Smash on Switch 2: Why Redesigns Matter for Portable Play
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has been the most reliable resident of Switch memory cards since 2018 — the game packed for airport gates, dorm rooms, and friend’s-couch sessions. So when speculation turns to the next entry’s roster, the stakes go beyond the character select screen. They’re about how a franchise built on split-second reads gets redesigned for a screen held inches from a player’s face. The piece behind this analysis lands on a sharp argument: if Nintendo were planning a Switch 2 Edition of Ultimate, it would have shipped by now. A game already playable on the new console doesn’t sell hardware. A new entry with its own visual identity does.
That identity is currently being negotiated across a list of veterans — Fox and Falco’s hyper-realistic Star Fox remake proportions, Donkey Kong’s Bananza glow-up, the Tears of the Kingdom question hanging over Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf. For handheld players, this is not cosmetic trivia. Redesigns shift silhouettes, telegraphs, and sometimes entire movesets, and they all have to survive the chaos of a four-player free-for-all on a screen the size of a paperback.
Featherweight Fox: A Readability Problem at Handheld Scale
The Star Fox remake’s realistic proportions are the most instructive case on the list. As the original article notes, Fox and Falco’s metallic legs anchor a significant chunk of their kit — forward tilt, dash attack, up smash, down smash, back air. The new designs don’t just shed the metal; Falco’s legs shrink to genuine bird anatomy. On a living-room TV, that’s an aesthetic clash with the rest of the roster. At handheld scale, it’s a readability failure waiting to happen. Smash is a game of silhouette recognition — spotting an opponent’s drift in recovery, reading a kick’s startup, feeling the spacing of a landing — a consideration next-gen roster predictions rarely stop to weigh. Fighters built from thin, organic limbs read worse at speed and distance than the chunkier, almost toy-like figures that fill Ultimate’s roster.
The original piece fairly notes that Nintendo could simply ignore the new Star Fox designs, and given that franchise’s recent trajectory, that’s plausible. But the fact the question exists at all reveals how Nintendo now treats visual identity as a product decision rather than a purely creative one — and product decisions are made with the handheld display in the room. Fox is a legacy fighter whose Smash look has stayed definitive for decades. A redesign that weakens his silhouette punishes every player who picks him in handheld mode.
Why a Port Would’ve Shipped Already: The Handheld Upgrade Pitch
The piece’s central argument — that a Switch 2 Edition of Ultimate would have materialized by now if it were coming — has a handheld-specific punchline. Switch 2 owners can already play Ultimate through backward compatibility. Nintendo’s problem isn’t getting the game onto the new console; it’s giving players a reason to buy it again, or to buy the hardware at all. A new Smash with a refreshed visual identity is one of the few titles capable of moving consoles at that scale — the same calculus behind Nintendo ditching Splatoon 4 for a Switch 2 spinoff — and the redesign candidates read like a catalog of Nintendo’s current IP priorities: Donkey Kong’s Bananza look, Diddy Kong’s new cap pin, Zelda’s Tears of the Kingdom gear.
That’s why the roster doubles as a marketing asset. A Link in his Tears clothing and a Zelda in her modern design turn the flagship fighter into a living showcase of the company’s last five years of output — visible every time someone opens the game in a café, on a commute, or at a friend’s place. Smash is the rare title that gets played in public, often with strangers leaning over to watch. Those moments are free advertising for Switch 2, and a new visual identity is what makes them land.
The Muscle-Memory Tax: What Redesigns Cost Veteran Players
There’s a cost buried in every redesign, and it’s steepest for players with thousands of handheld hours behind them. Fox’s metallic legs aren’t just a look; they power a moveset. If the new design drops the metal, Nintendo either re-rigs old animations onto new geometry — the likely outcome — or changes attacks entirely, resetting muscle memory built across three Smash games. The Zelda case cuts the other way. A Tears of the Kingdom Zelda has no fighting history to draw from, so redesigning her means inventing a kit from scratch. That’s the most exciting prospect on the entire list, and also the riskiest.
King Dedede’s situation shows how badly identity drift can go. The original piece notes Nintendo has cycled him through multiple competing looks in recent years — the larger Forgotten Land body, a return to the Smash design in Kirby Air Riders, and a brand-new look in the Nintendo Today animations. For a game that must read instantly in four-player local play on a small screen, a heavyweight who can’t hold a consistent look is a genuine liability. The smart money for the next Smash is conservative: adopt the new faces and costumes that read clearly at small scale, but preserve the silhouettes and movesets that made these fighters recognizable in the first place. Diddy’s subtle tweaks — the DD pin, the eye separator — are closer to the mark than any radical overhaul. They’re the template to watch when the next game finally shows itself.