Three years ago, I had some fun with my love of Marvel and the Super Smash Brothers series to make a series mashing them up (one, two, three, four). In each case, I looked at things like when each game in the Smash Bros series came out, the size of the rosters, and where Marvel stood at each of those release dates to come up with what I think is a reasonable approximation of what a hypothetical Super Smash Marvel series would have looked like.
With the highly-anticipated Super Smash Bros Ultimate coming out this Friday, I figured that now would be a perfect time to continue the series. After all, Nintendo has already announced exactly how big the roster will be even after DLC, so we know exactly how much space we have to work with, and this has been a pretty big year for Marvel (including five of the top ten grossing movies of the year being based off of Marvel properties, and the still-upcoming Into the Spider-Verse garnering a ton of early praise), so we should have some new possibilities to choose from.
Thankfully, there are a lot of roster spots open this time as well. Throughout this series, I’ve been matching my roster sizes to the Smash Bros games, but I haven’t been removing characters like they have. So, for example, when the games added eighteen new characters in Super Smash Bros Brawl, I only added thirteen characters to Smash Marvel Brawl since I wasn’t also removing five characters. However, for Ultimate, Nintendo is bringing back every playable character that has ever been in the series. Counting the six upcoming DLC characters (only one of which, Piranha Plant, has been announced), plus including the new echo fighter character as distinct options, that leaves us room for 82 characters in Smash Marvel Ultimate, or 22 more than I featured in my last go-around.
Also of note, this will be the first Smash-Marvel entry will I won’t have to reconstruct where Marvel characters’ popularity stood at the time, which might make filling all those slots a little easier. So with all of that lead up out of the way, let’s get started on our monumental task.