Super Smash Bros. (series)

Super Smash Bros. is a crossover fighting game series published by Nintendo, and primarily features characters from various Nintendo franchises. The series was created by Masahiro Sakurai, who has directed every game in the series. The gameplay objective differs from that of traditional fighters in that the aim is to increase damage counters and knock opponents off the stage instead of depleting life bars.

The original Super Smash Bros. was released in 1999 for the Nintendo 64. The series achieved even greater success with the release of Super Smash Bros. Melee, which was released in 2001 for the GameCube and became the bestselling game on that system. A third installment, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, was released in 2008 for the Wii. Although HAL Laboratory had been the developer for the first two games, the third game was developed through the collaboration of several companies. The fourth installment, Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, was released in 2014 for the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, respectively. The 3DS installment was the first for a handheld platform. A fifth installment, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, was released in 2018 for the Nintendo Switch.

The series features many characters from Nintendo's most popular franchises, including Super Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Yoshi, Kirby, Star Fox, and Pokémon. The original Super Smash Bros. had only 12 playable characters, with the roster count rising for each successive game and later including third-party characters, with Ultimate containing every character playable in the previous games. In Melee, Brawl, and Ultimate, some characters are able to transform into different forms that have different styles of play and sets of moves. Every game in the series has been well received by critics, with much praise given to their multiplayer features, spawning a large competitive community that has been featured in several gaming tournaments.

Many users have created their own ideas for future Smash games.

Gameplay
Gameplay in the Super Smash Bros. series differs from many fighting games. Instead of winning by depleting an opponent's life bar, players seek to launch their opponents off the stage and out of bounds. Characters have a damage total which rises as they take damage, represented by a percentage value that measures up to 999%. As a character's percentage rises, the character can be knocked progressively farther by an opponent's attacks. To knock out an opponent, the player must knock that character outside the stage's boundaries in any direction. When a character is launched off the stage, the character can attempt to "recover" by using jumping moves and abilities to return to the stage. Some characters have an easier time recovering onto the stage than others due to their moves and abilities. Additionally, some characters vary in weight, with lighter characters being easier to launch than heavy characters.

Controls are greatly simplified in comparison to other fighting games, with one button used for standard attacks and another used for special attacks. Players can perform different types of moves by holding the directional controls up, down, to the side, or in a neutral position while pressing the attack or special button. As such, each character has four types of ground attacks, mid-air attacks, and special attacks that can be performed. Quickly pressing or tapping a directional input and the attack button together while on the ground allows players to perform a chargeable "Smash Attack", which is generally more powerful than other attacks. When characters are hit by attacks, they receive a hitstun that temporarily disallows any attacks to be made. This allows combos to be performed. A shield button allows players to put up a defensive shield which weakens with repeated use and will leave the player unable to move if broken. Combining the shield button with directional inputs and attack buttons allows the player to also perform dodges, rolls, grabs, and throws. The three basic actions in Super Smash Bros., attacking, grabbing, and shielding, are often described using a rock–paper–scissors analogy: attacking beats grabbing, grabbing beats shielding, and shielding beats attacking. When a player knocks another player off of the main platform, they may perform an action called edge-guarding. At the same time the player that has been knocked off will try to recover by jumping back onto the stage and avoiding the other players' edge-guarding.

Another element in the Super Smash Bros. series is battle items, the abundance of which players can adjust them before matches. There are conventional "battering items", with which a player may hit an opponent, such as a home-run bat or a beam sword; throwing items, including Bob-ombs and Koopa shells; and shooting items, either single-shot guns or rapid-fire blasters. Recovery items allow the user to reduce their damage percentage by varying amounts. Poké Balls are special items that release a random Pokémon onto the battlefield to temporarily assist the user. Brawl introduced the Assist Trophy item which serves a similar purpose; instead of releasing Pokémon, it summons a character from another series. Brawl also introduces the Smash Ball, which when broken allows the fighter to perform a character-specific super attack known as a "Final Smash".

The rules that can be used in a match vary depending on the game, but the two most commonly used settings across all games are Time and Stock. Time mode uses a point-based system in which fighters earn points for knocking out their opponents and lose points for being knocked out or self-destructing (i.e. falling out of the stage by themselves). The player with the highest score at the end of the set time limit wins the match. Stock mode, also known as Survival, uses a life-based system in which players are given a set number of lives, known as stock, with each fighter losing a life whenever they are knocked out, becoming eliminated if they run out of lives. The winner is the last fighter standing once all other fighters are eliminated or, if a time limit is applied to the match, the fighter with the most lives remaining once time runs out. In the event of a tie, a Sudden Death match takes place. Here, each of the tied fighters are given a starting damage percentage of 300%, making them easier to launch off the stage, and the last fighter standing will be declared as the winner. In some games this process is repeated if the match ends in another tie.

Gameplay using competitive Super Smash Bros. rules is usually played in Stock mode with a timer. Items are turned off, and the only tournament-legal stages are those that do not feature hazards and other disruptive elements.

Super Smash Bros. (1999)
Super Smash Bros. was introduced in 1999 for the Nintendo 64. It was released worldwide after selling over a million copies in Japan. It featured eight characters from the start (Mario, Donkey Kong, Link, Samus, Yoshi, Kirby, Fox, and Pikachu), with four unlockable characters (Luigi, Captain Falcon, Ness, and Jigglypuff), all of them created by Nintendo or one of its second-party developers.

In Super Smash Bros., up to four players can play in multiplayer (Versus) mode, with the specific rules of each match being predetermined by the players. There are two match types that can be chosen: Time, where the person with the most KOs at the end of the set time wins; and stock, where each player has a set number of lives and are eliminated from play when their lives are depleted.

This game's primary single-player mode, named "Classic Mode" in later series entries, features a series of predetermined opponents the player must defeat. Other single-player modes exist such as Training and several minigames, including "Break the Targets" and "Board the Platforms". All of these were included in the sequel, with the exception of "Board the Platforms".

There are nine playable stages in Versus mode, eight based on each of the starting characters (such as Princess Peach's Castle for Mario, Zebes for Samus, and Sector Z for Fox) and the unlockable Mushroom Kingdom, based around motifs from the original Super Mario Bros., even containing original sprites and the original version of the Overworld theme from that game.

Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001)
A followup for the GameCube, Super Smash Bros. Melee, released in Japan and North America in late 2001, and in Europe and Australia in May 2002. It had a larger budget and development team than Super Smash Bros. did and was released to much greater praise and acclaim among critics and consumers. Since its release, Super Smash Bros. Melee has sold more than 7 million copies and was the bestselling game on the GameCube. Super Smash Bros. Melee features 26 characters, of which 15 are available initially, more than doubling the number of characters in its predecessor. There are also 29 stages.

It introduced two new single-player modes alongside the Classic mode: Adventure mode and All-Star mode. Adventure mode has platforming segments similar to the original's "Race to the Finish" mini-game, and All-Star is a fight against every playable character in the game, allows the player only one life in which damage is accumulated over each battle and a limited number of healing items in between battles. Also in Melee is the Home-Run Contest minigame, which replaced Board the Platforms in the original game. Here, fighters will have to send Sandbag out of the stage to get the best distance with a baseball bat while damaging it for ten seconds.

There are also significantly more multiplayer modes and a tournament mode allowing for 64 different competitors whom can all be controlled by human players, although only up to four players can participate at the same time. Additionally, the game featured alternative battle modes, called "Special Melee," which allows players to make many different alterations to the battle, along with alternative ways to judge a victory, such as through collecting coins throughout the match.

In place of Super Smash Bros. ' character profiles, Melee introduced trophies (called "figures" in the Japanese version). The 293 trophies include three different profiles for each playable character, one unlocked in each single-player mode. In addition, unlike its predecessor, Melee contains profiles for many Nintendo characters who are either non-playable or do not appear in the game, as well as Nintendo items, stages, enemies, and elements.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008)
Although a third Super Smash Bros. game had been announced long before E3 2006, Nintendo unveiled its first information in the form of a trailer in 2006, and the game was named Super Smash Bros. Brawl and released worldwide in 2008. The game featured a set of third-party characters, Solid Snake of Konami's Metal Gear series, and longtime Mario rival Sonic the Hedgehog from Sega's series of the same name. Brawl was also the first game in the franchise to support online play, via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, and to offer the ability for players to construct their own original stages. The game features a total of 39 playable characters and 41 stages.

Brawl also features compatibility with four kinds of controllers (the Wii Remote on its side, the Wii Remote and Nunchuk combination, the Classic Controller, and the GameCube controller), while its predecessors only used the one controller designed for that system. The player also has the ability to change the configuration of controls and the controller type.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl features a single-player mode known as The Subspace Emissary. This mode features unique character storylines along with numerous side-scrolling levels and multiple bosses to fight, as well as CG cut scenes explaining the storyline. The Subspace Emissary features a new group of antagonists called the Subspace Army, who are led by the Ancient Minister. Some of these enemy characters appeared in previous Nintendo video games, such as Petey Piranha from the Super Mario series and a squadron of R.O.B.s based on classic Nintendo hardware. The Subspace Emissary also boasts a number of original enemies, such as the Roader, a robotic unicycle; the Bytan, a one-eyed ball-like creature which can replicate itself if left alone; and the Primid, enemies that come in many variations. Though primarily a single-player mode, The Subspace Emissary allows for cooperative multiplayer. There are five difficulty levels for each stage, and there is a method of increasing characters' powers during the game. This is done by placing collected stickers onto the bottom of a character's trophy between stages to improve various aspects of a fighter.

Super Smash Bros for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U (2014)
At E3 2011, it was confirmed that a fourth Super Smash Bros. game would be coming to the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, with the two games being cross-compatible with each other. Sakurai stated that the announcement was made public in order to attract developers needed for the games, as development for the games did not start until May 2012 due to production on Kid Icarus: Uprising. On June 21, 2012, Nintendo announced that the creation of the games would be a co-production between Sakurai's Sora Ltd. and Bandai Namco Entertainment. The games were officially revealed at E3 2013, with new information being released via trailers, Nintendo Direct presentations, and developer posts on Miiverse. The game features 58 characters, 19 of whom are new, and 7 of whom are downloadable. The game was released for Nintendo 3DS in Japan in September 2014, and in North America, Europe, and Australia the following month. The Wii U version was released in North America, Europe, and Australia in November 2014, and in Japan the following month.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (2018)
In April 2014, Bandai Namco Entertainment posted a recruitment advertisement on a Japanese career job opportunity website. The recruitment page consisted of a listing for programmers for "Smash Bros. 6", which was expected to be released in 2015 for both the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. The page noted there were 120 game developers working on the project at the time, and that Bandai Namco expected that number to increase to 200. However, shortly after its publication, the page was taken down. In a January 2015 column in Weekly Famitsu, Sakurai alluded to the possibility of retirement, expressing doubt that he would be able to continue making games if his career continued to be as stressful as it was. In December 2015, Sakurai once again stated that he was not sure if there would be another game in the Smash Bros. series.

On March 8, 2018, a teaser for the game was shown during a Nintendo Direct. Sakurai later confirmed that he had worked on the game "in silence, day after day." On March 22, 2018, Nintendo announced that they would host another Super Smash Bros. Invitational tournament, in which a selected group of players would get to play the game for the first time and compete in a series of matches before a winner is chosen. The tournament took place alongside the Splatoon 2 World Championship at E3 2018 and was held on June 11–12. Both events were live streamed on Nintendo's official YouTube and Twitch channels. The title was confirmed as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate at E3 2018, where it was also announced that it would contain all playable characters from every previous game.

The game was released worldwide on December 7, 2018; according to the review aggregator platform Metacritic, it received "universal critical acclaim" from critics and scored 93 out of 100. In addition to all returning characters, the base game release adds 11 newcomers. Twelve additional new characters are also available via downloadable content, with the final character currently in development for release later in 2021.

Like Brawl, Ultimate features a story mode, known as World of Light. The plot revolves around the destruction of the Smash Bros. world at the hands of original villain Galeem. Initially only able to play as Kirby, who survived the attack, the player travels across the wasteland to rescue the other playable fighters, gathering "Spirits" (the remnants of the world's non-playable characters who aid the player in battle) along the way.

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