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I'm not so sure that "smush" is going to be the capstone you're describing. Of course, details are slim and hype is high right now, but I think there are a few factors to keep in mind. As a competitive melee player, Nintendo has proven themselves to be incredibly slow and remains out of date with regard to supporting a competitive community for any game they have. They do seem to be trying to turn a new leaf with Ultimate, but Nintendo Japan has a lot of internal inertia (Sakurai's personal opinions) and regulatory restrictions (gambling laws making it hard to host tournaments with meaningful prize money) that make me skeptical that they're going to go as far to support their game as Valve, Riot, Blizzard, etc, which is what's really necessary to become a tier 1 e-sport. These leading e-sport companies are all American, in contrast to Nintendo which has to work overseas to support smash competitively (the Japanese competitive smash community is tiny compared to the U.S., in part due to culture).

In addition, I don't think Nintendo's going to be able to kill melee and convert all of us to ultimate without also turning off lots of casuals. But without the full support of both casuals and the entire existing competitive community for smash (over half of which is for melee), ultimate is just going to be another profitable and fun game, like smash 4, but not lastingly legendary like melee happened to be.

I am definitely suffering from smush hype delirium, I won't even try to deny it. And I think your skepticism is well placed. I would be surprised (pleasantly) to see Nintendo offering anything close to Riot, Valve, Blizzard levels of support within this decade. Still it feels like they've gone from actively hostile toward the competitive scene in Brawl, to throwing us a few bones in Sm4sh (omega modes, new run of Gamecube controllers, albeit slightly funky ones) to finally at least considering the pro scene as first class citizens in Smush.

That being said I don't really say a way that it could kill Melee either... although I bet melee players are going to buy a lot of controllers. The only thing I could imagine killing Melee is maybe if Smush had a Melee compatibility mode that implemented its mechanics exactly faithful to the original, but I don't see them doing that, and even then people probably still wouldn't leave Melee.

These leading e-sport companies are all American, in contrast to Nintendo which has to work overseas to support smash competitively (the Japanese competitive smash community is tiny compared to the U.S., in part due to culture).

How successful any multiplayer game will be is a thorny question, so I think you are more likely to end up right than the gp. Established properties can suddenly go bust. Fast followers on hot trends can reap all the rewards. Multiplayer brawlers are essentially a one-series phenomenon (SSB) that has had spotty popularity. If I had to guess, I would bet that SSBU will be about as popular as Splatoon 2.

The problem with your logic is that Tekken, Street Fighter and now Dragonball Fighter Z, all made by Japanese developers, are the top fighting games on Twitch. Their popularity is much lower than PUBG/LOL/Fortnite/etc but I would submit that fighting games are simply punishing to get into - it's very difficult for a newbie to find a niche as a support character as is possible in many team games, for example. Furthermore, character balance/competitiveness issues are magnified by the 1 v 1 focus.

I just want to note that Capcom, another Japanese company, has managed to make Street Fighter an Esport starting with Ultra Street Fighter 4 in 2014 and continuing now with Street Fighter 5. They did this by having a qualifying circuit for their Capcom cup tournament at the end of the year which had a prize of $250k for 1st place. It's nowhere as big as the 3 you mentioned, but I think that's mostly due to size of the scene.

I'm nervous about what happens. Smash and even Mario Kart have always great for folks just looking for some crazy fun.

At the same time there has always been this tension between the fun aspects of those games and the competitive community who really wants something else from those games and the things they don't like (randomness, indirect help for lesser players) are also what keep the games fun for everyone. The competitive scene folks have some pretty strict ideas of what they want and it isn't what keeps those games fun for everyone.... bend to them too much and those games stop being fun for everyone else.

I don't think there's much need for you to be nervous. First I think Mario Kart is pretty safe, the competitive scene there is pretty negligible so I doubt Nintendo will prioritize them at all. For Smash, all the stuff they're adding is either togglable in settings or should work for both communities, at least all the things I know about are. Here's what they are afaik:

- All characters from all versions available. Important for pros because having a few players who main characters that aren't included in new versions left out can really hurt the pro scene. Can't see how this would be anything but more fun for casual players.

- All stages have Omega (single platform) and Battlefield (4 platforms) modes. Original versions of stages still exist though.

- Manufacturing new Gamecube controllers, so crucial for the competitive scene where pros have resorted to setting up their own workbenches and making franken-controllers from working components of broken controllers. Shouldn't affect casual play at all.

- An extra decimal of precision on %s allows more precise play, should be at worst a bit of extra visual noise if you don't play competitively.

- Removal of fatigue on Pokemon Trainer, effectively introduces 3 new potential main characters for pros. Takes away a subtle mechanic for new players to learn.

- Game speed, SmashU looks to be a bit faster than Smash 4 and Brawl but not as fast as Melee. This one I can definitely see the argument for being a little less new player friendly. But I think it increases the skill cap but shouldn't make the game less fun in casual play.

Probably the best example of what you're talking about is tripping, which was a mechanic in Brawl but was dropped in Smash 4 and won't be back in Ultimate, I just found that mechanic frustrating, but I'm more toward the competitive side of the spectrum. Overall though, I think Smash Ultimate is going to be the same crazy fun that you're used to from Smash games, it's just going to have a lot of settings that help out the competitive scene. At this point competitive Smash and casual Smash are really 2 very different games.

> All stages have Omega (single platform) and Battlefield (4 platforms) modes. Original versions of stages still exist though.

More importantly, there's a stage hazard toggle. (And also importantly, this time around the Omega stages are all functionally identical, as are the Battlefield stages.)

> ...bend to them too much and those games stop being fun for everyone else.

There is definitely room for multiple configurations though. Splatoon for example has Turf War which is exclusively non-competitive and Rainmaker etc. which are exclusively competitive (ranked). That allows them to fine tune the modes which are intended to be fun for the everyday player. The more competitive modes can be balanced separately for those with a competitive goal.

If Nintendo are serious about Smash's competitive side, they should probably consider an online competitive mode which removes some of that Smash randomness.

> With Ultimate, Nintendo seems to have finally started thinking of Smash as primarily a competitive game.

I don't think Nintendo was ever against its competitiveness. They probably understand that if they focus on keeping the game fun, the rest will follow, regardless of whether the competitive scene accepts it or not. For an example of getting this backwards, of trying to make a game competitive first and worrying about the fun afterwards, look at the painful example of StarCraft II. Blizzard succeeded in making that game competitive, ok. But they failed at making it fun, and as a result its energy as an eSport, i.e. its playerbase and therefore viewerbase of casual and casual-competitive players, fell out from under it.

I do agree the things Nintendo is offering the competitive scene with Ultimate is awesome. I'm buying a Switch before the holiday season starts because it's probably going to get hard to get.

Smash isn't a premier esport. It doesn't even crack top 20 in total earnings, getting passed up by many titles that are much, much younger.

https://www.esportsearnings.com/games

Self describing as someone who literally only buys smash for their console, I think you need to consider that you're heavily biased. Smash can be a wonderful addition for a wonderful community, but the smash community is a pretty small minority of Nintendo gamers.

Sometimes I wish the game that became the "everyone's in it!" game for Nintendo wasn't a fighting game. Limited appeal. Some sort of adventure/rpg game would have been much more Nintendo with a broader appeal. Now that would have potential to be the great Nintendo capstone epic.

You're totally right: after Smash Bros release owning a switch would finally make sense. Up until now I find all the titles pretty underwhelming. Especially the Zelda that was highly praised by the press but which in my opinion does not contains anything of what make the previous ones good (music, story, good gameplay, characters).

I'm also waiting for Metroid Prime 4 and Pikmin 4 as I loved the two games released on GameCube.

I'd strongly urge you to at least try Zelda. I am a fan of past Zelda titles.

This one was different, but wonderful. I went in knowing nothing about it, and was blown away. The first seven hours or so gave me a sense of helplessness, wonder and uncertainty that I rarely experience in a video game.

The longer you can go without reading a guide, the better. Eventually it can become a grind, but I got months of play value out of it, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Super Mario Odyssey is also excellent. It's incredibly fun, even if it's easier than other mario games. Incredible attention to detail.

I already tried it because I owned it. I also wrote a 1,600 blog post explaining my position in French, but I don't feel translating it here in English. But here are my main points: the weapon system and the inventory are (incredibly) frustrating. Getting a new weapon is not a rewarding as it will fade 3 strokes after. Sanctuaries could be labeled as game-designer training, but as a player they lake both fun (heck one time I even gave the console to my girlfriend for her to solve one because it put too much on my nerves) and distinctiveness. The whole world is desperately empty. There is no pressure to complete the game whatsoever (no hostage, no crashing moon). The saving system is crappy as it does not save the game state. What makes the salt of previous games was the story, the feeling of progression, the music, the characters, the distinctiveness of some regions (kokiri forest, zora domain, etc.) and all of that is pretty much non-existent in BotW. Some gameplay mecanism like rain that forbid climbing are hostile to the player by design and really annoying. Monsters: all the same with some color or stat variations.

Basically this "game" is a game engine on top of which a real game could be implemented, but as such I just see it as an empty open world. I'm sure that without Zelda on the title, it would have been judged more objectively, for was it is: an average game to say the least.

The weapon system was very interesting to me. New weapons were incredibly rewarding because they were so fragile. You develop interesting relationships with your inventory cycle. It really is a survival game dressed up as a cartoon, that little joyful Link, so full of hope, repeatedly beat down and made to suffer by an uncaring world.

It seems you have mostly played zelda games from the n64. I have not tried BotW yet, but from what I have seen, it seems to be close from the the first zelda. A big world with no story, no pressure to complete the game quickly, no explicit path to follow. Just a world to explore.

I have played the first zelda, and OoT, MM, and WW. In all of them, what I have really liked was the pleasure to wander into the world, (mounting epona on hyrule field, get lost in the see while discovering new island). In the contrary I have only played the first few hours of skyward sword, because every two minutes a NPC was telling me what I should do and what I should not, and where I should go . Awful! So I am very happy Nintendo choose to go for less story and more discoveries. Could you post a link to your review, I would be interested to read your position with more details.

Yes, I played mostly at Zelda games available on GameCube: Oot, MM (throught a promotional CD) and WW. The game disk also included Zelda one and two, so I tried the first game and I didn't liked it either. But that was for very different reasons, and comparing games with such generational gap makes little sense.

For the review, please send me an email (visible on my profile) so I can send you the link (as the blog use my real name).

> I'm sure that without Zelda on the title, it would have been judged more objectively, for was it is: an average game to say the least.

Without the Zelda title, it would have been treated the same as every good Zelda-like game: as evidence that Nintendo needs to revitalize the Zelda series. Instead it was a Zelda title, and so was the revitalizing that the series definitely needed. The fact that it was an outstanding game on top of that was just icing on the cake.

Ah, I had mistakenly assumed you hadn't. That's fair then. I can actually acknowledge most of your points as fair, but doesn't detract from my own enjoyment. People have different subjective standards for game enjoyment, and that's totally fine.

Personally, I hardly cared about beating the story. Instead, I focussed on specific goals: buying the house and equipping it. Building Tarrey town. Upgrading armor. Expanding weapon slots. Exploring.

As a byproduct of this, I found I had more or less outmatched all the enemies. But it came as a surprise. I was just having fun pursuing some personal goals.

I disagree with every single one of those points. BotW is amazing because of those points. BotW has such a huge sense of exploration and finding the unknown. The quest of better weapons, the open world, the way weather affects players and the world. Honestly I think BotW is one of, if not the best game ever made.

> uper Mario Odyssey is also excellent. It's incredibly fun, even if it's easier than other mario games. Incredible attention to detail.

Super Mario World is one of the easiest games I’ve ever played and also one of the best.

...God Hand is the hardest game I’ve ever played that is still fun. I figured out why: it requires a lot of manual dexterity but is extremely fair. Compare Kaizo Mario et al, which are basically puzzle games in disguise.

> With Ultimate, Nintendo seems to have finally started thinking of Smash as primarily a competitive game.

It definitely does seem that Nintendo are showing more and more interest in the competitive aspects of their games. Some other recent examples include the Arms (which could almost be considered exclusively competitive) and Splatoon tournaments which they often run at conventions they are attending etc.