Without getting all mopey-nostalgic, every new iteration of Super Smash Bros. that comes out reminds me more and more of how isolated we are in adulthood, in the "real world." Walk thorugh it with me.
Super Smash Bros. came out when I was in elementary school. I never owned it, so every single time I played it I was doing so with friends. "Friends" is even a stretch here - it's fucking fifth grade, you end up at people's houses surrounded by other people all the time - in a sense, you're playing with strangers.
Super Smash Bros. Melee came out when i was in middle school and remained a staple of my gaming diet all the way into college. This is, of course, the one I played to death, the one I played the living hell out of. I played it with friends, with siblings, with cousins, with siblings' friends, with neighbors, with neighbors' friends, and friends of friends. A quick glance at the name archive on my memory card would be a miles-long stroll down memory lane - I think my old babysitter is on there somewhere. So is an ex-girlfriend (or two). So is a then-ten-year-old kid who my mom would tutor at our house, who refused to leave our house without playing against me a couple times. Oh yeah - and also there are a bunch of college freshman floor-mates on there. It's just... my God, so many people, so many different people I would interact with, in that span that lasted from middle school to college, those crucially formative years where people enter and exit your life constantly and you're just used to it. The golden age, really, of Smash and of life!
Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out in my sophomore year of college. It wasn't as good as Melee - no one denies this! - but it also wasn't a bad game. It was a great way to blow off some steam and fuck around avoiding homework and studying at school, and it was still a social glue for my friends back at home. I didn't end up playing Brawl with the number or variety of people I played Melee with, but it still pulled in its fair share of names for the record book on my Wii.
Super Smash Bros. 4 - the one for the 3DS and the Wii U - came out when I was in my mid-twenties. My friends and I were hyped as hell, but I can't honestly say that we played it very often. There was online play, which was nice, but gone were the days where we'd hang out in person for no reason at all. I was married, I was a full time employee, I was a homeowner, I was taking part time classes - there just wasn't time! I won't pretend to know ho many names ended up in my record book on the Wii U, but it likely wasn't more than like, ten. Just ten core friends who'd been smashing with me for fifteen years or so.
And now Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is out, and it's probably the best game in the franchise yet on a technical level. And it doesn't matter. Because I feel like I've already played more of it than I will going forward. This thing's been out for a month now, and half of that month I was on vacation (staycation) from work, just chilling around during the holidays. And despite all that free time, and despite having this brand new game, I have played it in person with friends exactly twice. When my cousins and sisters visited after Christmas, we did not play Smash. When my good friend Steve tried to set up a "Smash Day" event, almost nobody came. And my good friend Keith, so often responsible for setting up our big dumb convoluted video game tournaments, has two kids and no interest in the game whatsoever. And my good friends both named Matt each live an hour away from me now, and surely aren't coming over just to play video games. And none of this is weird or unexpected; it's just life.
And now we have come full circle, because once again, instead of playing with friends, I'm mostly playing online with - yep - total strangers. It's funny how that works!
I'm looking forward to the DLC, though - that'll keep me coming back month after month for two-hour dabble sessions, I guess.
Anyway, like I said - best game yet in the series, probably.
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