I also didn't wind up making use of the Dojos at all, but I'll play around with that when I hit the Spirits Board, now that my four-star collection is nice and broad with several max-level options in every class.Īfterwards I finally looked at the Smash section for the first time and set up a whole raft of rule sets. I never did get a precise sense of how much the attack/block/grab type-advantage triangle actually matters. There are a lot of undocumented interactions not explicitly highlighted in the UI, like how Plessie (who gives you unlimited swimming) counters the stages where you are technically disallowed from swimming. I collected all the different stage immunities quite early on, so every time I saw a floor hazard effect it was essentially just the game's way of reserving two slots from my supports.
The heal gives you tremendous safety net for mistakes in dodging boss patterns. It was such a chaotic encounter all around that there was never a sense of gradual progression towards refining a promising approach.Ĭelebi's periodic heal trivialized all the boss fights thanks to all the downtime between phases and attacks, and was a bit of a crutch for me in the late stages.
Eventually I just fought at the bottom of the map a lot until I wound up with a scenario where Peach had her recovery obstructed and fell off the stage before I did. Tried Fox for a while to get mobility and damage going in all directions, which was very successful at building up damage on Mario and DK but not at all against Peach. Tried long-range projectiles to knock her back while she stood still. Tried speedy characters with a jump buff to outrun the pursuers, stay close, and hit her consistently. I never even came close to developing a working method and was completely stuck it seemed as though I wouldn't be able to solve it even if Mario and DK weren't chasing me down everywhere (and I did find some ways to semi-reliably bait one or both of them out of play, but it wouldn't leave me enough time to hunt down Peach for the finish). I tried a bit of everyone, though, and took this mode as an opportunity to learn the fighters that were new to me, including those added in SSB4 DLC.īut the hardest fight by far was Pauline.
If I ever felt impatient, I had a few fallback solutions at hand for everything: Little Mac has a way of wrecking everything on these one-stock fights DK was my standby for the large group fights Shulk and Simon were my preferred options for mid-range pokes that kept me out of harm's way Dedede was incredibly useful in a handful of unique situations, precisely the right tool for the job. Before that happened, I was quite close to developing an approach to Celebi (switching to Lucario to take advantage of the mounting damage), and I think it was Akuma that gave me a ton of trouble as well, as that's a fight where you simply can't afford to take damage, and you just have to do it until you do it cleanly (or the CPU makes a critical mistake).Įverything else was largely solvable with minor adjustments to roster picks and strategy, which was how things should work in a game like this: it's nice to see meaningful decisions about effects and fighting styles have a larger impact than the numbers or levels or grind. There were a handful of four-star fights that I never had the opportunity to solve properly before the CPU decided to SD or flub an offstage recovery and hand me the win.
I hit the True Ending first (with a squad of Toon Link, Captain Falcon, and Bowser), saw that my file was at 99.67%, and wondered if I had missed any dots, scrutinizing all three world maps before I realized, correctly, that I just had to do the alternate solo fights with Dharkon and Galeem alone. I ended up with just over 40 hours on my file, and I'm amazed to see that so many others apparently finished it much quicker, although in my case I didn't tend to overpower battles with highly ranked Spirits, choosing instead to fight with a power level equal to or slightly below my opponents' unless I was really stuck.