What makes a stage in a fighting game memorable? In Mortal Kombat, the pit allows you to knock your opponent off the stage and onto a bed of spikes, and there’s also the Dead Pool stage where you can finish off your enemy by uppercutting them to send them to an acid-filled death. Some stages, on the other hand, are memorable for how painfully awful they are. That’s the case with 75 m, the worst stage in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, where you can easily fall off into an 8-bit abyss, and get knocked off of tiny platforms due to stage hazards like bouncing springs.
This stage contains elevators, and platforms of various – mostly small – sizes. Oh and just in case you lost track of where you are the 2D version of Donkey Kong sends springs to attack you at random times unless you turn off stage hazards. Some of the stages in Super Smash Bros. are so long that the camera has to pan out a good distance to show everything that’s going on, which can – ironically – make it hard to see what’s going on. But the 75 m stage is so tall that the camera is constantly zoomed out, rendering pretty much everyone on screen (apart from big DK) ineligible (Gods help you if you’re playing in handheld mode). The only good thing about it is it doesn’t move from side to side.
What makes this stage such a poor one is the fact there’s no floor and all you have to fight on are the tiny platforms provided. There are other stages like Hanenbow and New Port City that also have platforms on the smaller side, but the latter at least has an area on the lower right side of the stage that is longer and acts as a decent-sized floor. If you choose to play on Hanenbow, there are a couple of big leaves that give you a longer runway to fight on. Floors are important because they can act as a way to reset your vision and keep better track of where you are.
The 75m stage might have a long upper area to fight on, but even with stage hazards turned off odds are you’re not going to be spending all of your time fighting on there because, well, fighting on just a single plane in Smash Bros. is boring.
Smash Ultimate – like the other games in the series – contains multiple fighters per battle outside of the standard two you often see in other big-name fighting games, so you have to stay on alert of their locations as well. Fighting on this stage is frustrating because the small platforms do not allow you to have any flow as you’re constantly having to jump down from one platform to another.
The stage makes fighting feel more like you’re playing a really physical game of tag as you and your opponents are constantly chasing each other between the tiny platforms. Chaining attacks becomes an ordeal, as every melee you get into is likely to be disrupted by someone dropping off the tine little ledge you’re fighting on.
To make matters worse, the stage uses a zig-zag pattern with some of its platforms, making the idea of being knocked off or falling off of one even more frightful. It’s straight-up ripped from the original Donkey Kong game and was not redesigned with Smash Bros. in mind. It’s a great stage in the original Donkey Kong arcade game because the object of that game is to climb the platforms and get to the top to save Pauline. Unfortunately, when put into a fighting game with multiple combatants navigating its platforms at one time, every maneuver and landing feels like a leap of faith rather than the skilled scrap this game is renowned for.
