super smash bros ultimate

I finally took the plunge on Super Smash Bros Ultimate. It's just been so hard to hold out on the hype. And over the weekend there was even a tournament streaming on Nintendo's Youtube page, so I was really in the mood to get into this one.

I have to admit, the gigantic roster actually sort of intimidated me going in. It's that whole choice paralysis thing. Freedom from choice is what we want! But Nintendo was smart on this one. They start you off with just eight playable characters, and you slowly unlock new ones as you play. This is a great move as it makes decisions early on easier about who to experiment with.

For instance, I started out by just randomly trying whoever until I landed on Pikachu who I really enjoyed using. By limiting my choices early on, it made me find a character that I liked enough to learn some moves and having a blast.

This game is so great, and there's no shortage of things to do to keep it fresh. There's characters to unlock. There's story modes. You can bet on online matches. You can poke around in the soundtrack music player...

And I love just how customizable everything is. I've set my matches to play more like the sort of tournaments I've seen on Youtube. Meaning, matches are played with three lives stocked, run for six minutes, have no items or environmental hazards. And man, just those tweaks have made the experience feel better suited for me.

I am completely and totally hooked on Smash Ultimate. Not only does it feel like the ultimate Smash game, it feels to me like the pinnacle of fighting games. It's like, now that Smash has completely clicked with me, I almost don't know if I could go on and enjoy other fighting games quite as much as I used to.

There's just something so pure about the controls in this game - once they make sense and you've tweaked them as needed. For instance, I turn off the tap-up to jump option. And I make the A and B buttons jump, while Y is attack and X is special.

I completely love this game. Characters I really enjoy, I'll run through the classic mode with. And I've been using any gold I acquire solely to unlock more music. My goodness, the music selection is incredible for video game historians/fans. I feel like this will be one of those games that I'll just play on and off forever.

After two weeks, I finally unlocked all the playable (non-DLC) characters in Smash. It was a good run. And I have to admit that towards the end, I figured out the trick where if you exit the game completely and then restart it after each new challenger round, you'll pretty much be guaranteed a new challenger when you boot it back up, thus expediting the unlock process.

But yeah, this game rules hard and I'm glad I finally got into it. I'm pretty sure now that my favorite fighter to main is Ryu. I think he's overtaken Pikachu. This is a genre-defining game, this one.