Week 64
Monday, 1st September
The legendary hero Riki appears as an Assist Trophy and in Shulk's Final Smash!! As an Assist Trophy, he uses many arts like Happy Happy, Freezinate, and Yoink! He sounds a bit like Tingle... but don't worry, Tingle will make an appearance too. By the way, a cursor will appear above Assist Trophies and Pokemon to indicate which fighter is its ally. Now you can tell right off the bat who it belongs to!!
Riki is a member of Shulk's party in
Xenoblade Chronicles. As mentioned, he does a random act when summoned as an Assist Trophy, similar to Tingle, who is returning in the same role as
Brawl.
Tuesday, 2nd September
This time, you can challenge every fighter in All-Star Mode from the moment you turn on the game!! This is a survival battle with limited recovery items and no option to continue. However, this mode will be incomplete until you've unlocked every fighter... Until then, you can only play against characters that are already available. This is a picture of the bottom-screen menu, with a padlock indicating that the mode is still incomplete.
In these battles, multiple opponents appear in one stage, and you clear the battle by defeating a number of them. The rest area that appears between battles displays the next opponents and the year the characters made their first appearances, and it also holds recovery items and an occasional reward. The characters you fight against appear pretty much in chronological order. Behold, the history of Nintendo games!!
All-Star Mode now orders the characters by their specific debut, instead of by the series as it did in the previous game. The mode no longer needs to be unlocked, which would have been done once all characters were available, as with
Melee and
Brawl. It will remain incomplete until then, however. The option to continue once KO'd by paying in-game currency has been removed, as well.
The rest area used to only contain three special Heart Containers that would heal full life (instead of the usual 100% damage as in regular gameplay), but it now contains at least a Maxim Tomato (that heals 50%) and a Fairy Bottle (heals 100%, but only once the player has reached at least 100% damage).
Wednesday, 3rd September
Until now, you were only able to choose from four, or sometimes five or six colors for each character. This time, though, all characters have eight colors to choose from! The first four color schemes for Samus are based off her Varia Suit, Fusion Suit, Gravity Suit from Super Metroid, and the Dark Suit.
...And here she is in the color schemes of the Gravity Suit from Metroid Prime, Green Samus (a regular in the Smash series), the Light Suit, and Dark Samus. A total of eight colors.
You can choose between four male and four female Villagers to play with. The designs for their faces and clothes are different. And here are the four Villagers we haven't shown you yet.
No character in
Brawl had more than six alternatives, except Wario, who had a unique second costume with its own set of palette swaps. Here we see Samus has two new colours she did not previously. The first is inspired by Dark Samus from
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and the second is based on the Light Suit from the former game, first revealed in a daily pic from earlier this year.
With the rest of the Villager's alternatives shown off in this post along with Samus', the two characters now have a known full set of costumes. Other characters with a high number of known existing colour schemes are Link, Kirby, Little Mac and Zero Suit Samus, with six each.
Thursday, 4th September
Here's one of the final battles in Smash Run, called "Run!" As you'd expect, it involves you dashing toward the finish line. In general, the fighters who are fast by default, equipped with speed-boosting equipment, and powered-up with speed boosts over the course of that Smash Run will have the advantage. However, speed isn't the only factor that will determine who will be victorious...
Those red things in the picture are called danger zones, and if you touch one, you'll get penalized by respawning farther back in the stage!! The danger zones disappear after someone else touches them, so fighters following those in the lead will have an advantage. You can still find speed boosts throughout the stage, so it'll be a heated battle 'till the end!!
Here's another final battle called "Climb!" Obviously, those that can jump or fly higher will have the advantage, but they also have to avoid the danger zones!! It gets pretty challenging if you've boosted your speed too much, as well. Everyone really gets into this when playing multiplayer.
These are two unique final battles for Smash Run, as others are matches done on regular stages in sometimes unique conditions, in the nature of the Special Melee and Special Brawl modes of old. As the final battle is randomised, players will not know whether to favour getting speed and jump power-ups to make these explained races easier, or go for attack and defense enhancers that will increase to chances of winning Special Smash games.
Friday, 5th September
So what is this Games & More option in the menu? I assume that some people may use this mode the most.
This is what you see after you click on Games & More. There are many modes to choose from. There's the Options button, too.
Futhermore, this is what the screen looks like after you click on Solo. In the Stadium, you can find the Home-Run Contest, various Multi-Man Smash challenges, and Target Blast!
Diving deeper into menus. Next week is the last set of daily pics before Smash Brothers 3DS comes out in Japan. The game releases there next Saturday (on the 13th of September), and there are only five standard pics of the day until then. There is still a three week wait after that for the game to go international, however we're rapidly approaching what will be information galore for all of us.
Again, two new musical pieces are on the official site.
Super Mario 3D Land Theme / Beach Theme from
Super Mario 3D Land / Super Mario Bros. and
Tomodachi Life from
Tomodachi Life.
A small guidebook for Smash Brothers 3DS is being distributed in Japan, and a few new pieces of information are inside. There's an explanation for the tabletop minigame first seen in the E3 trailer, which is for StreetPass. Short messages can be assigned to taunts for when playing with friends online, like in
Brawl. Some Assist Trophies are shown to be in the 3DS version for the first time, including Dr. Kawashima and Ghirahim. Several pages towards the end are dedicated to playable characters and their special moves, including the Final Smash for each. Most notable in this section, King Dedede has a new Final Smash. All revealed characters bar Lucina are here, and this is speculated to be the starting roster, as the same lineup is present in a screenshot released on the 3DS eShop in Japan.
You can find photographs of each page
here. Excuse the overall quality for now; proficient translations and actual scans may come later.
