Smash Ultimate is one of the biggest hits on the Switch. It was pretty much everything a fan of the franchise could have wanted. All the old characters came back (Who remembers that first trailer with Snake under the box?), the mechanics were so much more polished than Smash 4, and the game plays faster as well. That's not to mention the dozens of new characters that were added on release or during the game's lifespan.

Some saw it as this 'Magnum Opus' of Sakurai, something he would never be able to outdo. But I have faith in the man.

The question is really where we go from here. How can you improve from a game that literally had it all? I personally don't think taking the Ultimate roster and adding more characters is the correct formula for success. Might as well make more battle passes for Ultimate ports at that point.

Me personally? I'd love to go back to the basics. Hard reset. The original cast from the first game, a few returnees, and a handful of new characters. Keep it low key, don't go back to having nearly 100 characters in the game. Every new title they can cycle through the old characters. Put more focus on stages and a complete story mode similar to Brawl's.

What are your thoughts and hopes?

Some could say Ultimate was so aptly named because they wanted it to be definitive. It's almost like they wanted to close a chapter here and who knows if saying goobye to the saga, to any of the creators or whatever. But time has passed and it seems this reasoning isn't precisely solid, so it does look the saga and the people involved in it are pretty much still in the fight.

While I admit a hard reset or a new beginning would be a nice twist, I think they can actually continue from here. We don't need the clone characters like Daisy, Dark Pit, Richter and so on, and we don't also need copies like three Links, so that frees up a lot of space. Maybe do away with some returnees that have only been in one game besides Ultimate and we have even more space. And maybe some newcomers could be Ultimate-only, so the roster could be decent yet retaining most of Ultimate. And maybe even other newcomers could join in as well, who knows, but it'd be a very bad move to remove regulars to place newcomers and then sell the regulars in a Battle Pass (yes, we still remember and you're still not forgiven, Tekken).

I agree that we need to have back the All-Star mode as well as a proper Story mode instead of battling against literally everyone before a unique, purposedly-designed final boss. I also miss Targets, they were a funny way to learn how to precisely control characters and learn which routes could favor them more, been missing that in Ultimate quite a lot. And well, this might be too much asking given how the industry currently is, but do away with the shop and introduce again some gacha like in Melee or Brawl to collect trophies or spirits or whatever you want to put in this game, it was a funny addition.

These are my two cents in this. While I think we won't see a new Smash game for a long time given Ultimate's popularity (and also Nintendo's pace at releasing new games of their longtime sagas, Mario Kart says hello) we will definitely get a new one eventually and the options are quite varied. The world can still change a lot, who knows if it will even see the light in Switch 2 or direclty wait for the next console of the big N, so until more news come we'll simply keep dreaming and enjoying Ultimate to its fullest.

As a Melee player, I think the only thing that would make a new Smash game appeal to me is if it had more intricate gameplay with more combo potential. Every game since Melee has been painfully boring to play (and watch) due to most of the gameplay consisting of neutral interactions that lead to 1 or 2 hits before resetting back to neutral. Makes the game campy and slow. My hopes are not high, though, since Nintendo apparently hates when people play their games competitively.