Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: Spirit Hunting

Now, the last two months I've been primarily playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with a focus on clearing all Challenges, finishing all Classic Mode routes (both solo and co-op) and collecting all Spirits, thus "completing" the game. The only other Super Smash Bros. game where I've already achieved this was the original Super Smash Bros. on the Wii Virtual Console, where I revisited the game three years ago, but this was relatively simple.

With Super Smash Bros. Brawl in 2008 and early 2009 I also came quite close, where was I really invested in all its single-player activities. I've collected all Stickers and even cleared all but three of the more difficult Challenges, which I could have gotten at any time with my five remaining hammers, since I have the European version, where this is possible. But I was also missing a variety of Trophies from the bosses in the Subspace Emissary, where getting them was quite tedious and I lost interest at some point...

I couldn't be bothered with Super Smash Bros. Melee, mostly because this game can be ridiculous and I can't get used to tap jumping. And Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS & Wii U simply didn't entice me as much to even try.

Now, when Super Smash Bros. Ultimate came out, I wasn't really sold on the whole Spirit concept, as well as on World of Light, mainly because all of this was putting quantity over quality. And that is still true, where this is effectively just a gigantic Event Mode with glorified Stickers as the collectible, where the respective characters and things get substituted with whatever the developers had available. So, I wasn't really interested in doing any of it at first, but I also didn't have my own Nintendo Switch until now...

What also has changed is the fact that Min Min is now part of the game. And she made playing Spirit Battles so much more enjoyable, because her Arms make dealing with all those shenanigans much easier, like fighting multiple enemies at once. With that she turned something that's potentially frustrating into a fun side activity.

At first you can't use DLC characters in World of Light and when I was stuck with a Mii Sword Fighter as my best option, things didn't really go well. But from the moment on that DLC characters became available, I've exclusively used Min Min for the rest of World of Light and went through the New Game+ with her on the hardest difficulty.

Since the Spirit Battles are rather bite-sized and beaten fairly quickly, playing through World of Light can actually get quite addicting and you often have this feeling of "one more", until you reach a point where it gets exhausting. Since there are so many Spirits, this can go on quite a while, but the map is sectioned quite nicely for a series of play sessions.

And here the highlight for every Zelda fan is with all certainty the Sacred Realm, where this part of the map looks really cool and even has some small puzzles to it. It's the same with Dracula's Castle, where this has been excellent as well, arguably even better than the Sacred Realm, because it provides a much more clever, map-wide puzzle with the cannonballs. They really went all in with the Castlevania stuff.

By now I've collected 1471 Spirits, where only two of them are missing, but those are the two Spirits that need save data from other games to be unlocked (Arthur from Ghosts 'n Goblins Resurrection and Sophia from Persona 5 Strikers), where I will have to wait until they become part of the normal rotation. And of course the game isn't done yet, where it will get two more DLC Spirit Boards and probably a couple of events with new Spirits.

Since certain Spirits can be enhanced or need to be dismissed to summon others, you will also have to collect some of them twice or even thrice to really have a full collection with all Spirits owned. That was also the main reason for me to go through World of Light a second time, since certain Spirits can only be gotten there and doing the Spirit Battles is a lot more fun there than on the Spirit Board with its annoying shield mini-game.

Clearing Classic Mode with every character was also as interesting as it was tedious. That every character gets a dedicated route is really great and an incentive to try them all at least once, but the repeated bonus game and the Master & Crazy Hand boss, which appears in a majority of the routes, can make things rather repetitive. So, like World of Light this was something where I could only stand to play it for so long and I had to split things up a lot.

The challenges were surprisingly easy this time around. I'm not fully done yet, where I'm still missing two challenges on the "Online" board, but these are just a matter of time. One requires me to play 200 Quick Play battles in total, where I'm on my way, and the other to use 30 different fighters during that, where I need like five more...

The latter is somewhat annoying, because my default Global Smash Power (GPS) is rather high thanks to playing Classic Mode so much. And in my area Quick Play already feels like Elite Smash, where everyone is playing "For Glory" style and super competitively at their best level, which is great, but it also means that I will get completely obliterated with every character I'm not really experienced with...

Otherwise the challenges require you some tricky tasks here and there, but nothing extremely difficult or tedious, like "Clear Century Smash with all characters". So, they were overall fun to do. I even have all nine hammers left, but there won't be any need of using them.

Milestones are a different beast, however, where I will probably try to clear what seems feasible at some point, without worrying about it too much. It does cover some stuff that got added via updates and therefore doesn't appear on the challenge boards, like the Home-Run Contest, so it still might be interesting to look into some of it. Other things might not be realistic, like the 50,000 games or winning an Online Tourney, but I will participate in the current one about the 35th Anniversaries, where this must be the first time that Nintendo ever acknowledged one of the Metroid anniversaries...

Update: I've won an Online Tourney right away. I thought these were with 64 players, where this would have been tough, but it seems to settle for eight quite often, where you only have to win to battles in a row. So, with a little luck it's doable and now I'm actually quite motivated to do more of the milestones.

But overall this has kept my me busy for quite some time, where my time in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is already rivaling that of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity and will eventually surpass it. And even once I'm done with everything, I will probably keep playing to practice or just for the fun of it.