Kinda funny to be posting this right after the Nickelodeon All-Stars Brawl review… I want to be clear, Smash Ultimate is very much the better game, but Nick Brawl is a cool new alternative that has a lot of potential if Nickelodeon decide to keep it going past the first game.

Well anyways, Smash Ultimate is done. We finally got the last DLC in the second and last Fighter Pass. No more speculation, no more big updates for the game (just some possible balance patches), this is the final Smash Ultimate.

I’ve done a couple Smash-related posts on the old website, mostly speculation/wishlist stuff for the DLC, alongside my review of the game. I figure, why not talk about all the DLC characters now that they’re all released.

In my mind there’s 2 important things about DLC characters in Smash specifically: what they represent (historical importance in gaming, and to Nintendo specifically), and how they play. If they’re fun to play, that’s good. If they’re also an interesting choice as far as representing something important or interesting in gaming, that’s even better. I think most of the DLC here does at least one of those, which is good.

So I will talk about those aspects of each of the 12 DLC characters.

This is all just for fun, I do think the DLC is worth getting if you’re a Smash fan either way, though it is a bit on the expensive side (I think DLC characters should be a bit cheaper than they are, I will expand on that idea later).

Let’s go!

Piranha Plant

This one was announced before Ultimate came out, but not part of the fighter passes. Rather, he was a pre-order bonus, or you could buy him separately later on. This is actually the kind of character I always thought would be cool in Smash. Piranha Plant may be a generic Mario enemy, but it’s one you’ve seen all over the place since the first game, and as such there’s a good moveset potential here. As far as how good of a reveal this was… great. First-party Nintendo characters kinda get a pass for me as far as DLC goes because they just implicitly make sense, but it’s a unique, fun idea that gives a spotlight to the type of character that’s supremely important to gaming, but kinda never gets the spotlight.

As far as moveset, Piranha Plant is super fun. The spike ball is really interesting for both damage and mindgames, the poison is a cool spacing tool, the stretchy thing has interesting applications… and I think this is a pretty under-rated character overall. He has everything you’d want from a Smash character. I kinda don’t have much to say about him, but I find him super fun to play.

Good start for this game’s DLC, though it was a sort-of bonus so not representative of the fighter passes.

Joker

This one came to us as a surprise trailer at the VGAs (and was basically the only good thing about the VGAs that year). I think he’s a cool choice, largely because we get some Shin Megami Tensei representation, of which Persona is a spin-off of. The only thing about that representation that is a bit of a shame is the lack of non-Persona music in Joker’s level (some oldschool SMT battle music would’ve been nice), and it could’ve been cool to include some more SMT demons in his moveset, but it’s SMT, I’m happy.

As far as moveset, Joker is a character I really suck with. But he’s pretty great. He’s fast as hell, has decent kill power, and Arsene popping up from time to time making all his moves even better is great. He’s quite fun to play. I’m just… too bad at him to get into detail with his moveset.

I think he was a solid addition.

Hero

We got him at some E3 presentation. At first shown as the DQ11 Hero, it ended up being the heroes from DQ3, 4, 8 and 11, with alt colors that reference a bunch of others. This is THE biggest DLC of the bunch, being, FINALLY, Dragon Quest representation in Smash. DQ being one of the best console-style RPG series ever (if not THE best). It’s the most important one for sure, and should be bigger than it is outside of Japan (but Squeenix kinda doesn’t like releasing these outside of Japan for some reason so we miss them sometimes).

For moveset, Hero has some pretty basic sword stuff, but also some pretty cool chargeable magic. Some of his spells are actually pretty wildly strong. Then his down-b opens up a menu, which allows you to select one of 4 random spells from a pool of 21, some of which have a small chance of one-hit kills, but also all sorts of attacks or buffs. And also his front smash has a chance of being a crit, which is pretty strong too. I think Hero is a pretty good character overall, I’d say his weaknesses are his speed which make him not quite as good as some others, but his moves are really good. I really enjoy playing him.

Hero is easily my favorite character of the bunch. I always wanted either him or Slime to be in Smash, because of how important DQ is to gaming, and they did the series justice here.

Banjo & Kazooie

This was at the same E3 presentation as Hero, and he was THE big reveal. Everyone went crazy. It’s pretty weird because B-K have not been relevant since the N64, and to this day Microsoft refuses to make a new good B-K game, despite this DLC showing there’s still some love out there for the bear and bird duo. This character isn’t really here for historical significance or overall relevance, but because people have been asking for them in Smash for so long. I’m pretty sure they might be the most requested.

On the moveset side, I really like them. They might not be super good as far as competition, but they have a bunch of cool moves that reference moves in the games. The grenade is fun, the smashes are great, some of the air attacks are cool, the side-b with the invincible dash thing is geat… He may not offer that much you don’t get from other characters, but man, he’s fun to play.

Definitely one of the better character inclusions in Smash DLC. Might even be the best one, on hype alone.

Terry

People who don’t know much about video games found this to be a weird inclusion, a lot of people not knowing who he was. This character was actually semi-leaked by Nintendo before reveal at a September Direct, with them adding SNK to the DLC’s copyright before the reveal, so people kinda figured it would probably be Terry (though a few other names like Fio and Nakoruru were also being thrown around). And he had this really cool reveal video with the arcade pixel characters trying to catch the Smash invite. I see Terry not just as a Fatal Fury/King of Fighter rep, but more as an overall SNK/Neo Geo rep. The music selection definitely shows that, with music from Psycho Soldier, Athena, Metal Slug and more, alongside the KOF and FF music. And, not even considering all that, Terry is super iconic within the fighting genre. There’s not a lot of fighting gamers that aren’t familiar with Terry’s hilarious engrish.

His moveset is also super fun. He does the Ryu/Ken thing of always facing his opponent, to mimic the traditional fighting game thing. In addition to the regular Smash moveset, all his specials can also be executed using the inputs from Fatal Fury/KOF, which gives you a stronger version of those moves, and he’s the only character to have a back special. His moves have a lot of mobility, he’s strong as heck, and he can do supers if he’s over 100% with super inputs, which are very fun. Gotta love hitting people with the “Are you okay? Bustah Wolf!” stuff. His recovery is ass though.

This was a great, unexpected inclusion. I’m really happy with him not just gameplay-wise, but also as far as what he represents for gaming. Definitely a bit of a passion project for Sakurai as far as the DLC goes.

Byleth

And the last character of the first fighter pass… Disappointed everyone. The reason for that is, of course, that all the other characters in the pass were big awesome third-party characters that were all great and meaningful choices, so Byleth ends up feeling out of place… and, of course, is yet another blue-hair swordy Fire Emblem rep which people tend to think we have too much of (and they’re right). As far as the whole “relevance” thing, I have to give Byleth a pass, because first-party Nintendo just makes sense for DLC. I’d have different choices for all the Nintendo reps in both fighter passes, but they’re all as relevant as each other, really.

As far as moveset… Well, at least Byleth isn’t JUST a swordswoman. She also has a spear, a bow and an axe, plus her sword is an Ivy-style whip sword, each of which are related to different directions used for moves (neutral is bow, side is spear, up is sword and down is axe). She does end up having a pretty versatile moveset that has a lot of interesting options that can deal with different situations, and of course her up-air is really good. She’s actually quite fun to play and pretty good. It’s good that she’s not yet another swordy and has a varied moveset.

So Byleth is probably no one’s favorite inclusion, but she’s… fine. Kinda par for the course. Byleth was kind of what I was expecting from the DLC before characters started getting announced, I was expecting it to mostly be first-party Nintendo stuff to advertise recent-ish games. But surprisingly that wasn’t the case, we didn’t even get a Pokemon which REALLY surprised me.

Min Min

And this character also gets a pass as far as “relevance”, because Nintendo. Min Min was originally just announced as “an ARMS character”, though it was pretty clear it would be either her, Ribbon Girl or Spring Man. Min Min just ended up being more popular, having been the winning character in some big tournament thing. And gameplay-wise she was also more interesting for Smash. ARMS itself is a bit of a weird thing since… I kinda feel like it’s over for that series. It is a good game, surprisingly, but not one that people really grabbed on to overall. People were not that willing to give a chance to the motion controls, even though they work quite well.

The moveset here is really fucking strange. A and B are usually normals and specials respectively, but here they’re left arm and right arm, respectively. Namely, neutrals and tilts are the same for both buttons. The up and down Bs are actual specials with up-b being recovery and down-B changing the ARM on your right hand, and up and down As are similarly unique to the A button. But for neutrals and forwards, you can charge forward smashes with both ARMS at once, delay which gets sent out first and do all sorts of crazy things. Min Min is all about range, and has a lot of cool tools. She can make her dragon arms better with throws (which is something from ARMS) as well. And she can forward smash in the air, which is pretty nutty. I have lots of trouble playing Min Min, but I think she’s at least very interesting as far as moveset since she can do things other characters can’t.

Not the coolest inclusion, but one that adds a unique moveset to the game, even if I’m no good with her.

Steve/Alex/Zombie/Enderman

I completely get why this happened, and I’m fine with it. Saw lots of mad people though. Minecraft is fucking HUGE. It’s the highest-selling game, ever, by nearly double the game below it. Even if it’s something I’d never play (though I sometimes enjoy watching vtubers playing it), its relevance to gaming is undeniable, and it’s a weirdly big deal on Switch too. Really no reason Steve shouldn’t be in Smash. It was pretty exciting, definitely the hypest character in the second pass, and one I was kinda happy to see surprisingly.

And when it comes to moveset, this character is super cool. The fact that he has to mine is a bit eh (and a bit tough to deal with in some matchups because mining takes time to get the good stuff (mostly iron)), but that’s how he gets stronger, since he can find iron, diamonds and gold from mining, and he can set up a crafting table to make better equipment (if he builds with diamond, all his tools will be diamond so will perform better than his starting wood tools). Some of his attacks use those resources as well. He can place blocks which has some really fun applications, he can build a minecart to ram into people, he can make a TNT block with a line of redstone dust and a button to blow it up remotely…  and he has pretty solid normals too, the jab is actually kinda wild, and the boost coming from building better tools is very strong. His up smash is one of the craziest in the game. And because he’s from Minecraft, the animations are a bit odd to get used to since he doesn’t… move much. I think Steve is an extremely strong character overall.

You may not be into Minecraft, but Steve is undeniably the biggest new character in both fighter passes. He may not be your favorite (he’s not mine), but he makes total sense for Smash. And he’s super fun to play.

Sephiroth

And this is the first real disappointment. This would actually have been a REALLY amazing reveal… if Cloud wasn’t already in Smash. And if a sword-wielding RPG Square Enix character hadn’t already been in the DLC (plus Hero is just better). I figure, if they wanted to represent Final Fantasy some more, there’d be better choices than just “FF7 again”. There’s 15 main games in the series, they were definitely some possible characters that could’ve been overall more interesting than Sephiroth. Yeah, Sephiroth is cool. But FF is about more than FF7. And RPGs are about more than FF, so it would’ve been nice to see some un-represented series, Squeenix or not.

As far as gameplay… He’s real good. He’s a swordsman, but his sword is HUGE, obviously. Dude has so much range. Some of his attacks have kinda weirdly precise hitboxes, while others like his up smash have a massive stupid arc. And his specials give him some good variety and some really useful tools, like the side-b that attaches magical time bombs to enemies (great combo/kill tool), and actually one of the funnest up-b recoveries in the game because of how versatile it is not just for recovering, but also killing. Sephiroth is fucking fun to play.

Not my favorite character of the bunch as far as a reveal/relevance and such, but he’s fun to play so I’ll forgive the very meh choice.

Pyra and Mythra

Here’s another first-party Nintendo rep, so again I have to give a pass to this one as far as relevance. Of course it’s relevant, it’s Nintendo. Xenoblade 2 was great fun though, and I’m actually kinda happy we got these 2 rather than Rex, who’d have kinda weird moves since he’s very reliant on having other characters supporting him in his own game.

Pyra and Mythra actually bring back an old mechanic no other characters really have (except kinda Pokemon Trainer), that being Zelda/Shiek’s transform. You can switch, very quickly and on-the-fly, between Pyra and Mythra, and both characters actually have completely different movesets. Pyra is more focused on power, while Mythra is more focused on speed and combos (and wild hitboxes). You end up with a character that is… extremely strong, it turns out. Lots of good combo tools, lots of strong moves, really fun side-b attacks for both of them that are funky as shit… Yeah they’re great to play as.

Pyra & Mythra might not be the most interesting choice, but they make for a fun character. Pretty satisfied with them.

Kazuya

Huh. I feel I should’ve expected him, or Jin (but definitely not Heihachi since he was already represented twice in the game), but for the most part I was kinda discounting all the mentions of Tekken in speculation. It’s a weird one because Tekken is obviously a super important fighting game series, but its relevance to Nintendo itself is… questionable (which has not been the case for other series represented in Smash so far). The only Tekken games on Nintendo systems are Tekken Advance which sucked, Tekken 3D on 3DS which no one played, and the lowest-selling port of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 on Wii U… and that’s it, I think. A Bandai Namco character made sense though (since they’re devs for the game), and honestly, going for Tekken might make the most sense… though I would’ve liked to see a slightly more retro character like Taizo Hori, or actually a Digimon would’ve been a great choice too. As far as a choice though, I do think Kazuya is a good one.

As far as moveset, Kazuya is kinda wild. Dude has approximately one billion different moves he can do, so he has so many options. He actually has a command dash which I think is the only one in the game (which has some weird form of invincibility IIRC), and all sorts of crazy moves that do stupid shit. He has a reflect, a huge stupid laser beam, several moves that stun or trip or have massive hitstun, a huge emphasis on combos, different inputs for different moves, some moves with not just different inputs but specific timing for inputs (like a diagonal down attack as you’re getting up, IIRC)… he has SO MUCH STUFF… Oh and yes he also does the fighting game character thing of always facing the opponent. He’s fun as hell to play, but not the easiest to get good at.

Kazuya is super good though I’d say a bit harder to play than most other characters in the game, but man he’s fun. And despite being a bit of a weird inclusion IMO, he’s a good one.

Sora

And there it is, the shittiest choice. I was super disappointed in this one. For many reasons. And this comes from someone who’s been a KH fan since the first game.
First off… No one actually likes Sora. Sora is a pretty shitty, stupid, annoying character… as is every original KH character. At most, they may like his design. What they actually like is Kingdom Hearts as a whole. And that’s why people were excited for Sora, of course. But the draw of Kingdom Hearts, what makes it interesting, isn’t the shitty convoluted storyline that doesn’t even try to make sense and the badly-written characters but, rather, Disney. People love the combination of FF-style shit put alongside classic Disney shit. It’s great, and had pretty good gameplay to go alongside the interesting collaboration. And, despite the degrading quality of the series after 2, it’s still a big deal because a few of the games were so good it fuels desire for more.
Second… we already had 2 JRPG sword fighters from Square Enix in the DLC… why are we getting a third one? That gives us 4 total characters that are JRPG sword-using Squeenix characters if you include Cloud. Why? This is actually worse than Fire Emblem, because at least Fire Emblem is first-party Nintendo so… can’t blame them too much. With third-party stuff, it’s the opportunity of doing something unique, which most of these characters actually did. Even Hero did something interesting despite the sword thing, and, you know, wasn’t the fourth squeenix sword user. There’s so much of gaming as a whole getting ignored here.
Third… if they wanted to represent Kingdom Hearts, they did an awful job of it. I understand WHY, I can’t blame Sakurai/Nintendo for that (other than deciding not to choose a different character). I said before “if Sora gets in Smash, the level will have to be something lame like Hollow Bastion because they won’t be allowed to do something fun like a travelling level that goes through Disney worlds, and there’d be no Donald and Goofy, and that would suck balls”, and… there you go. It’s because they had to deal with Disney, and Disney probably didn’t want to give Nintendo ANYTHING, because they suck. The fact we actually got the Mickey keychain on Sora’s keyblade was probably super hard for them to get (honestly I was expecting something like a Smash logo keychain when Sora was heavily rumored a couple days before reveal). But, like I said before, what people really like about KH is the Disney shit, and there’s none of it here. Donald and Goofy are SUPER important in KH, they’re consistently accompanying Sora, every step of the adventure… so where the FUCK are they? They didn’t even put them in Sora’s final smash, which should’ve been the bare minimum, they just did a shitty door locking thing with the keyblade. In the Hollow Bastion level there’s a segment with stained glass-style art of some characters for some reason (it’s visuals from the games, sure, but it has no relevance to the level), and in the KH games, the one for Sora includes Donald and Goofy. Here? They’ve been replaced with a fucking raft and the stupid star fruit thing. Fuck off. If we’re not getting even a wiff of Donald and Goofy, what’s the point?

On a gameplay level, Sora has some things going for him. His recovery is probably the best in the game, it’s actually ridiculous. His side-b (alongside is really high double jump) gives him some Smash 4 Bayonetta-style low percent top screen kill possibilities. Thundaga is a super good move (nerfed by the fact that you have to cycle through the way inferior blizzaga and firaga to be able to use it again, but that’s quick enough to do). His triple hit combo in the air and on the ground (not sure if that’s neutral or side tilt, I think both , or at least both are similar) is actually really good. My problem with Sora when it comes to gameplay is that he’s floaty. Like, really floaty. It’s a weird thing to actually describe (but I’ll try), it’s his double jump that’s… questionable. It has this weird thing where it delays for a while before actually going up, then he goes up weirdly slowly, then he kinda stays at the peak for too long, and he then moves down slower than even Mewtwo. So Sora kinda ends up… feeling like shit to play. But the weird thing is that he’s still fun to play despite that massive problem. His good moves are more than worth it, and he has a lot of options for movement in his moveset. Like, even if he’s floaty, you’ll probably end up using the down-air to get back on the ground faster, you know. Sora is pretty decent, he just takes some adjustment time.

Even though Sora is extremely badly represented from a content standpoint (and is a shitty choice), at least he’s actually pretty solid as a character, despite the massive floatiness and the fact that he kinda feels like shit, because he has such good options. The best thing about his inclusion is the fucking awesome Timeless River costume. That’s so cool. And it’s cool to have a new neutral stage choice for competitive Smash even if it’s a meh stage as far as KH locations. But I wish the final character was one with, you know, historical importance to gaming, and not a fourth Squeenix swordsman.

Overall

The first fighter pass was just amazing, other than Byleth, who was a cool character gameplay-wise at least. The second fighter pass definitely had more disappointment, with Sephiroth and Sora being pretty meh choices… But Steve and Kazuya were really cool, and as far as gameplay all the characters are interesting. And the fun stuff with this DLC is that each character had something unique and fun, either by being a fan-favorite or by having really cool movesets, or both. My favorites of the bunch are definitely Hero, Banjo and Steve, but I do find all of them at least fun enough to play to be worth getting. Like, even if Sora isn’t a good choice, he’s still a new good moveset, so I can’t be too mad at it.

The DLC IS overpriced, 6$ per character (5$ each if you get the passes) is obviously too much compared to how much the base game costs with the massive amount of content and characters that are in there, but this is what gamers have decided is an “okay” price for one character so… eh. Look, when your 60$ game has 76 characters at launch, 5$ for a single character is just objectively too much when it comes to value proposition. Mathematically, if you consider only character count (which is a bad metric because there’s so much more to the game than the amount of characters in it, such as music, gameplay, stages, pretty big single player content, shitty online), a fair price for a DLC character would be 78 cents. Round that up to a dollar. That’s my DLC rant, it’s too expensive, for most games, gamers need to stop buying DLC completely (Smash is the only series I buy DLC for and I’m not happy about it).

If I’d change anything from the two passes, I’d take out Sephiroth and Sora, put in Doomguy (because of the extreme importance of DOOM for the gaming industry as a whole, obvious Nintendo relevance, and the more unique moveset he would’ve brought) and Arle from Puyo Puyo (because there’s basically no puzzle reps and it’s an additional Sega rep, and Nintendo have had a Puyo variant). Just to add some balance to this second pass. My selection is just better by objective metrics (variety, more different companies represented, importance within gaming), and I’m pretty sure we’d have more unique movesets as well. My selection of first-party Nintendo characters would’ve been different too, probably having Mike Jones, Ganon (Blue Pig version) and Bidoof… but the Nintendo selection is pretty arbitrary, it could be anyone and the choices they made are fine.

It’s nice to see Sakurai finally (hopefully) leaving Smash behind, and leaving it behind not only with the best gameplay in the series so far, but also with the best roster Smash will ever have. Like, how do you follow up Ultimate without it being a massive disappointment? It was already wild for it to have all the previous, even cut and Smash 4 DLC, characters, alongside a bunch of new ones (all of which are awesome, big fan of all of them except Isabelle). A fighting game launching with 76 characters is unheard of, and they added 12 more on top of that, plus having really good single player content and having pretty impeccable gameplay design… man, this game is just so good.

There’s a good reason this is BY FAR the highest-selling fighting game (literally 9 million more copies sold than fucking Street Fighter 2), with all the content it has. I mentioned that in yesterday’s review, but SFV launched with 16 characters (and still isn’t worth buying). Smash Ultimate, 76. Other long-running fighting game franchises are clearly not keeping up. The only ones that did okay in recent years have been Tekken Tag 2 (Tekken 7 needed LOTS of overpriced DLC to get to a good amount compared to Tag 2) and KOF14 had a good amount too (but now KOF15 is gonna also launch with too few characters). BlazBlue Cross Tag needed DLC to get to a really good roster, but the base game plus the DLC is basically the price of a full game so at least that’s one that’s worth it. Smash Ultimate is clearly in a league of its own though.

Buy Smash Ultimate, it’s good. Buy the DLC if you like the characters, or think they look fun too play, unless you think they’re overpriced (which I’ve proven they objectively are… unless the Disney talks were really that bad for Nintendo, of course… but when has a bad deal ever stopped anyone, right?).