Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s two-year-long post-launch development is drawing to a close. At today’s final Mr. Sakurai Presents, the series creator and game’s director Masahiro Sakurai revealed to fans in a suspenseful cinematic that the final character joining the roster is Sora from Kingdom Hearts.
Sakurai took to his office one last time to detail the wielder of the Keyblade’s significance. Sakurai said Sora was one of the most requested fighters from the Smash community and that he was grateful to finally bring the character into the roster. As he has at previous Mr. Sakurai Presents, the director shared a detailed breakdown of the character’s utility in the roster and shared his variant color schemes.
Sora brings with him a Kingdom Hearts-themed stage, Rising Falls. The simple battleground has a single platform that traverses iconic places from the series along with nine new tracks from composer Yoko Shimomura’s original soundtracks.
An Amiibo is in the works, but the lineup is currently a few new characters behind. Sakurai did announce that Minecraft’s Steve will release in spring 2022 and that Alex will be made into an Amiibo as well.
New Splatoon themed Mii fighter costumes accompany the latest wave of DLC with an Octoling wig and Judd hat, as well as a Doom Slayer (aka Doomguy) gunner costume will join the new fighter in the final wave of DLC.
A late announcement in the stream also confirmed that the mainline Kingdom Hearts games will be coming to Nintendo Switch via cloud gaming, though Sakurai did not offer any release info.
Fan’s had spent the past week jockeying for their favorite characters and franchises to make it in during the final DLC. The top contenders included Sora, Master Chief from Halo, Doomguy from DOOM, Kris from Deltarune 2, and a late night entry of Goku from Dragonball. Even with some spot-on predictions, the crossover is still a shock for many, bringing together Square Enix, Disney, and Nintendo into one epic crossover.
There are likely balance updates to come after the character is introduced as well as general maintenance of online servers, though we don’t have exact details on how much longer we will see support for Ultimate from Nintendo.
Sora is finally here on Oct. 18th.