Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: 96 Classic Stages!

Brinstar Depths! Pirate Ship! I'm happy!

This is a direct response to my post from June, where I suggested that the game should aim at exactly 100 returning stages. Well, they aimed at 100 stages for now, but four of them are new, which leaves us at a total of 96 returning stages. Close enough!

We already knew about 80 of them and these are the ones that got confirmed today:

• Peach's Castle (64)
• Kongo Jungle (64)
• Mushroom Kingdom (64)
• Rainbow Cruise (Melee)
• Yoshi's Island (Melee)
• Brinstar Depths (Melee)
• Fountain of Dreams (Melee)
• Mario Bros. (Brawl)
• Pirate Ship (Brawl)
• Hanenbow (Brawl)
• Golden Plains (3DS)
• Paper Mario (3DS)
• Dream Land GB (3DS)
• Mute City SNES (3DS)
• Gamer (Wii U)
• Windy Hill Zone (Wii U)

You can view the complete list of stages on the official site.

I'm really happy about most of these and I got almost everything I wanted. If you look at my list of suggestions from that last time, there's not a single stage here that wasn't on that list. Four are missing, however, which are marked bold in the next list, which shows all stages that didn't make it:

• Planet Zebes (64)
• Sector Z (64)
• Mushroom Kingdom (Melee)
• Icicle Mountain (Melee)
• Poké Floats (Melee)
• Mute City (Melee)
• Rumble Falls (Brawl)
• PictoChat (Brawl)
• Rainbow Road (3DS)
• Pac-Maze (3DS)
• Woolly World (Wii U)
• Jungle Hijinx (Wii U)
• Orbital Gate Assault (Wii U)
• Pyrosphere (Wii U)
• Miiverse (Wii U)

I can live without all of those, so there is nothing on this list, where I feel like this is a big loss. It's quite surprising that so many Wii U stages didn't make it, considering that they wouldn't take as much work to port over, but there were probably good reasons for these omissions.

I guess, except for Rainbow Road (and maybe Woolly World) I can even understand, why all of these stages didn't make it, especially with the new toggle for Stage Hazards. How would vertically scrolling stages even work then? And the other of the missing stages feel simply redundant or were probably too much effort for their own worth.

Orbital Gate Assault for example was said to be one of the most difficult to make stages (one year development time according to Sakurai), which is why it probably was left out considering that the stage isn't that much fun to play and even had some collision errors.

Jungle Hijinx, while completely unique, was also pretty bad with the background level, because it was hard too see what's going on there. And if you think about it, this gimmick probably wouldn't work any longer with the new Stage Morph feature, which is probably why the stage didn't make the cut. I personally didn't like the stage all that much, so I'm not sad that it's gone.

It's a small shame that they apparently didn't go for a "PictoChat X" stage, which combines both PictoChat and PictoChat 2, but whatever... Not a huge loss. Oh, and Metal Cavern from the 64 original remains in a limbo, but I could see this one as Stage Builder material.

Of course it's possible that they will announce more returning stages than the ones that got showcased today, but it's most likely the final selection, where from now on they will only reveal more new stages.

If I could chose four more returning stages to complete the 100, it would be Metal Cavern, Rainbow Road, Woolly World and Mute City (Melee). The latter wasn't on my original list, but it's still different enough from Port Town Aero Drive to be considered. And they renamed the Mute City stage from the 3DS to "Mute City SNES", so it has this going for it. But maybe they just did this to match Dream Land GB...

Anyway, I got all my most wanted stages and I'm especially happy about Brinstar Depths and Pirate Ship. With Pirate Ship we have absolutely all Zelda stages in the game with one for each major 3D Zelda title. And with Planet Zebes and Pyrosphere not making the cut, it's nice that at least Brinstar Depths returned. Though, I'm still hoping for a new Metroid stage.

Overall the selection of new stages seems pretty slim so far. Only four ones, though four excellent ones. Five, if you already count that Monster Hunter stage. But I hope that each of the bigger franchises will get at least one new stage, which includes both DK and Metroid. Heck, even Fire Emblem should get one, considering how many games it had in the last years, full of potential places.

However, judging from the stage select screen, there are probably only five unannounced stages left for a total of 108.. There are six open slots on the stage select screen, but the last one is probably used for the new training stage in Training Mode. With the Monster Hunter stage and the rumored Minecraft stage, it would mean that there are only about three more stages left... Which isn't a whole lot. But I hope that there's more than that in the end.

I also hope that you will be able to change the order of both the stages and characters to sort them by franchise. It would be nice to have all Zelda stages right next to each other and so on.