World of Light: Smash Ultimate’s Story Mode
THIS REVIEW INCLUDES SPOILERS FOR WORLD OF LIGHT.
Having finished Super Smash Bros Ultimate’s equivalent of an Adventure mode, World of Light, I felt compelled to write something about it. While it wasn’t pushed forward much in the run up to the game’s release, it was given a spotlight in the final Smash Direct before Ultimate hit shelves just last month and is woven into other modes in the game as well; the Spirits option includes a ‘spirit board’, a means of challenging specific spirits as and when they appear there, completing other modes can give Spirits as a reward and they can even be used in regular smash matches, if a player opts in on using them.
World of Light has also drawn inevitable comparisons to the Subspace Emissary, the adventure mode from Super Smash Bros Brawl. As such it’s important to immediately discuss the differences between the pair and what they aim to achieve. Subspace Emissary was a story mode designed to give every member of the cast a role, focusing on several conflicts leading up to a battle with the ‘big bad’, a new villain made for the role called Tabuu. It’s focus was on platform/beat-em-up style stages, with several boss fights and battles against other fighters to the beats of the story. The map was large and not actually connected; a new, unlocked stage would flash different colours to let players know where to go next, and previous stages could be revisited (almost) freely throughout the mode. It did have some well known and often discussed flaws, but it’s beloved for exploring the characters connections with each other and giving players unique and fun interactions between beloved gaming icons, such as Samus and Pikachu teaming up together, Snake being discovered by Lucario in his cardboard box and Link and Mario attempting to murder each other due to a misunderstanding.
World of Light on the other hand, has a minimalist story and instead focuses on unique fights, each themed to represent the spirit caged within the other fighter’s body. Spirits themselves are used as ‘power-ups’, with unique stats, types, and abilities that can assist a player in battle once equipped. There’s also a skill tree that features abilities unlocked by spending skill spheres, designed to empower the player’s fighter and make the harder fighters more manageable. The map is huge and sprawling, with forks and different paths a player can choose to explore. The player has to travel to each new battle and clear the path ahead through the spirits they defeat and collect. There is a boss to battle who, much like Tabuu, was created as a Smash original character, and other bosses appear from games featured in the fighter roster. Fighters are often hidden in areas that reflect on who they are or to their roles in their own game series and several ‘dungeon’ areas are based on specific games, either in layout or with fitting puzzles; for example, there is a ‘gourmet run’ style area where a player must collect the most food possible. How well the player does affects what spirit appears at the end.
So, how good is World of Light? Personally, I found it to be a mixed bag.
Let’s start with the good parts. The references littered throughout World of Light are absolutely brilliantly well done, both in Spirit battles meant to relate to a character or to a key scene from their appearance and in the dungeon areas that are designed to ape specific games, such as an area designed as a love letter to the Legend of Zelda series which requires traversing three areas based on Wisdom, Courage and Power and assembling a Triforce. It’s incredible the amount of love and imagination that’s gone into the spirit battles so they can be as true to the character they’re intended to evoke, while working within the limits of the fighter roster. It might sound silly given there’s 69 fighters available, but with over 1000 spirits and many different characters ranging from the iconic to the obscure to cover there’s actually a lot to consider when adapting these fights to reflect them.
The use of primary spirits, which give your fighters a certain amount of power and so many slots (up to 3) for additional support spirits, was very straight-forward and helps reinforce old fighting game basics. Attack spirits have an advantage on grab type spirits, while grab spirits trump block type spirits,and block spirits have an advantage on attack spirits. This helps teach new players a core principle of the game through how they build their spirit teams. The number of additional abilities a support spirit might add is extraordinary and means that thought goes into building your team. Some can negate the difficult terrain a spirit might evoke as part of their battle, others increase the power of certain attacks, some offer increased stats in certain conditions and there’s many other niche abilities too. Some primary spirits offer certain boosts too, meaning that choosing the right spirits for the job is a surprisingly in depth process.
Another feature is the use of facilities to help enhance spirits or gain rewards to make the story mode smoother. By beating a ‘master’ spirit, you gain access to the facility they manage which include expeditions that send a team of four spirits off to ‘explore’ an area, returning with various items or currency after several hours. You can leave primary spirits to train so they gain levels in real time, even as the game is switched off, allowing players to train up spirits they intend to use or enhance even if they don’t suit the battles they’ve been fighting. Dojos offer the ability to give a spirit an additional type, enabling them to offer different boons and drawbacks when equipped. For example, the ‘Demon style’ gives a massive increase to offense while sharply decreasing a fighter’s defense while the ‘Lightweight style’ increases movement speed and jump ability, while decreasing offense, defense and a fighter’s weight, which impacts how easy they are to launch off the screen. additionally, spirits can be dismissed in exchange for currency and ‘cores’, which can be used to summon other spirits. It gives more use to spirits and means they can be earning rewards even if the player is playing in a different mode or not playing the game at all.
An interesting touch in the final area is the balance between the two bosses, Galeem and Dharkron. Defeating the spirits under Galeem’s control weakens it’s power, enabling Dharkron to spread it’s influence further and opening the possibility of facing Galeem in a solo battle, and vice versa. Defeating either leads to a grim game over, as the boss that was unchallenged proceeds to brutally tear apart it’s opposition and consume the world in light or darkness. It’s a nice touch that adds to what story there is and reinforces that only by defeating both can a player successfully conclude the story. It’s worth commenting that the map is extremely pretty to look at once it’s fully uncovered, and fighters increase their walk speed if you travel for more than a few seconds so it’s not too frustrating to navigate, especially as shortcuts and alternate routes are unlocked by defeating spirits blocking the way ahead, using a spirit’s skills to open a path or exploring.
The bosses aren’t just the two new entities created for the mode. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself facing classic bosses from several games represented in Smash Ultimate, and from the ones I knew they were very faithfully recreated. While much is unchanged and simply adapted to the format and gorgeous graphics of the game, some do have new tricks to shake up their attack patterns and I found some gave me a lot of grief, while others I simply enjoyed refacing from nostalgia. You face off against Master Hand and Crazy Hand during the course of the adventure, albeit separately, and there’s an absolutely fantastic battle near the end of the adventure where, for the first time in Smash bros history, players get to take control of the Master Hand itself in a fight against a horde of fighter-turned-minions. It’s a glorious moment and really makes one feel the power of the very first Smash Bros. original character and boss.
All of these positives are matched with a negative however. For how detailed and lovingly crafted the references are, the game doesn’t go out of it’s way to explain who the characters it’s referencing are. In previous Smash Bros games, trophies were the tokens collected of characters instead of spirits. While they didn’t feature in any game mode aside from the occasional bonus game that offered them as a prize, each trophy was a 3D model with a blurb stating what game series it was from, when it debuted and offering some information on who/what it was depicting and how it fitted in it’s game’s canon. The spirits do not have this, being only a static image of official artwork; this was explicitly said to be due to the effort and time involved in creating the 3D trophy models, but doesn’t explain the lack of flavour text to go with them. This extends to the spirit battles in World of Light; without context or previous knowledge of a series or a character the fight loses it’s meaning, and World of Light isn’t able to provide any information beyond the series the character came from and their name, leaving any conditions such as ‘the enemy begins with an item’, ‘the floor is lava’ or even ‘timed stamina battle’ as modifiers to make the fight slightly different to the others.
Unfortunately the introductory cutscene, featuring many of the characters and showing them collectively fleeing or fighting Galeem together, is by far the best cutscene in WoL. The other cutscenes usually focus on the bosses in a largely empty setting, featuring only glimpses of the fighters if they’re seen at all. While there’s voice acting in the first scene, there’s none in the others and the events that unfold are explained with subtitles for extra clarity. Even knowing that the story would be minimal and wasn’t the focus of the mode, it was disappointing to see so little in the cutscenes, especially since there are only seven in total and they’re only a few minutes long each. Upon seeing the ending, with the spirits flying away together in a rainbow stream of light to the swelling theme, I didn’t feel my heart swelling with emotion or an immense sense of satisfaction in beating the mode. It was just done.
The boss battles commit a terrible sin in being repeated with nearly no differences. The Master Hand and Crazy Hand are faced three times each. The major bosses have to be battled at least once each separately and then together for the final boss. The final boss itself is very disappointing and drawn out through repetitive encounters. The first stage of the boss involves a vertical climbing stage, dodging attacks from the two bosses with occasional stops to engage in battles with hordes of fighters, which is new, however the second phase involves refacing every boss previously seen in World of Light, with a fully healing item spawning after two bosses each and some on field effects occurring as the player attacks ‘orbs’ to begin each battle. The third stage of the fight is just another battle with Galeem and Dhakron, albeit at the same time. When one is stunned the other will take advantage and attack the other, otherwise it’s simply the same boss fights overlayed onto each other.
New Game Plus, unlocked upon beating the core game, only offers the option to go through the mode from the beginning with all the previously unlocked characters and skills available from the start. Otherwise there’s no difference in difficulty or in the spirits the player can find. Aside from gaining an achievement on the challenge board, I didn’t see any worth in replaying the game. A reason I’ve seen given for repeating it is to recollect spirits so they can be used to summon other spirits, but it’s not a good enough reason in my mind. The Spirit Board offers any encounter you might need for summons, and few of the spirits collected in the main mode are used twice when summoning others.
For all that I’ve praised the spirit system and the various abilities given, it’s easy to simply equip an immensely powerful spirit with a type advantage and crush lower level spirits. Certain tactics make the battles simple and it can be easy to rely on the same team for the majority of the fights. The only penalty is to be given fewer rewards upon completion, which include leveling up items for the spirits and currency for purchasing others, which can be gained through the exploration facilities. Of the facilities, I’ll admit that I never saw the appeal of the Dojos and didn’t find the prospect of using them that alluring. While I put some spirits in one or two of them and did try using them, I found that more often than not I would forget I had trained a style and ended up confused when my fighter wasn’t acting in the standard way I was used to. This ties to the thing I actually disliked the most in World of Light, the skill tree.
It offers a lot of useful skills that really help make the battles easier going forward, such as making the fighter’s throws and attacks stronger, reducing how far they’ll be launched by enemy attacks and reducing the damage taken from poison or lava floors. Some of the powers granted are incredible and are extremely helpful when facing far tougher spirits, such as the ability to keep dodging without becoming more vulnerable for repeated use and the ability to use a final smash twice. However, it does something I consider absolutely contrary to the game’s design as a co-operative fighting game; it encourages bad habits. For example, removing the consequences of repeated dodging means a player will get used to doing so and will suffer when they fight in other modes and lose that ability, as the skill tree only works within World of Light. While these abilities can be toggled on and off, there’s no incentive to ever turn them off once they’ve been learned.
So what do I ultimately make of World of Light? It was entertaining! I did enjoy my time playing it, as I did like clearing the map and when I recognised a spirit or when a map’s layout was based on a game I knew, I always loved how they were implemented and represented in Ultimate. And even if I didn’t understand the reference or now the character I was battling, putting thought into my strategy meant that I was still thinking. While I could have simply used my strongest spirits, I did try to match the spirit’s level to maintain a challenge. However, I’m in absolutely no rush to play the new game+, and it hasn’t left a great impact on me either. It’s major flaws, for me, are simply that the skill tree alters the core mechanics in a way that is detrimental to a player’s skill and growth and that many of it’s well crafted references are lost unless a player has been an avid follower of all manner of a wide variety of video games over the years. But there’s no denying that World of Light does what it needs to, and does it well enough.
