With installments spanning every home console from the Nintendo 64 to the Switch, it feels like not much more can be done with the Super Smash Bros. series.
As the one-year anniversary of its initial release in June 2025 nears, the Nintendo Switch 2 continues to inherit more flagship Nintendo franchises on an exclusive basis as the sunsetting process for the now 9-year-old Switch continues.
This is far from an abnormal or remarkable phenomenon, with console manufacturers often releasing games for two systems at a time while the gaming world transitions from one generation to the next.
Nintendo kicked off this new era with two flagship titles last year – Mario Kart World at the console’s launch, and Donkey Kong Bananza released just over a month later, giving a welcome initiation to those that shelled out the cash for the shiny new system.
Since then, Kirby Air Riders, Mario Tennis Fever and the upcoming Pokémon Pokopia have joined the ranks as Switch 2 exclusives to usher in the ninth generation for Nintendo, with several more franchises likely to follow.
While Nintendo fans are eagerly awaiting the next mainline Super Mario and Legend of Zelda titles, another series that experienced its biggest moment yet on the Switch is facing a bit more of a question mark as the company transitions to the next era.
Initially introduced to global audiences upon its Nintendo 64 release in 1999, the Super Smash Bros. series has been a wildly successful unicorn for Nintendo over the past 27 years, serving as the perfect outlet and arena for all of Nintendo’s biggest stars (and eventually many others) to share the same stage in a genre Nintendo had largely avoided up until that point.
In the quarter-century-plus since the original Super Smash Bros., the series has truly taken on a life of its own. Each installment has received widespread critical acclaim and glowing sales numbers commercially, while inspiring a grassroots competitive scene that infiltrated an esports world largely centered on more traditional fighting games and first-person shooters.
Although the first installment of the series was a massive hit and a favorite at basement gatherings at the turn of the century, it was the series’ second installment that both established Smash Bros. for what it is while offering an incredibly in-depth expansion of the game’s features in a timeframe of just over two years.
Super Smash Bros. Melee was released in North America in December 2001, less than a month after the initial launch of the GameCube itself – with the title quickly becoming the killer app for the system. Despite the GameCube selling just over 21 million units worldwide, Melee alone reached sales of nearly 7.5 million units – meaning around a third of GameCube owners also had a copy of Melee.
The game was a remarkable expansion of its predecessor, with improvements that truly shattered my perception of what was possible in a single video game as a kid. Playable characters more than doubled from 12 to 26, while playable stages ballooned from just nine in Smash 64 to 29 in Melee, with an incredibly in-depth single-player mode and a wide plethora of available collectibles.
Melee also, for lack of a better word, is extremely broken, with technical oversights that were likely a result of the game’s rushed development resulting in the advent of a wide range of advanced techniques that continue to set Melee apart from other fighting games and even other Smash Bros. games to this day.
Melee‘s widespread popularity also facilitated the creation of the series’ competitive scene, one that spans across all of its titles to this day and remains incredibly robust, especially for Melee and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the latest installment.
While competitive players simply continued to indulge in Melee, the series moved on to new consoles with even more gameplay and character roster expansion in mind. Super Smash Bros. Brawl hit North American shelves for the Wii in March 2008, debuting a full-scale one-player campaign mode while boosting the playable character roster to 37 options while also including 41 stages and the option to create custom stages.
Though Brawl was nowhere near the esports juggernaut that Melee is, the game was still a rousing success, selling 13.32 million units as the console’s eighth-best selling title.
Further expansion and lofty sales numbers wouldn’t end there, with the series taking a unique step forward in 2014 with a two-pronged release – Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U.
Colloquially known as Smash 4, the game gave the series a bit of the best of both worlds – the 3DS game sold 9.65 million copies and was the eighth-best selling game for the system, while the Wii U version still managed 5.38 million sales on the commercially unviable console. Additionally, Smash 4 on the Wii U revived the series’ standing within the esports world, sparking a vibrant competitive community that served as the pinnacle of the Smash scene from its release in the Fall of 2014 until Ultimate’s release for the Switch in December 2018.
Yet things continued to get overwhelming for the series – and this is what I’m ultimately getting at.
Smash 4, on one hand, feels appropriately maximalist. The game features 58 playable characters, including seven that were only available as downloadable content, while also boasting 55 playable stages when including DLC.
Already on the border between joyfully expansive and overstimulating, Ultimate upped the ante in unprecedented fashion. Living up to its name, it all makes sense when viewing the game as the ultimate iteration of Smash Bros. – as many characters and stages as one could possibly imagine, a full one-player campaign mode, seemingly endless collectibles and a competitive scene arguably more robust and global than Melee‘s ever was and will be.
While I am and always will be biased towards Melee, the game I grew up spending countless hours on both by myself and with friends, I really do greatly enjoy every game in the series – Ultimate included. But it begs the very obvious question – where does it all go from here?
Is there really a way to tastefully expand a roster and stage selection that has already swelled to 87 playable characters and 115 stages?
Sure, I’d still love to see Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Waluigi and Lloyd Irving make their Smash Bros. debuts – but with a character roster that already makes even basic knowledge of each character and matchup feel like a chore, it’s hard to see how it can be tastefully added to.
And while Nintendo has fought the grassroots Smash Bros. scene tooth-and-nail for its entire existence, there is undoubtedly a tacit acknowledgement and concession of the unprecedented impact the series has had on the gaming world.
At this point, it feels like the best way to “move it forward” would simply be a Switch 2 version of Ultimate with perhaps a new feature or mode outside of new characters or stages that would entice players to still pick it up. With the compatibility in services between the Switch and Switch 2, there’s no reason why Ultimate still couldn’t be the definitive Smash title for the Switch 2, in the same way the Wii U’s Mario Kart 8 was for the Switch when released with additional content.
Smash Bros.‘ impact on Nintendo games, esports, fighting games and the wider gaming world as a whole showcases the series’ incredible staying power that feels truly impossible to replicate, especially as competitive scenes for Smash 64 and Melee remain lively decades later.
At five mainline console titles and a series that has transcended the casual and competitive gaming worlds like no other games have done before, series creator Masahiro Sakurai would be entirely in his right mind to view it all as a mission accomplished.
As it’s long been proven that these games will last longer than the consoles they are played on, Smash Bros. is perhaps the only series that can wrap it up today and still be assured that gamers around the world will continue to enjoy it for generations to come.
With that being the reality, why jeopardize an unshakeable legacy?
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