Post Script

Could Ultimate be Sakurai’s Final Smash? And if so, where does he go next?

There’s a little-known Japanese adventure game from 1999, released by Pax Softnica (the studio which helped out on Mother and EarthBound) when the SNES was in its twilight days, that goes by the name of Famicom Bunko: Hajimari no Mori. It begins with a young city boy starting his summer holiday in the country, when he falls down a hill and briefly encounters an enigmatic young woman. And yes, believe it or not, she shows up in Super Smash Bros Ultimate’s Spirits mode, as ‘Girl from Hajimari no Mori’, played by the female villager from Animal Crossing.

It’s at this moment – not when we clapped eyes on the final fighter-select screen, nor when we first realised the full enormity of the Spirits mode map – that we found ourselves wondering where on Earth the series goes from here. The titular rabbit from DSiWareexclusive perspective puzzler Looksley’s Line-Up is one thing, but this? You can’t really get much more obscure.

In other words, the cuts are getting deeper just as the roster is growing larger. On a TV screen it looks faintly ridiculous even before you have all characters unlocked. In handheld mode, you almost need to squint to make everyone out. And the soundtrack? Heaven knows how Sora managed to squeeze all this onto a Switch game card, let alone how many favours Sakurai had to call in to get so many composers to contribute remixes of old standards, new favourites and selected obscurities besides. There’s a prize for unlocking over 750 tracks; all in all, you’ll find more than 900 pieces. Who needs Spotify?

The point being: Smash can’t really get much bigger, and there’s probably little point in any potential follow-up trying. So how did it get to this point? This modest fourplayer fighting game, developed in secret at HAL Laboratory by a Nintendo fan with the help of a man who would become the company’s president, has ballooned in size as it has in popularity. Super Smash Bros Ultimate is now a monument to excess, an unwieldy behemoth stuffed to the gunwales with, well, stuff. Beyond the frenzied, anything-goes action, it’s a veritable feast of modes, music and menus, with more game types than you could ever want, and so many options you’ll barely bother with a fraction of them.

In the past, it’s felt like a natural escalation, beholden to the unwritten rule that sequels must be bigger than their predecessors. Yet there’s something telling about the way Ultimate gathers together all the fighters from previous versions of the game for one gargantuan blowout. For all that Ultimate feels like a celebration, it’s hard not to think it might also mean goodbye – at least for the man who made it. There’s the name, for starters: whether you take the definition to

mean the acme of achievement or the more sobering one suggesting finality, it’s clear that this represents some kind of culmination – if not an absolute end point, then at least the end of this particular era.

Look, too, at that opening sequence of Spirits mode where everyone – apart from Sakurai’s beloved Kirby, of course – effectively dies. Yes, over the course of the game you essentially bring them back to life. But there’s something symbolic about the image: this feels like a man killing his darlings. Sakurai originally left HAL because he’d grown bored of making Kirby sequels; it’s not much of a stretch to imagine he’s ready to move on from Smash, if only for his own health. His gag in the recent Direct about wondering when he might be able to take a break was delivered in a way that suggested he was only half-joking at best.

If it is indeed time for Sakurai to move on, where could the series go without him? A shift to a more serious competitive focus doesn’t seem to be on the cards. For one, it would betray the original idea behind the game. It was developed, after all, as a reaction to other fighting games, which relied on systems that were arcane to the average player. Smash, with its combination of popular characters and simple mechanics, was immediately appealing to a much broader audience.

And despite having supported the game as an esport, it wouldn’t really be the Nintendo way to narrow its appeal. Sure, there’s that new Final Smash meter, a lift from other fighting games, where taking damage eventually gives you the opportunity to pull off a weaker version of your Final Smash. But that feels more like a way to give beginners, who’ll inevitably take a pummelling, a chance at exacting revenge: a sop to casual players rather than the Smash hardcore.

Besides, Smash is already a fixture at Evo – albeit much to the chagrin of many a fighting-game connoisseur. With such a huge roster, Ultimate is going to spawn plenty of surprising match-ups, unless one or two characters aren’t as balanced as first impressions suggest (these sort of things only really emerge after dozens of hours of online play, after all). Besides, with GameCube controller support and all of Melee’s fighters included, maybe we’ll just need the one version of Smash at Evo next year.

And for the foreseeable future, for that matter. You’d think, after all this – not to mention the five DLC characters to come – no one could possibly want for anything more. Yet Nintendo fans’ collective appetite for sequels appears to be insatiable. With or without Sakurai, future editions of Smash are all but assured – even if it might take a long while for Nintendo to even consider how to follow this.

For all that Ultimate feels like a celebration, it’s hard not to think it might also mean goodbye