What Sets Super Smash Brothers Above Multiversus
A critique of a game that doesn't exist yet, or a critique of a larger trend?
I fell in love with the Super Smash Brothers franchise way back when its first iteration was released on the Nintendo 64 in the late 90s. All it took was one commercial and I was hooked.
The hook, for me, was just the concept of Nintendo throwing all its characters together and letting them beat the stuffing out of each other. It was so wild and so fantastical. The fact that the game ended up being better executed than anybody (including Nintendo) expected, becoming one of the most enjoyable fighting games around and a franchise still going strong nearly twenty years later, was really just the icing on the cake.
What Super Smash Brothers perfectly emulates is the wild imagination of childhood play, of staging a war on your living room floor between your G.I. Joes, your Batmen, and your Jurassic Park t-rex action figure with an actual chunk of flesh ripped out of its side.
That element was entirely intentional. The opening credits of the original Super Smash Brothers shows toys of Nintendo characters lying in a young child’s room. When they’re grabbed by hands, suddenly they spring to life and begin fighting each other! The implication, of course, is that all the game’s fights are simply kids bashing their favorite Nintendo toys together, brought to vivid life by the power of the Nintendo 64. It’s really hard to overstate that appeal. By the era of the N64 Mario Kart had normalized the idea of the various Mario characters hanging out together in their downtime, but throwing them into the same game as Pikachu, Fox McCloud, or Samus Aran still felt revolutionary and wondrous. And those are just the well known characters — I know I’m not the only kid who was introduced to F-Zero or Earthbound by the inclusion of Captain Falcon or Ness in Smash’s roster, and this turned the Smash Brothers franchise into an invitation to dive deep into Nintendo’s lore and history in ways perhaps many of us hadn’t before.
This ethos has followed Smash through five generations of consoles. Super Smash Brothers Ultimate — the series’ entry for the Nintendo Switch — just last week released its 82nd and final character, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, which is, of course, the franchise that mashes up Final Fantasy RPG characters with just about every Disney property in existence. The back-room wheeling and dealing it must have taken to get Sora into Smash Brothers boggles my mind, and I would love to see a documentary about it some day.
Sora has had Smash back in the spotlight recently, but there’s something else that’s had me thinking about Smash as well: a supposed upcoming video game and Smash Brothers clone called Multiversus.
Now, Smash Brothers has a long history of games that have attempted to ape either its play style, it’s massive roster of characters from various franchises, or both. Hell, just within the past few weeks Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl released (to surprisingly good reviews!), a game that is literally just Super Smash Brothers with Nickelodeon characters. Most of these games have failed to recapture the spark that has made Smash such a success. It’s honestly hard to explain why; most of these games just feel off somehow.
So if this is a common phenomenon, what makes Multiversus worth talking about?
Well, first I need to clarify that Multiversus has yet to actually be officially announced. Everything we know about the game started as rumors early this week, though leaks over the last day or two seem to have confirmed many of these rumors. But, if anything I say from hereon out ends up not being true, well, you’ve been warned.
Okay, with that out of the way, Multiversus is indeed another Smash Brothers clone, this time throwing together the various characters owned by Warner Brothers.
“Warner Brothers?” You may ask. “So, like, the Looney Toons?”
“You fool!” I reply. “You truly underestimate the Warner Brothers library!”
This is the supposed leaked image of Multiversus’ starting roster. Yeah, you have a couple classic WB cartoons. Then there’s Shaggy from Scooby Doo reminding you that WB owns Hannah Barbera. The likes of Finn & Jake, Steven Universe1, and Rick Sanchez to remind you that WB owns Cartoon Network and Adult Swim. Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Harley Quinn to remind you that WB owns DC Comics. Oh, and also Gandalf from Lord of the Rings for a bit of spice.
I’ll admit, there’s a lot I like about this image. These are characters I love, and they seem like they could be fun together. I like the art style, and it helps these disparate characters feel cohesive. The real weirdness of Multiversus comes, though, as we start to investigate some of the other rumors that have surfaced this week.
At this point, all I can do is list them:
Possible characters/franchises:
Tony Soprano (The Sopranos)
Gizmo (Gremlins)
Johnny Bravo
Pennywise (It)
Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street)
The Powerpuff Girls
Harry Potter
Mad Max
Mortal Kombat
The Flinstones
Godzilla
LEGO
Game of Thrones
The Matrix
Possible levels:
The cul-de-sac from Ed, Edd, and Eddy
The Polar Express
Six Flags Theme Park
Other rumors include:
Anderson Cooper of CNN as an assist character
Either Roger Rabbit or Roger from American Dad as an assist character
The Turner Classic Movies Logo and the Plumbus (from Rick and Morty) as throwable weapons
Again, I’m not expecting all of these to actually happen, but that is an absolutely wild, positively exhausting list of franchises nonetheless! And I haven’t even gotten to some of the weirdest rumors yet! One says that “Ultra Instinct Shaggy” — a now-outdated meme about Shaggy from Scooby Doo secretly being an godlike being of unfathomable destructive power — will be a special move for Shaggy in-game, while another insists that yet another meme, “Big Chungus,” will be an alternate costume for Bugs Bunny.
My friend who’s been steadily sending me these rumors all week is practically frothing at the mouth, but I’ve been more hesitant, genuinely just exhausted and sometimes even upset by them, and at first I wasn’t sure why. I thought perhaps I was just getting old, but I was losing my mind about Sora’s wild bullshit over in Super Smash Brothers just a week ago, so it’s not that. I still have my capacity for joy; Multiversus just wasn’t sparking it.
My objection — the thing that’d been bothering me — suddenly clicked into place when I remembered this movie:
as well as this one:
Over the last few years, Ready Player One and Space Jam: A New Legacy have eschewed ideas like story, quality, and integrity in order to serve as vehicles to put as much Warner Brothers IP on screen at once as legally possible. The WB doesn’t know what to do with most of these characters or franchises, but they sure as hell want to make sure you remember that they own them!
Now, I’m not going to claim that Nintendo are paragons of virtue — their attitude towards people playing ROMs has been pretty abhorrent — but the characters they put in Smash Brothers are ones they’ve built from the ground up, or ones they’ve reached out to other studios and come to an agreement about using. There’s a pedigree here, and a relationship built between Nintendo and their players.
On the other hand, Multiversus is just the newest entry in a rapidly growing list of reminders that the entertainment industry is being swallowed up by Monopolies. Do I like quite a few of the characters in Multiversus? Sure! Do I feel good that one company owns all of them? Absolutely not! It’s depressing as hell!
I hope Multiversus has programmers with a real passion working on it. Hell, I hope the game is good, just because I almost never actively want anything to be bad. But it really just feels like yet another instance of the WB whipping their dick out to remind us of all the money they’ve put out to obtain these IPs, a desperate attempt to cash in on the massive library they’ve absorbed and assimilated over the years without really understanding or caring about them.
Why is Super Smash Brothers such a special game in a way its clones aren’t? Quality, of course, but the most important thing may just be that it came first. Super Smash Brothers released in an era when its concept was still novel. Multiversus, meanwhile, is releasing in an era where everything is interconnected, and more and more of us are clamoring for a story that just stands alone already.
That said, if Tony Soprano really does make it into Multiversus and his finishing move is he and his ducks curb stomping his opponent into the concrete, I’ll take every word of this back.
IT’S FALL…
Which means it’s time to rewatch that seminal classic, Over The Garden Wall!
The ten episode animated series, which is streaming on Hulu, is atmospheric and spooky, often downright terrifying, but also comforting and heartwarming. It’s a journey everyone should take at least once, and which so many of us return to year after year, autumn after autumn.
Last year I wrote this piece about Over The Garden Wall, and specifically about its exquisitely crafted structure and storytelling. It’s the perfect time to revisit, or check it out for the first time!
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin about his relationship with the stories he loves. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!
Throwing Steven Universe, who is more or less a pacifist (or at least strives to be), into a fighting game feels weird, right?