No new Spirit Events in Smash Bros? Evil Ryu calls that FAKE NEWS!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Sorry about that.

A month and a half ago, KoopaTV published an article called “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: New Balance Patches, Spirit Events, and Event Tourneys are OVER!” At least one of those three items is incorrect reporting, because there is, going on right this moment as of publishing, a brand new Spirit Event for the Street Fighter 35th Anniversary that features a brand new Legend Spirit, Evil Ryu:

The actual fight is scary because Evil Ryu keeps getting Final Smashes.
...I won by exploiting his poor recovery.

I don't find the particular details about the fight or the spirit all that interesting (and I'm wondering why nothing happened for the Ace Attorney 20th anniversary), though there notably isn't reduced jump power unlike many other Street Fighter spirit battles. (Though it's still a stamina battle on an Omega form stage.) Evil Ryu has slightly more attack as a spirit than Akuma (which actually makes him the strongest spirit in terms of raw attack power in the game), but far less defense. Neither have slots for support spirits, but Evil Ryu has a Fist Attack ↑ ability while Akuma has nothing. I guess there's a sense of final-content privilege/power creep going on.

But the real thing to consider here is that just because Nintendo said that old events would be repeating—and they have been—that didn't exclude new content. They never said anything about new content. However, in his presentation featuring Sora, Masahiro Sakurai repeatedly said things like how the game is now complete and how the October content would be the very last downloadable content, and that included a summary at the end of all of the content in the game, including the number of Spirits (listed as 1,496 as of the end of September 2021, to be increased with the the Metroid Dread spirit event and then Sora's October 18 DLC... now it's 1,513). ...Spirits added to the game afterwards counts as downloadable content, so clearly Masahiro Sakurai continues to be an unreliable source, since Evil Ryu contradicts this.

OCTOBER 18. FINAL DLC.
Final DLC means all downloadable content. Paid and free.

KoopaTV is far from the only outlet that put two and two together and concluded that, yes, new content would be done for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. But the difference between us and other outlets is that we already have recognised that Masahiro Sakurai is not a reliable source of information. We should have already learned this lesson from when I apologised before! And I'm personally disappointed in myself that my December 2021 article never brought up the point that just because content will repeat, that doesn't prevent new content from joining. It's such an easy caveat to make, and normally I like to write in caveats, but I just didn't do it.

I'm sorry.


Ludwig will not speculate if Evil Ryu will be the sole exception to there being new content, or if Evil Ryu will be the start of a new trend. You're free to think about that in the comments section, and if you accept or reject Ludwig's apology for publishing what would later become incorrect information.