Superhero Media: World of Light

Ok, so this one took me a while. In my defense, I don't play a heck of a lot of video games these days, I'd rather watch films and paint miniatures. However, when I decided to just get through it and dialed the difficulty back a little, it really only took a week of playing between coats of paint. Ideally, I'd like to be fair to World of Light, but comparisons to The Shadow Emissary are all but unavoidable. While I'm at it, comparisons to Smash Run and the Kirby series are going to happen, so you might want to bite on a belt or something. The story begins with the cast of Smash Bros Ultimate facing Gaalem, the "Lord of Light" and his army of master hands, only to be quickly overrun and turned into spirits, all except for Kirby, the most powerful fighter on the team. From there, the player travels around a vast world, awakening the other captured fighters and battling spirits until they can confront Gaalem. It's ok. Functionally, World of Light is a series of linked Smash battles with varying rules, making it more than a little repetitive and very much some video game "stamp collecting". 

Personally, the charm of altering rules in otherwise normal Smash fights wore thin pretty quickly, especially the prominence of Stamina Battles, as they're just not what I love Smash Bros for. What I really found the campaign great for was learning how the newer characters worked, as I never played much Brawl and didn't have the money for the DLC characters on the Wii-U, I wasn't terribly familiar with Cloud, Solid Snake, Ryu and so on. Some of the boss fights are interesting, particularly Marx and Dracula, but they're all available in Classic Mode anyway, so there's that. Yeah, it's that time, World of Light just isn't as interesting as The Shadow Emissary, sorry, but it's true. It's not that the story is less "deep", both are about kiddie pool depth, it's that The Shadow Emissary does a better job of linking the fights and is more fun to play, with added platforming elements, not just fight after fight. Even the Smash Run on the 3DS was more the sort of thing I would have wanted, with the rambling landscape, interesting challenges and variety of enemies. 

I guess my main complaint is that World of Light is very "gamy" and I would have preferred more narrative. The cast of Smash Bros Ultimate is so large and varied that I would have liked to see them interact more, even just in short skits to get a feel for their personalities. How does Samus feel about having to work alongside Ridley against a more dangerous foe? Solid Snake is a wanted criminal in his own setting, does Captain Falcon consider taking him in for the bounty? Would Bowser and King K Rool be rivals or fast friends? What World of Light does do fairly well is play out in a manner where the characters are added gradually as more battles are fought, which isn't too different to my first Ultimate Alliance campaign, and would be a good way to run your own supers campaign if you wanted to take it slow. I'm hoping that future Smash Bros entries have better single-player campaigns, but I feel I should also get my hands on Brawl and play through The Shadow Emissary again to talk about it here. Still waiting for Rayman as DLC.