8 Tips For Super Smash Bros. Ultimate‘s World of Light Mode

By Andy Moore | December 12, 2018 | 11:30am

Video Games Lists Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

8 Tips For Super Smash Bros. Ultimate‘s World of Light Mode

The World of Light mode in Super Smash Bros Ultimate is as expansive as it is difficult, and with hundreds of different spirits, each with their own abilities and characteristics to choose from, deciding how to build your dream team of fighters as you go through this mode can be a little daunting. Fortunately we’ve already beaten our way through an army of Goombas and Greninjas in an effort to find out the best tips and tricks for making it to the finale of this challenging adventure.

Your team power level and type makes a huge difference

When you first start out in World of Light the overall level of your team of spirits doesn’t mean much at all, and it continues to mean very little until you’ve made some decent progress into the farthest reaches of the overworld. While you can easily ignore these metrics for a good portion of those early hours, sooner or later you’ll end up against a fight that seems impossibly hard for seemingly no reason at all. Specific stage modifiers aside, there’s a good chance your main problem when fighting these difficult stages is because the power level of your spirit squad is significantly lower than that of your opponent. Most of these impossible fights will become much more manageable by simply closing the gap between the two teams.

Your team power level is determined by the power of your primary spirit, combined with the skills of your equipped support spirits. The closer your primary spirit is to the level cap of 99, the higher their overall power level will be, so making sure your primary spirit is suitably leveled for a fight is the easiest way to keep these values up. Each spirit also comes with a rarity attached too, with Ace rank and higher level spirits boasting more robust and significantly higher power levels, so make sure you update your usual team compositions whenever you acquire these rarer spirits.

Each primary spirit also has a type, too, comprised of the rock, paper, scissors triangle of attack, grab, and defense, along with a fourth neutral category. By picking the type that counters your opponent’s own category, you can give yourself a small bonus in power in the coming fight, making it easier to close any differences in power level between the teams without having to worry about finding a stronger spirit or levelling your current spirit any further. These rules also work against you too, so trying to fight against a spirit that has an advantage against your currently equipped primary spirit is going to make the fight much harder to win. The only exception to these rules is with neutral spirits that are neither strong or weak against any of the other types, so finding a neutral spirit that has a high power level can be a good alternative if you don’t want to continuously swap between spirits after each fight.

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Don’t overlevel your spirits too early

As you progress through each fight in World of Light, you’ll be rewarded with a number of items depending on how evenly matched the fight was. If you went into the fight at a severe power disadvantage, then you’ll receive more rewards, and significantly less if you held the advantage. While it might be tempting to try and power level your favorite spirits as early as possible, doing so will ultimately result in your overall resources being much less than they should be, which can be especially crippling during the earlier areas of World of Light where each fight only gives a handful of rewards. Since these earlier fights aren’t quite as complicated and demanding as the fights you’ll encounter later on, it’s a good idea to try and take these on at a disadvantage and reap the extra rewards now instead of trying to do it later.

If you’ve already levelled your most useful spirit to the level cap then you still have some options available to you. For starters, try and rotate in some of your extra spirits that you haven’t levelled, boosting them up where appropriate while saving your most powerful spirit for fights you’re having a harder time with. You can also try heading into the fight with your support spirit slots left empty as this will contribute towards lowering your overall power difference.

Stack support spirit bonuses for greater effect

There are a lot of spirits to collect in Super Smash Bros Ultimate, and while each one may look different, most of the support spirits get their skills from a fairly limited pool of abilities which causes quite a few spirits out there to have the same skills. This isn’t a bad thing, however, as the effects of these abilities will stack if you equip multiple spirits with the same skill. By doing this you can significantly boost the strength of certain aspects, like extra damage when attacking with weapons or when dealing fire damage. This additive bonus works with most of the skills, however it’s worth noting that equipping skills that grant items or weapons will not give you the additional item in the fight as these are only provided on respawn and every fight in World of Light only gives you one life so you would be wasting a slot by trying this.

A good example of clever ability stacking comes in the form of utilizing Little Mac’s inherent fist-based skill set, which can be boosted with any number of spirits that have the Fist Attack Up skill. To make this killer combo, you’ll first need to acquire three support spirits that all share this ability, which won’t be hard as there are plenty to be found in any of the three starting directions from the beginning of World of Light. For this I used Ricky, Fei Long, and Urban Champion Fighter. You’ll also need to unlock the Spring Man Neutral primary spirit, which can be found guarding the chest on the outskirts of Lumiose City located northwest of the starting crossroads. Little Mac will also need to be unlocked too, which can be done by completing the power station dungeon located in the corner of the swamps, found northwest of Lumiose City. and then defeating Little Mac himself after unlocking the gate barring access to him in the nearby city itself. Once you’ve gathered everyone together, level up Spring Man to the maximum level, and then equip your team and head into battle. In action, this combo can easily dish out between 80-120% damage with a single neutral B charged attack, and most smash attacks will either instantly knock out or severely damage and launch opponents with ease.

Primary spirits get a bonus if your character is from the same franchise

If you’re looking to push your team power up even further but you aren’t all that bothered which fighter you actually take into battle, then you could try to squeeze out a few extra bits of power by matching your hero and spirits up by their franchise. By equipping a primary spirit from the same universe as your fighter, you’ll net a small bonus for keeping things canon. The actual amount gained seems to vary depending on the situation, where different level spirits get boosted by differing amounts, but the amount gained can sometimes be quite substantial, with some matchups gaining a boost of around 15% extra power for pairing up your team. Of course doing this does mean you’re restricted in a number of ways, and it may be more beneficial to stick to a fighter and team that you’re better with, but the option is there for anyone versatile enough to swap between several fighters in the name of additional power.

Keep at least one support spirit hazard counter available at all times

Given the sheer number of spirits available to collect in the game, you’d be forgiven in thinking that most of these characters serve little more than to be offered up to the dismiss menu, converting their recently liberated forms into delicious cores and resources for you to fashion new, shinier heroes out of their remains. While that’s certainly a viable option to help you obtain spirits quicker using the summon menu, you should be mindful that there are a number of spirits that you will want to keep on hand when dealing with specific fights that contain stage hazards and particularly nasty conditions.

As a rule you should make sure you keep any spirits that offer up an immunity to Poison, Ice-Floor, Lava, Slumber, Zap, Falling, Strong-Wind, Fog, Irreversible Controls, Sticky-Floor, and Screen-Flip as these conditions can make some fights almost impossible to complete without countering these obstacles. You should also be sure to keep at least one spirit that grants the Franklin Badge at the start of the round as this will help when dealing with encounters that try to overwhelm you with projectile attacks.

Get the Metal Killer skill first

As you progress through the World of Light you’ll start to acquire skill orbs which can be spent on any number of passive abilities in the skill tree. These abilities vary in use, with some providing accessibility benefits like bigger windows for dodging, as well as increasing damage on certain attacks and providing resistances to certain stage hazards that can be present during specific fights. Most of these skills have their uses, and you should try to grab the skills that suit your own preferred playstyle when you have the orbs to do so. With that said, it’s in your best interest to grab the Metal Killer skill located on the bottom right of the skill tree as soon as possible as this will make some later fights much less difficult for you.

By activating Metal Killer you will passively deal additional damage to any metallic opponents, which naturally take less damage and are harder to launch than their non-metallic counterparts. As you progress further into the World of Light you will encounter several difficult scenarios that pit you against a metal foe along with a number of other hazards, and these fights are some of the toughest the game throws at you, so grabbing this skill is a great way to even the odds back in your favor.

Use the saved teams feature to save time

Switching out teams before each fight in order to counter various hazards and types can get frustrating, especially when each new fight demands an entire new lineup of primary and support spirits forcing you to search through your ever expanding roster to find the right members for the job. Thankfully, there’s a way for you to save your favorite teams as premade options, allowing you to configure squads specifically suited to square off against particular types or hazards so that you can swap to them on the fly.

To create your ideal spirit loadouts, simply compose your team then use the save team button just above the spirit screen. Onced named and saved, your spirit team will remain on your list of premade squads and can be selected from the saved spirit menu at the top of the screen. There are a lot of fights to go through in World of Light, and certain areas will continuously throw fights of varying types and hazards at you in succession, so doing a little bit of preparation with your saved teams beforehand can save you a lot of time in the long run.

Use floating platforms during difficult fights

The AI opponents in World of Light can be brutal at times. These computer-controlled opponents seem to vary from being completely benign to the most competent fighters in the universe, and on the occasion that you’re up against the latter, your options are limited. With that being said, there are a few quirks to the behaviour of these opponents that you can exploit if you’re desperate.

World of Light’s AI opponents are extremely good at recovering once launched off the battlefield, and will often read your intentions quite accurately when it comes to fighting near the edge. However, for some reason these mechanical masterminds don’t seem to carry the same logic over to the smaller, raised platforms that can be found in quite a few of the game’s stages. Despite their prowess near the edge, the AI seems to have trouble recognizing what to do when either of you are standing near each other but at varying heights, which quite regularly causes them to create large openings for you to charge up a smash attack or get some damage in without much trouble. If you make sure you’re positioned with your back towards the edge of your platform, the AI seems to have trouble finding a safe space to land too, which prompts them to simply jump over and line themselves up perfectly for a fully charged smash attack. Of course it won’t work every time, and there are occasions where the AI can circumvent this strategy, but for most fights there seems to be a gap in logic when fighting on these platforms, and if you position yourself correctly you can trivialize most fights by doing this.

Andy Moore is a gaming freelancer based in the UK. When he’s not writing, he can be found staring blankly out of the nearest window, or spending way too much time on Twitter.