Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: New Spirits

There's currently an event in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, where you can obtain four new Spirits from the Spirit Board. These are:

• Rauru from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
• Noah & Mio from Xenoblade Chronicles 3
• Deep Cut from Splatoon 3
• Oatchi from Pikmin 4
  

Each of these games would have been worth a Spirit Event of their own, where the last one to receive such an event was Metroid Dread in 2021, back when Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was still being updated via the Fighters Passes.

Interestingly, they don't even need to update the game to add new Spirits to it. It still runs on version 13.0.1, which was the final update in late 2021. But for events and such it must have its own API, where it's also possible to add more "content" at any time in the form of Spirits. Makes you wonder why they didn't... Well, they did this once before, in fact, with the Evil Ryu Spirit in early 2022, but that was it.

Even if they are just glorified PNG files, the Spirit battles are all unique challenges. It would have been a good reason to get back into the game regularly if they had kept making such events. Multiplayer games really profit from content additions, no matter how small they may be.

And at the same time this is great advertisement for new Nintendo games. Titles like Bayonetta 3, Fire Emblem Engage, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and of course Tears of the Kingdom could have all had events of their own with a number of Spirits. Why not also have the new Ganondorf and the Sages along with him? Seems like a missed opportunity if it's that simple.

Anyway, the Rauru Spirit battle itself is quite neat, where you're basically reenacting the Imprisoning War, but from Ganondorf's side. You can choose any character, of course, but he works pretty well here, because you can just spam his Smash Attacks. I did it first try, even though it's a Legendary Spirit.

It's played on the Battlefield version of Hyrule Temple, which looks just like a sky island. The six Sages are represented by Pit (Rito), Charizard spamming Flare Blitz (Goron), a blue Inling (Zora), female Robin spamming Elthunder attacks (Gerudo), R.O.B. (Mineru), and Zelda herself. Then, at the end you will have to fight a giant Mewtwo, who represents Rauru.

And it's perfect how they've chosen Rauru's spirit form for his Spirit. For what's possible with the Spirit system, they did a great job here and had some cool ideas. I also liked the Oatchi battle, where the dog gets represented by a giant, yellow Kirby.

Overall this was quite the fun event, even though you can finish it in like 15 minutes... But maybe this gets you back into online play or some other mode for a bit as well. For me this came at the right time, where I didn't have to dust off the game, because I was playing it more often lately, trying to get better at at it, facing people online. But this is a different tale for a different day.