Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (2018)

First time booting up a Smash Bros. game and it's really cool seeing so many characters together in one game, but I am left with one massively unanswered question... HOW DO YOU PLAY THIS GAME?

I found the tutorial section which left me staring at a chalked up Donkey Kong. Watched a "beginners introduction" and felt like I was attending an academic lecture. I feel like I'm entering the realm of elite gamers here

Edit: whilst typing this the game went idle and showed a short tutorial. Maybe the gaming elders were listening.

Prior to this month, I've never played any Smash Bros. game for longer than one match. I would usually hop on for a round and then get bored and stop playing. But after recently beating Smash 64, Melee, Brawl, Smash for 3DS, and now in the process of beating Ultimate, I've now also fallen in love with this franchise. It's simple to pick up and play, with moves being easily performed with directional inputs, and controls being universal for every character. This makes character experimentation less daunting and more inviting. And because it's so simple to start playing, it actually makes it more enticing to master the limited move-set that each character has. This game is the shining example of a game that is easy to pick up and play, but hard to master.

And then when you add the impressive roster, vast soundtrack, fantastic visuals & animations, smooth performance, highly customizable local multiplayer, and content-rich singe-player offerings to the highly polished gameplay, then you get a recipe for a near masterpiece of a fighting game.

finally playing through world of light, and i'm just picking up on quite a few glaring oversights and wasted opportunities

• lack of custom specials that were in smash 4
• no quick pause -> retry option in world of light battles
• no option to remove particle effects (or at least minimize it. it is so so so easy to lose track of what's happening due to all the unnecessary visual flair that happens with everything)
• 1v1 stamina battles not having traditional fighting game health bars at the top of the screen to more easily gauge where we're at -- i understand sticking to smash bros tradition by using the bottom UI for HP, but that still doesn't change the fact that it's objectively harder to grasp/read during fast paced action. health bars at the top of the screen (shortening towards the center) are prevalent in 1v1 fighting games for a good reason. it's for ease of readability. numbers being the sole available way to read current HP values only harms this game's stamina mode imo

a huge amount of quantity over quality in my overall experience playing this game. i feel like they didn't work on this game to make it feel like a rich nuanced unique experience, and instead just said "let's pad it out with as much crap as possible" -- e.g. the adventure mode being what it is as opposed to a shorter and sweeter experience (like subspace emissary). world of light and its spirit battles work well as a catch-all to appeal to most players, like i'm not denying that it succeeded in what it was going for. and it's incredibly neat how they're constantly updating the game and adding new characters which end up being big events. that last remark is probably the coolest thing about this entry in the series -- and it does make it feel worthy of the "ultimate" title in some sense. it's just always a mindless experience for me, which tbf sometimes that's what i need. brawl felt way more nuanced and unique for its time (probably not fair for me to say since a- i was younger, and b- i was exposed to few things at the time)