As promised, Nintendo dropped a new Super Smash Bros. Ultimate update on us today.
Unexpectedly it’s a massive 20-minute hangout session/Direct hybrid from Sakurai himself, who announced that the Dragon Quest Hero DLC character will join the battle today. Sakurai begins with a small little oral history on Dragon Quest before diving in, also noting that this fireside concept differs from the typical full Nintendo Direct model because he wanted to take care of business this time (he’s unsure if he’ll do this every time, but if feedback is positive the chances are good).
In terms of Hero news, all four variations are the heroes from Dragon Quest XI/S (voiced by Mitsuki Saiga), Dragon Quest III (Nobuyuki Hiyama), Dragon Quest IV (Takeshi Kusao), and Dragon Quest VIII (Yuki Kaji). Sakurai has provided code names for all of them: Eleven, Arusu, Solo, and Eight respectively.
Hero’s big gimmick is the down-special “command” move, which brings up “random commands” to use, and man there are a ton of them (one of the most interesting was “Hocus Pocus,” which spurs random effects, some of which can be debilitating). His stage is “Yggdrasil’s Altar,” and there will be seven orchestral tracks from classic Dragon Quest games accompanying this challenger pack.
As a reminder each DLC character (Joker was the first) can be purchased individually for $5.99 or as part of a “fighters/season” pass for $24.99. Today Nintendo re-confirmed that Banjo & Kazooie are still slated for the fall, and there are two unannounced DLC characters on the way that will finish up the fighters pass. Of course, with its massive “close to 15 million units sold” success, there’s nothing saying Nintendo couldn’t do a second fighters pass.
If you’re not interested in the new DLC, Smash is getting a free update that adds an online tourney mode, new Mii costumes (here’s a picture of all of them, dubbed “Round 2,” at 75 cents apiece), a “very easy” difficulty for adventure mode, a better video editor, and a “predict the winner” conceit (that lets you earn points for in-game items) for spectator mode. Finally, Sakurai re-iterates that a new trio of Smash amiibo are out now (Isabelle, Pokemon Trainer, Pichu)
You can find all of the info for version 4.0.0 here.
Source: Destructoid Surprise! Dragon Quest’s Hero joins the Smash Ultimate roster today