You might have missed the “anniversary moment,” but it’s been just over 3 years since the last character for Super Smash Bros Ultimate was announced. The arrival of Sora was a big deal for gamers on numerous levels, not the least of which was the fact that Sora was someone we had wanted for so long, and he honestly came to the title via a rather simple exchange with Square Enix and Disney. Why can’t everything be that easy? Jokes aside, once he debuted, the game was officially “done,” with only small updates being done to the game. Yet, things seem to be pointing to something new happening…
The news comes from insider Stealth, who posted that Super Smash Bros Ultimate got a mysterious update out of nowhere and with no fanfare. They then noted that the last time the game got an update was in February, and then nothing happened before that since 2021. So, once again, we must ask the question, what is going on here?
The easy answer is that there was some bug that needed fixing, and the team, likely the one from Bandai Namco, went to fix it. Yet, if that was the case, why didn’t they just announce it and move on? After all, now people are going to speculate about what this could mean for the franchise as a whole and whether this is a tease that Nintendo and Bandai Namco are already working on the next entry.
That’s not the only reason people will speculate, though. If you recall, Masahiro Sakurai, the man who made this franchise into the legend it is, announced recently that the final video of his “Creating Games” YouTube channel would be ending soon, with two final videos being dated. Since he’s no longer doing the videos, that has left many to speculate that he is going back to developing video games. If that is the case, we all know the one that Nintendo will want him to jump back onto.
It should be stated that Sakurai himself asserted that IF he came back to the fighting game franchise, he wouldn’t dream of doing one as big as the last one. There was so much time and effort put into it that he hasn’t made a video game since.
Then again, you can understand why Nintendo would want this and want the game to come out early for the Nintendo Switch 2 platform. It would be a huge boon to the new system and help sell consoles. Until something is announced, though, this is all speculation.
