The most recent Nintendo Direct livestream blew the lid off a lot of new features coming to Super Smash Bros Ultimate, the latest installment in Nintendo’s epic beat-em-up series. During the presentation, Smash Bros Game Director Masahiro Sakurai teased that there was one big mode that he couldn’t talk about yet. When the stream showed a picture of Ultimate‘s main menu screen, there was a big big green button that had been blurred out alongside Smash, Online, and the other options. Smash fans have done some digging and come to the conclusion that this hidden mode is called “Spirits.”
It seems likely that this mysterious mode is the Super Smash Bros Ultimate single-player campaign, which was last seen in Super Smash Bros Brawl on Nintendo Wii, where it was called Subspace Emissary. Much to fans’ annoyance, the campaign got removed from the most recent titles Smash Bros Wii U and 3DS, and despite Ultimate supposedly featuring everything from previous Smash games we haven’t had confirmation that this includes a story mode.
However, one fan believes he has managed to discover what the mysterious new mode is actually called. Twitter user l’attardé used Photoshop to play around with the blurred image, and found that the pixels on the very edge of the green button were not blurred. Due to the type of opacity used by Nintendo, he was able to recreate the word and found the name of the new mode: “Spirits.”
CLOSER. pic.twitter.com/GzzpCyHySd
— Lattie (@Lattie9001) August 8, 2018
His evidence is further backed up by the Japanese version of the Direct, which shows the same page in kanji script. The green panel is blurred in the same way, so he used his method to discover the Japanese name for the mode. When translated, this turned out to be, once again, “Spirits.”
With Luigi dramatically turned into a ghost at the end of this Direct, and both Mario and Mega Man getting brutally killed by Ridley during his reveal trailer, it’s entirely possible that Nintendo are setting up this new Spirits Mode as something particularly special. As long as it’s as entertaining as Subspace Emissary, we’re all for that.
