Image: Nintendo Life
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is celebrating its 5th anniversary today, 7th December 2023, and we’re sharing some special moments to celebrate this monumental fighter’s birthday. First on the list – your favourite Smash Ultimate character reveal trailers…
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is an incredible game; no doubt about that. But let’s be real, the best part was finding out which characters would be included in the downloadable content.
Whether it was the exciting reveal of Persona 5’s Joker at The Game Awards or the epic trailer revealing Kingdom Hearts’ Sora, the excitement and hype in the community before and after those announcements was unparalleled.
To celebrate the game’s fifth anniversary, we asked you to vote for your favorite character reveal from Smash Ultimate earlier this week. We have the final results right here, and team Nintendo Life has also chosen their favorites to round things out nicely.
So who was the winning character? Let’s take a look…
Staff Picks
Banjo-Kazooie – June 11th, 2019 Nintendo Direct
I’m not the world’s biggest Smash fan, all told. In fact, I didn’t buy Ultimate until nearly a year after it came out, and that was solely down to the most exciting announcement of this console generation for me: Banjo-Kazooie are Raring to Go!
With a similar format to King K. Rool’s reveal trailer (where King Dedede donned a disguise before the croc monarch himself turned up), the guessing game was up the moment a Jiggy bounced across DK’s treehouse. But Sakurai and the team still managed to build excitement, playing on our disbelief. The Duck Hunt duo fakeout lasts just a few moments — and you knew that Nintendo couldn’t possibly tease fans like this and get away with not revealing Banjo and Kazooie — but until you actually saw them, you daren’t believe it was true. Spiral Mountain, the characters, the moves, and the music (and that offbeat Ivysaur scene at the end) all combine into an expertly edited two minutes, twenty seconds; the snippet of DK, Diddy, and K. Rool going crazy and punching the air mirrored perfectly the scenes of fans at the NYC Nintendo store and my own reaction. Magic.
Banjo-Kazooie always felt like a celebration; a celebration of play, of 3D game worlds’ potential in those early days, of Grimm fairy tales, of the humor and talent of the teams at Rare. This reveal captured that celebratory feeling for me. Forget Smash fighter announcements; watching Banjo and Kazooie return to a Nintendo console ranks alongside the biggest, best console and game reveals ever. GL
Simon & Richter Belmont – August 8th, 2018 Nintendo Direct
Listen, I love Luigi’s Mansion and I love Castlevania.