[UPDATED With Replay] Watch the Last Smash Bros. 3DS/Wii U Announcements Live at 5PM Eastern
Update: Not to get overly optimistic, but 33 minutes sounds like a heck of a lot of Smash Bros. content to announce.
Today marks the third and final Nintendo Direct video presentation dedicated entirely to Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS. Cloud Strife’s appearance in the game was announced last month, and the character will be detailed today along with whatever other surprises series director/creator Masahiro Sakurai has up his sleeve.
What you can expect to see today, in addition to Cloud and his Midgar stage from Final Fantasy VII, is at the very least one more new character announcement: the winner of the Smash Ballot online poll. That character will likely be coming in a future update, but Cloud is likely to join the fighter roster today when the stream concludes. Anything else is pretty up in the air at this point. Sakurai has been looking to move on from Smash for a while, so the future of the series is uncertain. We’re unlikely to hear anything about that tonight, but any hint on the future would be intriguing.
And hey, Nintendo’s been into HD remakes lately. Maybe we could get a Smash Bros. Melee HD? (Hey, I can dream.) The game is still played heavily in tournaments, and it’d be nice to give players an updated way to compete that natively uses HD TVs.
Back in reality, however, another update to the game is also on the way, and it has been data-mined prior to its release to uncover its secrets. Read no further if you don’t want to be spoiled on what to expect.
Cloud will almost certainly be available for download at the end of this evening’s presentation—or whenever Nintendo’s servers recover from the inevitable flood of fans—as his data is already in the patch. Also included in the patch is the Chocobo Mii fighter hat that was shown during Cloud’s announcement, but a more notable inclusion is a Geno (Super Mario RPG) hat. As a heavily fan-requested character, Geno was seen as a possible character announcement tonight, but his presence as a costume for Mii characters seems to preclude that.
The patch will also bring balance changes to the cast, and SmashBoards has already begun documenting what they can figure out so far from raw data. Aside from that, there was nothing in the patch to suggest any additional characters or content would be made available today. However, that just means we’ll be all the more surprised by whatever is announced for release in the future as Smash‘s DLC draws to a close.
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