Judging from all the posts I made lately about Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, this shouldn't come as a surprise: but I'm really excited for the new Smash Bros. game! This needs to be said, after I had expressed my severe lack of excitement about Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS back in 2014.
Overall I did enjoy these two games for how they played, but for the most part I simply played the "Smash" mode with friends and that was it. I never really was invested in the game, unlike with Super Smash Bros. Brawl, where I've done almost everything save for some Trophies. I even collected all 700 Stickers! With Super Smash Bros. 4 on the other hand I never really cared about such things... The game wasn't as interesting and there have been several factors as to why this was.
It probably all started with the way things were announced. In the beginning it looked like they were going to completely overhaul everything, starting with a very basic roster. But then, one after another, almost all the characters from Brawl got announced again, some with only minor changes, plus we got some returning characters from Melee as well. I didn't mind having some characters cut, especially when there's a good reason for it, but the way how they announced one old character after another was kind of boring and destroyed part of the excitement. "Oh, Yoshi is back as well, big surprise... Wait, why didn't they bring back Wolf?"
As a Zelda fan, I was instead focused on Hyrule Warriors at the time, where we finally got a game with a roster of playable characters entirely dedicated to the franchise, while the new Super Smash Bros. completely failed to do something meaningful with The Legend of Zelda. Its characters looked even worse than in Brawl and the only new representation were stages and Assist Trophies, featuring characters that all became playable in Hyrule Warriors (Legends)... At the same time Fire Emblem got three new characters and one returning character from Melee, which seemed a little unfair.
So, there was some disappointment about that, but the biggest issue was probably dividing the game into two halves, one for the Nintendo 3DS and one for the Wii U. This mainly affected the selection of stages, but I like having as many stages as possible, where this split felt wrong and like I was looking at only one half of a game. I've always imagined, how nice it would be to have at least the returning stages, which were only present in the 3DS version, in the Wii U version as well...
And that's a general theme with stages for me. In Melee I thought it would have been nice to have more classic N64 stages, like Hyrule Castle. In Brawl I thought it would have been nice to have more Melee stages, like Great Bay, and even some N64 stages. You can never have too many stages. The more, the merrier.
At the same time, it felt a little lazy to have only returning stages present for some franchises. Like there was only Brinstar for Metroid on the Nintendo 3DS. Overall, because they had to develop two games simultaneously, the efforts on certain ends were kind of lacking, may it be the selection of stages or the character works.
On top of all that, some of the cut characters were later sold as DLC and the DLC was rather expansive. To this day I haven't purchased all DLC characters and stages yet, because it never felt like it was worth the money.
Now, enter Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and it finally does things right. Instead of re-announcing every character one after another, they announced them all at once. "Everyone is here." Plus, from the looks of it they are bringing a massive amount of classic stages back, finally all in one game.
This is the basis that I secretly always was longing for and from here on out things will be really exciting, because most announcements will focus on new entries to the game. There probably won't be as many, but I don't mind, because the basis is already so fantastic and it's not like there is this giant amount of must-have newcomers waiting to be in the game. I don't really have any big expectations here, so there aren't any dreams that could be crushed.
Overall my stance on what I expect from Smash has really changed from the last game and I'm overall much more okay with the decisions that were made in Smash 4. It might be because I got my share of playable Zelda characters with Hyrule Warriors, it might be because I've played some Fire Emblem Heroes, but I made peace with the fact that my favorite franchise, Zelda, probably won't be getting any newcomers, while other not-so-big franchises do.
Thing is that Zelda only has so many main characters, where most of the remaining popular characters are one-shots like Midna that only matter in one game of the series, but not in the series as a whole. Fire Emblem on the other hand creates new main characters with every installment, where it's easy to pick new Smash newcomers from those games... Of course that doesn't mean that there should be a dozen of new Fire Emblem characters in the future, so things need to be relatively balanced between the franchises.
Also, to be honest, with one-shot characters like Midna or Ghirahim it would feel kind of weird, if they were playable now, since their time is essentially over. It's already somewhat weird with Sheik, but at least this is simply one of the main characters in disguise and they've managed to update Sheik with looks from the more recent games, like Twilight Princess and Breath of the Wild. As a matter of fact, they've updated the designs of all Zelda characters this time, which is already more than we got in the last game.
That being said, my "most wanted" is still Hilda as an Echo of Zelda. Of course she's also a one-shot, but as an Echo fighter she is simply a good fit, especially with Zelda's new design. And I wouldn't be overly disappointed, if Hilda doesn't make it into the game, since we only would be missing a clone.
There's also Metroid, where we finally got Ridley as a playable character, which is already amazing. The only way to disappoint me now as a Metroid fan would be turning Dark Samus into an Echo. I would be fine with her staying as an Assist Trophy, but if she becomes playable, she should at least bring her Assist Trophy moves and become a unique fighter.
I'm also worrying for some classic stages, which haven't been shown yet, like Pirate Ship, but I'm positive that most of them will return as well. That's part of the excitement, really, where I'm looking forward to details about stages in the game.
And this brings us back to the topic: excitement. You really notice the ambition of this game, which Sakurai had from day 1, where he planned to bring everyone back. It won't be split into two games anymore, it will be one big neat package filled with the history of Smash. And I love this. That's the Super Smash Bros. that I always wanted and I'm really looking forward to the next months and every new announcement.
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