World of Overly-Complicated, Tedious and Unfulfilling Light

You could say that I didn't learn my lesson.

On Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, back in 2014, I glogged:

I'm disappointed in Smash for Wii U, but not for good reasons. It isn't my kind of game -- but I don't think it was ever supposed to be.

[...]

The modes that I wanted are gone, and a lot of their replacements are ... inscrutable.

Above all, it was the lack of a single-player campaign (like Brawl's "Subspace Emissary" mode) that made the last Smash Bros. feel minimally applicable to my own tastes.

Enter Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with its "World of Light" mode. Twenty to thirty hours of content!? What could go wrong? Well ... I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't what World of Light turned out to be.

Which is fighting. A lot, a lot, of fighting. Twenty to thirty hours' worth. ... and that makes sense for a fighting game, but World of Light both lacks a sense of variety (as with Subspace Emissary's occasional platform-ey sections), and hammers on its singular note for far too long, severely wearing out its welcome.

World of Light isn't completely without charm, in some highly-themed sections like the Jungle Japes sub-map with a bunch of Kong-themed fights, or the sub-map that has you flying across a globe and HP-battling Street Fighter characters. The game is at its best when these sections keep the nostalgia flowing continuously.

But the overwhelming majority of fights feel phoned-in, by comparison. Like someone made a list of all the video game characters they could think of, and then mapped all the "Man Wearing a Coat" characters to Dr. Mario, all the "Athletic Woman" characters to Zero-Suit Samus, and just threw in a group of Yoshis when they ran out of ideas.

The difficulty pacing of the mode is also kind of a mess. Each fight has a numeric challenge score associated with it, and up to the very end, I was still encountering 1,000-level fights right before and right after 12,000-level fights. This slapdash, random-feeling arrangement of difficulties wasn't merely disorienting, it actively harmed my ability to learn how to play better!

And while I appreciated the first several fights that felt legitimately challenging, some of them were just absurd. At a certain point, taking on multiple simultaneous full-strength opponents crosses the line from "unfair" to "ridiculous." I'm not ashamed to say that I turned the difficulty setting down about halfway through the campaign.

Which sorta leads into a key feature of World of Light: the Spirits. (Hell, the mode is listed under "Spirits" in the main menu.) These collectible little doodads, all accompanied by the name and image of some random game character, increase your fighter's stats and give them special abilities to better-weather challenging fights. But that's not all!

There are hundreds of them. And many of them level-up.

Choosing the best spirits, and playing the minigames (and visiting the ... item shops) to increase their power, is a whole other game on its own. But not a good game. It's of the caliber you'd expect from a "clicker" or a "time management" mobile game: repetitive, shallow, and totally brain-dead. There's nothing fun about it.

Between those mind-numbing spirits and the seemingly never-ending amount of fights, World of Light gets real, real tedious. I could only just suffer through it to unlock all of Smash Ultimate's playable characters.

That roster of characters, and the stages they can fight on, are by a fair margin the most impressive that this franchise has ever seen -- not to mention the unbelievably huge soundtrack. It's intimidating how much fighting-game content is in Ultimate, and if I had an active group of friends to regularly battle, I would be beyond thrilled at the amount of stuff that this game could give us to play with.

As someone who likes unlocking things, and who wanted to see some surprising single-player gameplay, it's a "meh" at best. Much as I appreciate the nostalgia, it's no match for World of Light's tedium.

Better than: Super Smash Bros for Wii U
Not as good as: for me, personally, Super Smash Bros. Brawl or Super Smash Bros. Melee
Oh, and the menus: still suck. Maybe less so than the last iteration, but man, it's still impossible to find anything unless you already know where it is.

Progress: Unlocked all fighters, reached but didn't complete the final World of Light stage.