community, I think, because the fanbase started to tear each other apart about it. On a personal note I still don't support GameXplain because the way they handled this issue was very arrogant and regardless if you were team real or team fake, they could have handled this way better.

BUT ANYWAYS...

The November Direct drops, the Grinch leak is nuked off of existence, Ken and Incineroar get announced, Spirits mode gets detailed, a significant decline from the hype levels the previous directs brought.

That is until Nintendo decided that they can one up the ending to Infinity War and do THIS!

This trailer alone spawned a million memes, sad fan art and suddenly realizing that Kirby is too OP. Oh yeah there was also this classic gem that kept us entertained...

As I write this we are FOUR days away from the ACTUAL release of Smash Ultimate, and the reason I wrote all of this is that looking back starting with the first announcement in March, not since Melee has a Smash game got me so excited. Brawl and Smash 4 had hype worthy moments for sure, but their development cycles kept everything at a slow pace. Ultimate, however, gave us a whole year's worth of hype, leaks, speculation, gameplay, and memories. And that's not even counting the post game launch content like DLC, patches and more. Melee was the last game that made me THIS excited for a Smash game, but this may even top that level of excitement because you could argue to the ends of the Earth about the issues you have, about how X-character should have been in the game and such. But Ultimate seemingly reminded us why we love Smash in the first place; outside of its competitive nature and culture, it's a game that takes everything that we love about Nintendo and video games in general and creates something magical out of it, something that could have only been born out of the imagination of a young gamer.

Like come on, we can now say that we can have an eight player Smash battle with Mario, Sonic, Cloud, Snake, Ryu, Mega Man, Pac-Man and Simon Belmont on the level from Bayonetta while both Waluigi and Alucard come out to fight. It's just a simply magical thing to me.

It is also humbling to think that ALL of this hype elements exist today because we got this in 1999...

What a time to be alive, y'all.

 

[Call_Me_Red]

I think what made this hype-train so different from other Smash games was how fast everything came. We waited two years for Brawl, but we had just over half a year for Ultimate. We haven't lost any momentum from the moment we got that first trailer.

 

[Room100]

This hype cycle hardcore made me realize how pivotal Smash has been in my life. Smash 64 was basically the reason I got the N64 and really opened me up to Nintendo. Brawl was the first game I ever pre-ordered and got super invested in before launch with Smash Dojo. And Smash 4 was a staple of my college years with an amount of hours I can't even count.

I've been hype for games and series before, but honestly nothing like Ultimate. I dove into every announcement, read a ton of leaks, and had a countdown on my phone since E3. It's all my friends and I could talk about. I hope that once the game comes out, all the frustration and divide over leaks, newcomers, and datamining will come to an end and people just appreciate this amazing game.

 

[ProfPeanut]

For me, the wildest thing about this speculation cycle has been how much the wishlist characters shuffled around.

Pre-E3, we saw Rex & Pyra, Spring Man and Decidueye topping the wishlists, all of whom practically disappeared after the August Direct, if not E3, even though none of them had been directly deconfirmed yet.

Meanwhile, characters that once got laughed off for being clone material suddenly became the most likely candidates, leaving many people to suddenly bet on Shadow getting in over other Sonic characters (myself included).

We had a leaker with an actually-consistent track record this time. We also got to watch how people would rather reject credible information if it didn't conform to what they wanted (or if it favored characters they never even thought about, like Incineroar or Steve).

We saw Waluigi support explode for a short time, and we saw Shantae support erupt after the Shovel Knight deconfirmation, both becoming much more vocal than any other bases I'd seen before.

Characters who got looked over in Brawl and Smash 4 riled up again all of a sudden. Skull Kid fervor hits its absolute highest prior to the September Direct, before getting cleanly kneecapped by Isabelle. Geno rode every argument that he could, betting all his chips on the final November Direct. Isaac actually believed that they'd finally get in.

Then the Grinch hoax showed up, and suddenly Mach Rider became a beloved character. Then later the hoax was disproven and now we have to factor Piranha Plant into our speculation!


As someone who watched the Brawl wishlists remain more-or-less stable the entire time, it's been a heck of a trip.

 

[pap64]

For me, the wildest thing about this speculation cycle has been how much the wishlist characters shuffled around.

Pre-E3, we saw Rex & Pyra, Spring Man and Decidueye topping the wishlists, all of whom practically disappeared after the August Direct, if not E3, even though none of them had been directly deconfirmed yet.

Meanwhile, characters that once got laughed off for being clone material suddenly became the most likely candidates, leaving many people to suddenly bet on Shadow getting in over other Sonic characters (myself included).

We had a leaker with an actually-consistent track record this time. We also got to watch how people would rather reject credible information if it didn't conform to what they wanted (or if it favored characters they never even thought about, like Incineroar or Steve).

We saw Waluigi support explode for a short time, and we saw Shantae support erupt after the Shovel Knight deconfirmation, both becoming much more vocal than any other bases I'd seen before.

Characters who got looked over in Brawl and Smash 4 riled up again all of a sudden. Skull Kid fervor hits its absolute highest prior to the September Direct, before getting cleanly kneecapped by Isabelle. Geno rode every argument that he could, betting all his chips on the final November Direct. Isaac actually believed that they'd finally get in.

Then the Grinch hoax showed up, and suddenly Mach Rider became a beloved character. Then later the hoax was disproven and now we have to factor Piranha Plant into our speculation!


As someone who watched the Brawl wishlists remain more-or-less stable the entire time, it's been a heck of a trip.

And let us not forget how people created these conspiracy theories about how the settings of the Directs hinted at future characters, like how the E3 presentation was hinting at K.Rool because of the random barrel and ladder, then the August direct had colors that supposedly hinted at Skull Kid. Then there were the official screenshots that seemed to hint at characters that were so blatant even GameXplain HAD to cover (the infamous Rathalos screenshot that looked like a mock up of a screen from Golden Sun).

Don't get me wrong; Melee had a similar hype cycle where it was announced out of nowhere at E3 and was set to be a launch window title for the Gamecube that same year. But Ultimate's hype cycle was perhaps the largest because of all the possibilities that the game brought up once they proclaimed 'EVERYONE IS HERE!". And for all the frustration and toxicity the hype created at times, never have I anticipated a game so much outside of Kingdom Hearts III.

Oh and I forgot about the infamous Isabelle reveal!

What I found so hilarious about the reveal is that for one hot second people were VERY upset about how it was not an Animal Crossing Switch announcement. It just makes me laugh because I VERY MUCH remember how ten years ago during the Wii's lifespan that the fact that the killer apps for that holiday season were Wii Music and Animal Crossing City Folk was soul crushing for the hardcore Nintendo fanbase.

Now ten years later and people are upset that A NEW ANIMAL CROSSING GAME HAD NOT BEEN ANNOUNCED DURING THE ISABELLE TRAILER. I even remember that Direct being crapped upon fanboys because "it didn't bring enough hype games", never mind the fact that we got the announcement of Luigi's Mansion 3, said Animal Crossing game and topped with a cute and funny Isabelle trailer.

Like I said, the release hype for Ultimate was truly a wild roller coaster of emotions that was all over the place.

 

[thirsty-pocket]

This hype cycle was one of the most wild for being the shortest one I've ever sit through. For once, we didn't know it was coming long before it was announced, in fact, most people thought they were just going to port Smash 4 to Switch and call it a day. We still weren't really clear on that until the "Everyone is here" trailer. ( and there were still some people that didn't get that. )

And the things I dreamed possible were in such flux. I was cautiously optimistic at first, then the two biggest "never evers" got in and suddenly I dared to dream for Geno and Banjo. Then the excitement petered out with the last few chaqracters, and now things are so wild that I don't even know how to feel... in the long run, I'm still extremely excited for this game, it's all I can think about in the past few days.

I'm even going to be a little bit sad when it finally does come out. Not just because the speculation is fun, but because it's great to have something that you are looking forward to immensely. The only series that even comes close to that for me is Zelda and 3D Mario platformers, and those are both already out of the way. It usually takes much longer to get Mario, Zelda, and Smash out of the way but here we are, almost year 3 into the Switch and it's all done... Hopefully Mario and Zelda get sequels, and Smash DLC will extend the life of the game much more than we expect.

 

[RetrogamerMax]

The speculation season for Ultimate was perhaps, the most interesting one for these list of reasons:

1. Everyone Is Here.

2. Some highly requested characters people have been asking for 17 years have finally gotten in like Ridley and K. Rool.

3. Ashley support skyrocketed like she was flying super fast high in the sky with her broom inbetween E3 and the August 8, Direct.

4. Skull Kid support skyrocketed after fans seeing: villains like Ridley and K. Rool getting in, the room with the purple and yellow chairs, and the Moon getting a Assist Trophy with his MIA in between the August Direct and the November Direct.

5. Shantae support skyrocketed after Shovel Knight was revealed as an Assist Trophy and all the suppose Smash Bros. references in Jammies Mode in Half Genie Hero's DLC.

It was very interesting to see how the playing field for highly requested characters changed so much after Ridley and K. Rool got in. Those characters might not have a chance as DLC in Ultimate, but they might have a chance in a future Smash game because of their massive following right now.