Four more challenges down as of last night, bringing me to 57 of 124 complete.
- Clear Adventure Mode
- Win in all the battles.
- See the true ending.
- As Ganondorf, clear the first stage of the final battle without being KO’d.
This leaves three more achievements still to complete on my Adventure Challenge Board.
- Win in the Final Round without being KO’d.
- Start New Game +.
- Obtain All Adventure Skills.
The latter two are easy. I could start New Game + at any time I choose, but I expect if I do I’ll temporarily lose access to the final boss fight, and have to grind all the way through the story again for a shot at the first challenge. Obtaining all the Adventure Skills is a grind I can complete fairly quickly once I start New Game +.
The first challenge is another matter altogether. Winning that charlie foxtrot of a boss-fight without being KO’d? Err…. Umm…. Yeah. I dunno if I’m that good yet. I’ve thrown myself at it a few times without success. This one is going to take more practice.
Now that I’ve completed a first run through story mode, let’s take a moment to reflect.
The World of Light adventure is a masterpiece of abstract storytelling. Each fight feels hand-crafted, a love note to gaming culture past and present. Throughout the story, I was constantly pausing to review the rules for each fight and thinking, “Yeah. That makes sense. Of course it would work that way.” I’m not as well versed in the myriad of games represented in the Smash universe as I’d like to be, so I wasn’t in a position to “get” all the references, but the ones which did trigger my nostalgia consistently felt “right”.
The majority of the fights were not challenging. The CPU level appeared to scale with the Novice > Advanced > Ace > Legendary tier of the spirits, and this left the Novice, Advanced, and several of the Ace fights feeling underwhelming. The distribution of the fights on the map also made progression relatively easy. Most of the Legendary fights were optional, and could have been skipped.
That said, the majority of the Legendary fights felt like they provided a pleasant amount of challenge. There were several that I had to skip early on in the story, as my personal skills were not up to the challenge and I needed to find appropriate spirits to back me up. On the occasions when I’ve gone to the Spirit Board, I’m consistently losing Legendary fights without my Adventure Skills providing their additional edge.
All in all, I’m quite satisfied with World of Light as Smash Ultimate’s single player “Story Mode”. I enjoyed playing through, and was quite entertained by the many nods and references to its constituent games.
Okami No Rei 