Newest Su­per Smash Bros. Ul­ti­mate Char­ac­ter Sparks Big Re­ac­tions

MISHAWAKA – The newest ad­di­tion to Su­per Smash Broth­ers Ul­ti­mate has been an­nounced, and the in­ter­net can­not seem to get him off their minds.  

It is dif­fi­cult to de­scribe my feel­ings about the sev­enth DLC char­ac­ter. On the one hand, he is a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the best-sell­ing game of all time, so it makes sense to put him in a fight­ing game that cel­e­brates gam­ing’s all-stars. On the other hand, it’s the player char­ac­ter from Minecraft. Yeah, that guy, and yeah, that game. How on earth, you might be ask­ing, did the lu­natics at Nin­tendo man­age to trans­pose a self-in­sert, mute, prac­ti­cally in­vis­i­ble char­ac­ter from a game about break­ing, craft­ing, and plac­ing blocks into a plat­form­ing-fight­ing game? I could not be­gin to tell you. In­stead, I’ll tell you how I feel about it.  

There I was, sit­ting at my com­puter on the day Minecraft Steve – that is his name, by the way – was an­nounced for Smash. The trailer started out pretty nor­mal: the char­ac­ters were in the mid­dle of an in­tense fight, when Sonic lands a mas­sive hay­maker on Mario, send­ing him fly­ing. Sud­denly, the trailer changes from game footage into prop­erly an­i­mated, three-di­men­sional cin­e­matic as Mario crashes through a wall into a dark cav­ern. As Mario glances around at his new, pitch-black en­clo­sure, sev­eral pairs of eyes shine through the dark­ness. At this point in the trailer, my heart dropped, be­cause, ac­com­pa­ny­ing these vi­su­als were sounds that any eight-year-old with a YouTube ac­count would rec­og­nize: the clank­ing of skele­ton bones, the groan­ing of zom­bies, and the spit­ting of spi­ders from the block­i­est sand­box game in his­tory.  

Now, the rea­son my heart dropped was be­cause of three dis­tinct thoughts swirling in my head: “no way,” “this does not look like the char­ac­ter I wanted,” and “ARE YOU KID­DING ME? MINECRAFT?” Then, that goofy-look­ing, two-me­ter-tall, sen­tient geom­e­try as­sign­ment burst through the wall and shat­tered my hopes of get­ting an­other Xenoblade rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Smash Bros. any­time soon. I watched the rest of the trailer in a daze as all my friends lost their minds around me. I feel like it is the clos­est I could be to shell-shock. Never mind the fact that it was not the char­ac­ter I wanted, HOW IN THE WORLD could they have made MINECRAFT work in Smash?  

To be fair, the game’s di­rec­tor, Masahiro Saku­rai, clearly ex­plained how dif­fi­cult in­clud­ing Minecraft Steve was: it in­volved a re­work­ing of the geom­e­try of all 103 stages in the en­tire game, re­pro­gram­ming how each of those stages would re­act to Minecraft Steve, and vice versa. All of that on top of mak­ing an en­tirely new char­ac­ter bog­gles the mind a bit. To be fair, Minecraft is a rel­a­tively sim­plis­tic game, styl­is­ti­cally speak­ing, and Minecraft Steve is an even sim­pler char­ac­ter, but all the work that en­tails is com­pletely stag­ger­ing.  

Writ­ing this, two days af­ter the an­nounce­ment, I have only just de­cided how I feel about the char­ac­ter be­ing in this game. Up un­til this point, I have been telling my friends how shocked I was, or how I felt like it could not be, nor should it be real. How­ever, my mind has been made. While watch­ing the an­nounce­ment, Di­rec­tor Saku­rai seemed in­cred­i­bly proud of his team and all the work they ac­com­plished bring­ing this char­ac­ter into the game. Watch­ing the move-set, an­i­ma­tion, and all the ac­com­pa­ny­ing quirks from Minecraft, I could clearly see how ded­i­cated the de­vel­op­ers were to faith­fully im­ple­ment­ing the char­ac­ter. There­fore, I can share in their hap­pi­ness that they did a job well done, and I will be wel­com­ing this com­pletely bizarre char­ac­ter to the game with arms open wide.