On Smash Ultimate’s Redesign

Few games have been more highly anticipated on the Nintendo Switch than Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the fifth installment in the highly-popular fighting game franchise. In terms of numbers, this game has been nothing but a success: swooping in on the coattails of its predecessors, it rapidly became Nintendo’s fastest-selling game of all-time. No one is surprised; Ultimate’s gameplay is balanced, diverse, and satisfying. And that experience sells.

Perhaps it’s fortunate, then, that games don’t sell on menus and toolbars — they only have to get up to a level of “good enough”. Smash Ultimate crosses that bar, but not by much. Consider this: in order to begin a standard game, one should choose “Smash” from the main menu…

What is “Games & More” anyways? Isn’t regular Smash also a game?

…and then choose a mode of playing Smash (hint: the standard is also “Smash”)…

Also, why isn’t Squad Strike also “Special Smash”?

…and then select a ruleset…

Bear in mind it also takes a few seconds to load between screens.

…and then select a stage…

There’s also no way of sorting these stages alphabetically, by franchise, by release date, etc…

…and then choose their character…

No custom sorting here, either, but that could be for consistency across consoles for familiarity.

…and then the game begins.

It does sound like these are all necessary steps, but think about this: almost every single time, players only want to play regular Smash. They have to through this process every time, going through six screens before a game starts—in contrast to Steve Jobs’s three-click rule. At the very least, it seems like Nintendo realized this as well; continuing to select the default option in each menu would eventually bring the user to the right place. Players may have learned to keep mashing the A button, yet, is that really a good solution?

This convolution is just a single symptom of Ultimate’s flawed design philosophy.

All the menus are organized in a hierarchical fashion, but few shortcuts exist for common tasks. For instance, if between games, a user wants to change their control scheme, they have to go back three screens to the second “Smash” menu, go to Controls, select their name, and set their controls. If someone wanted to change a quick rule—such as turn items or the smash meter on—they would have to make a new ruleset with that toggle. If they wanted to mix different options together, they would have to make a new ruleset for each combination. It’s not hard to learn or remember, but it’s extremely poor efficiency.

It’s clear that Nintendo didn’t orient their interface around the user’s story. Yes, the menus are logically organized, and it’s true that a user generally never wonders where they might find an option. But Smash still lacks smaller, thoughtful gestures that could be implemented in parallel with this mindset. For instance, each fighter has eight cosmetic skins that players can choose from, and most people only play on one preferred skin for each character. But Smash doesn’t save this preference, despite already having the capability to save each user’s preferred control scheme.

So, how can this be fixed?

For the smaller features, much of it has to do with listening to user feedback. But stepping back on a larger scale, consider the following reorganization of Smash’s menu:

This design is in line with the old menu UI, just relabeled.

All the various spinoffs on standard Smash are now allocated to Party Mode, and the mini-games, challenges, and story mode now fall under Single Player. The other options remain the same. This leaves us with Smash, with the same label as before—but this time, it brings you straight to the stage selection screen.

What happened to rulesets? All those options are now implemented onto the character selection screen, which is where players spend the most amount of time between games.

We now take advantage of the empty space in the top bar, where players can now quickly access common settings. They can select the rulebook to bring up all the options, and from there, they can choose to load a saved ruleset, and make changes from there that aren’t necessarily saved. Furthermore, I’ve also added a shortcut to the controls screen as well—this option is accessible in all modes of Smash here, and also in the settings menu.

These are just the beginnings of a proposed redesign, and there are many other smaller elements that need to be addressed as well. Nonetheless, a start is still a start—and I’d love to one day be able to navigate a menu without relying on muscle memory.