Super Smash Bros: A port or not a port - That is the question…
By Nicolas, Assistant Technology Editor
Smash on Switch… just let that sink in for a while. Before the direct started, I was reading the live chat comments. Probably 99.99% of them were shouting about smash (just like in every other Nintendo Direct) and I said to myself, “Phssh, they are completely wrong.
It’s a 30 minutes direct, it’s not like they’re going to announce anything big. The biggest thing would probably be about Splatoon 2 or at best some Metroid Prime 4 information. No new game announcements. That will never happen.”
I was wrong! After claiming that the direct was finished, Yoshiaki Koizumi casually said “Wait, there is just one more thing we want to show.” And I assumed it was going to be Metroid or Yoshi.
Then there was some ink being sprayed on the ground with the Inklings running and shooting each other. I didn’t know what to make of it, they had just shown lots of new Splatoon 2 information.
At first, I thought it was a Splatoon 1 port or something, but that didn’t make sense, so I immediately began to think an animated series was coming out and when it went all black I was so confused yet curious at the same time.
Then the zoom in on the Inklings face and the Smash Ball come into focus in the reflection. Bearing in mind this was at half ten, I jumped out of my seat shaking.
But this lead on to a great question; “Is it a port?”
I am 99% sure that it is not a port and a completely new game for many different reasons…
Let’s rule out the obvious first, when the 2018 comes up, in the bottom right it says “Original game,” despite this however, people still have speculations so I’m here to put these speculations to rest:
At first the Super Smash Bros logo is different. The new one looks more mature than the one below as well as the font being slightly different. As well as that, the iconic Smash Ball stripes go across the new one which I think is a very cool minor detail.
However we can’t say for definite that this will be the final design of the logo, so we have to look at some other factors!
Some other factors to look at is the appearance of Breath of the Wild Link, and a Mario that looks like he has Cappy on his head, (but it is not clear if it is Cappy so take that with a pinch of salt.) These characters were not present in Smash 4 in both versions.
Another and probably the biggest factor to prove that it is not a port, is that no gameplay was shown. If there was gameplay shown for a game that had just been announced, it would most definitely be a port.