Fans Create Website With Descriptions For All Smash Bros. Ultimate Spirits

This really should have been a thing in the game itself. I'm happy some fans have taken the time to put this together instead though! Definitely going to take a good look through this thing.

Holy Crap, this is brilliant, wonder how long it will take until Nintendo shuts it down

The descriptions about each characters and the details about what series and titles they were from in Smash taught me half my Nintendo knowledge and lead me to seek out so many games I'd previously not known about. It's really the only issue I have with the new Smash, it added a lot for me.

I've always loved reading the little excerpts in Smash games. It was always helpful to learn a little something about characters I was oblivious to, but the real treat was always the dumb jokes and slick puns that were thrown in here and there. I live for those.

So, of course I was upset at the lack of info in Ultimate. I'm 100% on board with using original artwork instead of the 3D renderings. But text blocks were too much work for the highest selling Switch game, apparently.

These fan transcriptions are great, and keep that same "Nintendo-y" feel to them. Glad that the community could fill in a few blanks. Who knows, maybe they'll add spirit descriptions alongside the custom stage builder and home run contest in a future update.

Still don't understand why Builder Mario isn't already an amiibo. If it's coming with SMM2 they should have announced it in yesterday's Nintendo Direct. 😉

@RupeeClock Yeah, that was the deal breaker, in my opinion, considering just HOW MANY languages Smash Ultimate supports. And there's already a few quirks regarding the spirits.

Looking at you, Komurasaki--err, I mean, "Girl from Hajimari no Mori".

Thanks, I always wanted to know who Mario is!

It’s nice to see fans do what Nintendon’t. I’m still upset about the trophies’ removal.....

@The_Keywork Bro you don’t even know how much trophies mean to a lot of people. They had funny, witty descriptions and gave you information about whichever game it came from. Not only was Smash Bros the game the way I got into so many other game franchises, it was also the trophies.

This made a lot of sense to be in the base game, but then again, it has already taken almost 5 months since the game came out. That would STILL take a long time, even with a bigger team writing them.

Reminds me of Smash 64's character profiles.

@The_Keywork surely it doesn’t matter if a “casual” is any good at the game, if collecting spirits in the game is what they enjoy then they are enjoying the game, you don’t have to be good at a game to enjoy it.

@The_Keywork

Either you're a troll or an elitist fan. Either way, people like you are the reason the Smash community have a bad rap.
So what if people like reading descriptions of their favorite and/or niche characters? What does it have to do with you? Why does it matter so much that people have different opinions on not having it?

@The_Keywork

"Trophies are just distractions casuals use to justify their purchase of the game because they know they aren't skilled enough to actually be good at the game."

Yikes. What an odd manner of thinking. Maybe some people don't want to be super competitive in a game like Smash, and frankly who cares?? I don't understand the logic of saying if you collected Smash trophies you were most likely bad at the game. And again, even if that was true, who cares?? Frankly, I learned a lot about obscure video game characters because of collecting the trophies in the earlier games. Smash is both a great competitive game and a digital museum of video game history.

Did a casual "friend" break your N64 or something?

@WesEds

I never said they wouldn't enjoy the game.

@Saiyaken_PHOENIX

Did I say that it matters? Only those who recognize themselves as casuals will get upset over what I said.

@MoonKnight7

If it doesn't matter, why respond to me? Or do you usually see comments on here that don't concern you in any way and still reply them?

@The_Keywork
And what's your beef with the whole "casual" audience?
I've been a Smash veteran since the N64 days, I welcome anyone that would like to try the game, no matter what skill level, because that's the beauty of Smash. Sakurai meant for this game to be played by absolutely EVERYONE, since the beginning of the Smash series.

@The_Keywork

Why? Cause it was baseless, rude, and inconsiderate to players who don't take it as seriously as you do. Maybe tone it back a little, champ.

Smash Ultimate is great without descriptions for every spirit. It would have been even better with descriptions though. I have a long history with Nintendo games but I have no idea who some of the spirits are. Sure Google helps with that, and I may have to check out this fan site at some point, but for some reason it would be way more satisfying to get descriptions in game after getting the spirit. Maybe they are planning to in an update.

I have mixed feelings. I for one loved the Melee descriptions back in 2001, but again, I was barely a teenager back then, with no internet access, and my understanding of english was basic at best...but going back to them nowadays, geez, have you read Marth's description lately? seems to be done with Google translate in a bad day.

Then in Brawl I read most of them, but many of the descriptions seemed just...boring and barebones. I am a nut for silly trivia information, and a quick trip to mario wiki, Zelda wiki or just plain old wikipedia gave far more interesting and correct data than reading anything Brawl wrote about those trophies, not to mention the selection IMO was fairly mediocre (yay, more Primid and Rob variation trophies) which I suppose was one of the reasons why the writers just wrote what seemed like filler text.

And with 3DS...well, a couple trophies into it I realized the focus was on the puns and sillines instead of actual knowledge, so I not even bothered with reading most of them.

All in all, I LOVE the knowledge the trophies brought back in 2001, but I was not particularly loving the way the series was evolving the trophy descriptions after that. So I was not particularly dissapointed when the spirits came without descriptions. Fortunately this fan attempt seems fine and concrete it seems.

The lack of info about the spirits is easily my biggest gripe about the game. I guess this’ll do, but they really should have had them in the game. I miss the trophies. I used to look through them and read about them for hours. Loved it.

I have completed every Smash I played from N64 to Melee to Brawl to 3DS and lastly Ultimate. The amount of hours I dedicated to these games is pretty much impossible to tell at this point...
However I love trophies, stickers and spirits; so I guess im a silly casual

@MoonKnight7

In your first response to me you said "who cares" twice. If no one cares, why make a big deal about it?

@Saiyaken_PHOENIX

I never said the casuals can't play the game. No need getting emotional over a stranger's comment on the internet.

I also was sad that these were not included with this version - I hope they bring back or add the descriptions - I enjoyed reading them after unlocking the trophies in all the previous games .

@Sebas

Probably so.

Pretty cool. Understand beggars can't be choosers but... would love to have this in a table format so I could get the full list of video games being represented for example.

@justin233

"Git gud" at what exactly?

Ultimate went backwards from the previous game when Nintendo replaced the 3D trophies with 2D spirits. Nintendo always prefers 3D, yet this was one of the few cases when 3D would have been better than 2D, and yet Nintendo gives us 2D. What gives?

Hey, glad everyone enjoyed it! I had a lot of fun working on it with everyone else. I wrote about 70ish spirits, and had a lot of fun! If you find a typo, website bug, or other oddity visit our Reddit post!
https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/bc22zy/here_it_is_every_super_smash_bros_ultimate_spirit/

@Cadm48 Congrats, man. Really well done

Now how long before Nintendo strikes it down?

@The_Keywork

Just so we're clear.

The "who cares?" were rhetorical questions for yourself, because you stated a hard-line opinion as to how Smash should be played; when there are, in-fact, many ways to play it.

"Who cares?" Well clearly, you do care. I'm saying that you shouldn't care if others enjoy the game differently.

I wasn't saying them as "no one cares what you think."

@MoonKnight7

It's all good. The game is made for the hardcore and the casuals.

@JDORS

Bait

Could not have cared less.
Spirits are just a cheap way to add a layer of rpg-lite to the adventure mode.
The whole spirit thing just seems like content padding to me anyways.
A more in depth explanation would not have had any impact on the end result.

This really ought to put it into perspective. They didn't have time or resources to add the descriptions for tiny throw away content. They also didnt take the time to make the game work properly online.

For 80 bucks plus 25 a year to access online and people are going to cry about absent descriptor text while the core experience is still a broken peer to peer mess at the time of writing this?

Honestly folks. Let's prioritize the important things and let dedicated communities fill in the blanks. They did a fine job. Nintendo has adult problems to deal with.

Give each of the contributors $5, Nintendo, and patch these into the game. Not having descriptions of characters I wasn't familiar with is what kind of killed replacing trophies with spirits for me.

@GlutenFreeGamer well, $5 seems pretty tight even for such a minor feature honestly...

@Big_Ounce And they ended up becoming what's now known as "Amiibo". I'm still baffled Nintendo didn't just call them Trophies, but it's probably a licensing thing.

But yeah, wholeheartedly agreed. The Trophies always were something special. It's obvious that they had to ditch them sooner or later. They certainly ate a lot of space and development time.
But as much as i love the variety of Ultimate's Spirits, they feel really rushed.

Each music track gives you the exact game it's from, who composed it, who arranged it etc.
Spirits? They don't even tell you which specific game they are from... Just "X Series".
Imo one of Ultimates biggest shortcomings.
I could have done without the (albeit interesting) little text bits, but a specific game and artist would have gone a long way.

Not having the 3D models was understandable but there was no reason for the history being gone. Especially since so many already had some already.

It was one of the best features of Smash and I really missed it.

Is it just “luck of the draw” unlocking characters on smash. I play the classic mode and fight random challengers that way. I know the spirit board exists but I read that it’s also a bit slower unlocking stuff.
Anyways just curious would love to add Richter Belmont and Alucard to my fighter pool.

@Bunkerneath yeah Nintendo is definitely going after sites that simply have descriptions of spirits.

@Desrever Sakurai had more important things to worry about than text blocks for 1000+ spirits.

@Itzdmo bait

I quite miss them myself. I know many won't care for them, but they were one of many little things that made the overall packages so great, and I would have liked to have been able to read a bit about the history of these characters, particularly those featured in NA-only and JP-only releases at a glance rather than having to go back and forth between fan pages. For so many players, especially those who have not touched a Nintendo console in generations, would have particularly made use of spirit descriptions.

Call me old fashioned, but at times like this, I miss encyclopedias, including those on disc (and growing up, I have had a few).

I would have loved for this to be in game. The details in the descriptions caused me to hunt down games I otherwise would have never played. And as far as the "crazy amount of content" I would have preferred to have kept the dropped modes and trophies over world of light and the spirits.

@The_Keywork boooo... get out self entitled person.

(That wasn't very lovely language - Matthew010)

@Bunkerneath They can't. It's fair use; promotional material... Unless they're getting ad revenue, in which case the images can be taken away, but not the descriptions themselves.

@fafonio

Poor child.

@The_Keywork still haven't answered my question, stop deflecting.

@Dilated

Alucard isn't a playable fighter.

@Saiyaken_PHOENIX

You really can't let this go. My "casual" remark must have struck a nerve. Or it hits really close to home

I knew this would happen someday. Nice job.