Minecraft comes to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate!
Nintendo announces the newest addition to their roster: Steve from Minecraft!
Time to craft your victory–Nintendo brings the all ages survival worldbuilding game to the Super Smash Bros stage with Steve, one of the two default characters available for players to choose from in Minecraft. This new character is the 7th character available for download, previous DLC included Nintendo Rockstars like Banjo & Kazooie from the Banjo-Kazooie Series, Joker (Persona 5), and the Piranha Plant (Super Mario franchise), just to name a few.
Nintendo remained faithful to Steve’s original design, making sure to keep the characters iconic, blocky movements without compromising on maneuverability and fighting style. Steve doesn’t just look right out of Minecraft, he plays like it too.
Masahiro Sakurai, Creative Director of the game goes over the process of developing Steve’s character and fighting style in an Oct 3rd, 2020 stream. You can watch the stream here, and if you are a regular player I recommend you check it out. Nothing like gameplay tips from the creators themselves!
Mr. Sakurai explains that staying true to the character and its original game was essential, and the team worked hard to integrate the style of Minecraft gameplay and bring it into the Smash Bros world.
If you’ve never played Minecraft, the name of the game explains it: you mine and resources and craft items and buildings. That’s the easy explanation, but its a universally popular all ages survival world building game. Its intensely addicting, and as far as creativity is concerned, the sky is the limit.
The team at Nintendo was able to integrate the very unique gameplay style into hat into gameplay: dynamite blocks, trapdoors, anvils, mine carts, players are even able to place blocks in the sky.
Like the rest of the characters in Super Smash Bros., Steve has a has standard one button dash, and a simple punch/kick attacks that utilize the wooden sword found in Minecraft. Be careful though, your weapon can break!
Now, here is where this character design takes a different turn–you can upgrade your sword throughout the fight. Just like Minecraft, you need to mine the terrain for materials and quickly craft your weapon, and the hit points and durability of the weapons actually dependent on the materials you use to create them. The wooden sword, being the default does the least amount of damage, but as you collect materials throughout the fight, you can upgrade your weapon from to stone, iron, gold, and all the way to diamond, the most powerful weapon.
So, How do you get the material? Well this is most interesting part for me: the materials you can get are dependent on terrain you are on.
For Steve, the gameplay will depend on what stage you are fighting in. For example, are you in Hyrule bridge? You can extract stone and ore to make a stone tools. Perhaps you are on Starfox ship, then you are able to extract Iron, the most powerful and durable material for your weapons, but be careful, says Mr. Sakurai, as Iron ore takes a little longer to extract than other materials, (much like in the original Minecraft game) can still appear at random so there is not guarantee that an iron-only stage is better, and if you are taking too long to extract, you leave yourself open for a punch!
Steve is a character whose style really depends on how you engage the map, just like in Minecraft. Gather materials, set up some dynamite, build a cart and ram players off the stage with one well-timed punch.
I think this is one of Smash Bros most creative characters yet, and has all the coolest elements Minecraft with the versatility of a Smash Bros fighter, and I cant wait to try him out!
Steve will be available for download on Oct 13th, when version 9.0 update goes live. Other skins for this character will include Alex , a Zombie, and the Enderman–Minecraft’s own eldritch horror.