Minecraft’s Steve is super weird in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Earlier this month Super Smash Bros. Director Masahiro Sakurai revealed the latest fighter for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. It wasn’t Crash Bandicoot as rumors suggested. It wasn’t Master Chief as hopes and dreams were. It was certainly not the long-awaited Waluigi. It was Steve from Minecraft. Last night Steve officially joined the Ultimate Roster as the second character in the second batch of downloadable content. I’ve played several dozen rounds as or against him (and others) Minecraft Characters) and only have one snack: what the hell?

I’ve poured in for hundreds if not thousands of hours Smash Bros. and can safely say that Steve is the weirdest character I have ever played. For starters, if Steve wins a match, chances are you’ll be presented with a nude suggestive victory screen with him holding a sizable chunk of meat at waist height. As a user https://twitter.com/PushDustIn/status/1316202516904775680?s=20 on Twitter, barely an hour after Steve came out, “How was that approved, lol.”

This NSFW bug is a microcosm of how Steve fits in Smash. In a moment everything seems to be normal. The next time you’re blind to something so unexpected that you don’t know what to do with it.

Steve isn’t the only one Minecraft Character who has joined Super Smash Bros. Ultimate last night – with the outfit selection options you can also play as Alex, Enderman, or Zombie, although they all have the same moveset – but for the sake of clarity we’ll just be referring to the stack as a unique Steve. Basically, like any of the other 76 characters, Steve plays in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. As with any other Smash Fighter, you can perform basic attacks and power-up smash attacks. They can jump, albeit a little lower than most other fighters. You can make four different special movements, depending on the direction you are pointing with your left thumb.

From left: Steve, Alex, Zombie and Enderman. (Screenshot: Nintendo)

Things go wrong with the specials. By performing the standard special movement (holding the B button with no direction given) on the ground, you pull a pickaxe and mine out of the ground to fill up a resource meter. These resources then determine what other moves you can make, most of which come in the form of crafting items. If you do the side special, you’ll jump into a mine car and race across the stage, much like Wario with his helicopter or Bowser Jr. with his clown car. If you do the up special, you’ll be blown up in a kite. The down special drops an inconvenient, yet hilarious box of dynamite. If you do the standard special in the air, you place a block.

This may all sound standard on paper, but none of these movements work exactly as you’d expect. Take this mining truck, for example. You can use it to hit nondescript opponents with a powerful attack that will likely make most of the fighters fly. You can also jump out of the cart while it is moving. The car continues and if it drives over another player, they will be picked up. It’s not easy to escape the wagon, so anyone trapped in it will likely be carried straight off the stage. It’s a nefarious move to get a kill. Smash Players are no stranger to cheap tricks, of course, but this one is so out of left field that it is likely to surprise even series veterans, unlike any other move by any other character. (That said, it’s good for getting a laugh, if only for the ridiculousness that comes with the helpless Bowser pace in the explosion zone.)

Then there is the kite. Usually in Smash Bros.The up special helps you get back on stage. With Steve it’s often no help at all. There is an initial updraft that can give you a boost and save you when you are close to the edge. But right after you hit the apex, Steve dived at a steep angle. Once you have buckled it up, you cannot take it off. You can futz a little with the angle, but there’s no gravity fighting. Worse, you can only walk in the direction you’re looking. In one battle, I accidentally killed myself three times in a row by using the up special while facing away from the stage. It’s even stranger when you use it on a flat stage with no edges or explosion zones at the bottom of the screen to slide your stomach across the stage.

To get back on stage, you usually have to use the standard for block building. When you’ve extracted enough resources, you can create floating blocks in mid-air and use them as stepping stones to get back on course. You can also strategically place blocks to kid other players, usually by creating a wall (to protect them from their attacks) or a ceiling (to keep them from jumping or making an upward strike attack). One high-level trick is to put a block in front of a fighter who is trying to return to the stage, causing him to fall into the abyss. In all of the games I played last night, this only happened once. (No comment on whether I was the one who performed this highly technical maneuver or the one who suffered it.)

The act of mining is also unpredictable. As you dig, there is a chance that rare resources like gold or diamonds could show up. Steve always spawns with a crate that is planted somewhere on the stage. If you discover a rare resource that appears to be random, you can go back to the box and tap the B button to turn on Steve’s arsenal. Gold weapons are more powerful than what you start with. Diamond weapons are the most powerful. A Steve with a diamond weapon should be avoided at all costs. These resources are indicated by a small marker next to Steve’s damage display. If you pay close attention to your fellow campaigners, you may be able to see what is in store for you. But Smash is not least a hectic close combat. Who has the time to pay attention to all the numbers and symbols on the screen? (As soon as Steve equips a higher tier weapon, this gem indicator disappears.)

Steve’s Minecraft Toolkit feels jarringly out of place in Smash. At the core, Smash is a fighting game calibrated for mind reading. In contrast, Steve is difficult to read. Who knows where he’s going with this kite? Does he have the resources to build a mining truck? Will he bump into me or jump out? What weapon tier does he currently have and how far will these smash attacks send me? Maybe I’ll start halfway. Maybe I can get a one-way ticket into the stratosphere.

Steve, no matter how you think about the source material of the character or how he plays Smashis a disparity compared to the other characters in the game, especially the downloadable ones. Any fighter who joined the roster after it started makes sense to the game. Piranha Plant is of course one Mario Mainstay. Person‘s Joker rocks a move that matches the lines of many other fighters. Terry Bogard is on with apologies Fatal anger Fans, take or leave it as a fighter, but its stage, King of Fighters Stadium, is one of the best in series history. Byleth is an easy fighter but tipped Smash Roster to the point where it’s basically a Fire sign Fighting game. (Crack all the jokes you want but those Fire sign Fighters are the best.) Even Rare’s legendary banjo kazooie makes sense thanks to the long history between Nintendo and Rare.

But as I played around with Steve, one steadfast thought kept struck me: who is this for? To do Smash Fans Really do you want to play as a pixelated miner? His fleeting moveset messes things up more than any other fighter. It’s even visually dissonant. If you look at them Smash In total, all six dozen characters have been artistically adapted Smash‘s visual style, no matter what direction your source material went. Steve is still a bunch of blocks.

But Minecraft is one of the most popular games in the world with 126 million monthly players on more than a dozen platforms. The range of the game is undeniable. Nintendo has now sold 20 million copies Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Mathematically speaking, there will inevitably be some fan overlap for the two games. Steve couldn’t click for me, a longtime one Smash Fan and a comment Minecraft Beginners, but those players who exist in the middle of this Venn diagram might get a kick out of the crossover. But I say this: Steve is sure to bring something new to the table. “Don’t you know what kind of game? Minecraft is? “Said Sakurai with noticeable exhaustion during Nintendo’s announcement video for Steve. “The sorcery it takes to make it work … it’s impossible!”

After Min-Min was released in June and Steve released this week, four more characters are to be revealed in the second Fighters Pass, which retails for $ 30 ($ 42). (You can purchase individual character packs for $ 6 ($ 8).) Now that Crash Bandicoot 4: the time has come is out, released around the same time Steve was revealed. The famous marsupial is unlikely to be on the final list. This Master Chief thing is nothing more than a stupid meme. Is Waluigi due after years of expulsion? Stranger things – for example a Minecraft Character that shows up in Smash Bros. – has happened.

Correction, 3:30 p.m .: In an earlier version of this post, the number of characters to be revealed for the second Fighters Pass was incorrectly stated. Kotaku regrets the mistake.

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