Parents' Guide to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

This new chapter in the popular brawling franchise packs in so much content, characters, and combat, it's a must-have for any Nintendo Switch owner. Like the other games in the series, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a love letter to popular game characters from a range of games that have graced Nintendo's consoles. But Ultimate stretches the bounds of the game card with the sheer amount of content that's crammed into it. Players can listen to hundreds of songs from each game (about 900 in all), and will be able to unlock more than 70 fighters to use across more than 100 stages. Beyond that, there's a wealth of options for Versus and Classic game modes, allowing players to get their fight on in tournaments, sudden death matches, squad play, and other face-offs. Plus, as in the Wii U version, you'll be able to customize your amiibo to play according to your own fighting style, and can easily leap into online battles with people from around the world.

That would seem like plenty of content for one game, but Nintendo went one step further, adding a single-player adventure mode: World of Light. Here, Kirby tries to free the entire roster from being enslaved by a villain that turns characters into puppets. To give Kirby a chance, he'll recruit Spirits from defeated opponents, each with an initial character trait similar to rock-paper-scissors. Along with boosting the attack and defense stats of each character, Spirits have their own skills and levels to determine how powerful they are, which gives a role-playing game flair to the brawling action. But beyond customizing each character, Spirits can help gamers scale the challenge based on their own talent and experience: You can demolish enemies with overpowered fighters, or give yourself a challenge by weakening your characters to face modified odds. World of Light is simply massive, and collecting Spirits through fights in this mode or the Spirit Board submode (where you can brawl for exclusive Spirits) gives a Pokémon-like element to building your party of characters. It also gives you more of a reason to practice and learn how to play characters instead of simply mashing buttons for success. If there's a negative to be found within Ultimate, it's that there's so much content here, it practically spoils other games on the Switch; you'll find yourself expecting that every other game card will have this much content. That's a minor concern for something so complete and so well done. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate isn't just a new chapter for the franchise, it's the evolution of Nintendo's fighting series.