Super Smash Brothers for Wii U Review: No More DLC Characters Other than Mewtwo

Nov 27, 2014 03:18 AM EST

It is official.  Super Smash Brothers is putting Nintendo back on the map again.  Some say that its release, coupled with the recent Pokémon games could save the company after the declining sales of the Wii U.  However, is more DLC characters other than MewTwo coming?

Super Smash Brothers for the 3DS and Wii U has received very high praise, with Gamespot giving it a 9 out of 10, Metacritic scoring it 92, with a user average of 8.6. Most reviews give it a definite A.  It is the fastest selling Wii U game in the United States, selling nearly a half million copies in just three days. 

Super Smash Brothers is a game that is the ultimate battle of Player vs. Player, and the players can be their favorite Nintendo character with special powers and abilities to defeat the other character with their special abilities.  Smash Brothers is very big among the gaming community since its debut on the Nintendo 64 in 1999, and it is a gaming cash cow for Nintendo like The Legend of Zelda, or other Mario-related games like the Mario Kart series.   

One of the features that have sparked a lot of interest with the latest Super Smash Brothers game is the concept of DLC (downloadable content) characters that players can work.  Super Smash Brothers has one DLC character, and it is MewTwo from the Pokémon franchise, available sometime in 2015. This is the first time that Smash Brothers offered a new character after a game's release, and this character has not been seen on Smash Brothers since the GameCube version. 

According to VG 24/7, Smash Brothers creator Masahiro Sakurai has described the upcoming MewTwo DLC as an "experiment", and not the start of a trend.  Sakurai did not want to see criticism that the game was "cutting up content to sell characters one by one, or that we are adding things later that should have been there from the start". 

Sakurai also considers all the hard work put in the game, and the current roster is heavy with powerful playable characters.  It doesn't look like he isn't totally open to the concept of selling off characters, especially if the players want them. 

However, the idea of Nintendo selling a low-price version of the Super Smash Brothers and then selling off DLC characters might seem deplorable to some.  This is like those applications users can get on the smartphones that are initially free, but then the user has to pay for specific content.   If players of Super Smash Brothers only want to play one specific character, the idea of selling the game and buying only one DLC character might be a good deal, but this does limit the traditional version of the game. 

It is clear that the demand for DLC characters could create an entirely new market in this classic fighting game, and it will be interesting to see if other games follow a sellable DLC character business model.