Announced by way of a 20-minute Sakurai stream
As promised, Nintendo dropped a newSuper Smash Bros. Ultimateupdate on us today.
Unexpectedly it’s a massive 20-minute hangout session/Direct hybrid from Sakurai himself, who announced thattheDragon QuestHero DLC characterwill join the battle today. Sakurai begins with a small little oral history onDragon Questbefore diving in, also noting that this fireside concept differs from the typical full Nintendo Direct model because he wanted to take care of business this time (he’s unsure if he’ll do this every time, but if feedback is positive the chances are good).
In terms of Hero news, all four variations are the heroes fromDragon Quest XI/S(voiced by Mitsuki Saiga),Dragon Quest III(Nobuyuki Hiyama),Dragon Quest IV(Takeshi Kusao), andDragon Quest VIII(Yuki Kaji). Sakurai has provided code names for all of them: Eleven, Arusu, Solo, and Eight respectively.
Hero’s big gimmick is the down-special “command” move, which brings up “random commands” to use, and man there are atonof them (one of the most interesting was “Hocus Pocus,” which spurs random effects, some of which can be debilitating).His stage is “Yggdrasil’s Altar,”and there will be sevenorchestraltracks from classicDragon Questgames accompanying this challenger pack.
As a reminder each DLC character (Joker was the first) can be purchased individually for $5.99 oras part of a “fighters/season” passfor $24.99. Today Nintendo re-confirmed that Banjo & Kazooie are still slated for the fall, and there are two unannounced DLC characters on the way that will finish up the fighters pass. Of course, with its massive “close to 15 million units sold” success, there’s nothing saying Nintendo couldn’t do a second fighters pass.
If you’re not interested in the new DLC,Smashis getting a free update that adds an online tourney mode, new Mii costumes (here’s a picture of all of them, dubbed “Round 2,” at 75 cents apiece), a “very easy” difficulty for adventure mode, a better video editor, and a “predict the winner” conceit (that lets you earn points for in-game items) for spectator mode. Finally, Sakurai re-iterates thata new trio ofSmashamiiboare out now (Isabelle, Pokemon Trainer, Pichu)
