Sakurai confirms Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will get its last DLC fighter in 2021

This article contains affiliate links: if you buy through them, SavePoint may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn’t change what we write.

Every great journey has an end, and on June 28, 2021 Masahiro Sakurai announced that of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. During the presentation of Kazuya Mishima, the Tekken fighter who would arrive in the game the next day, the series director confirmed that the next character in Fighters Pass Vol. 2 would be the last of all the game’s downloadable content.

His words, in a loose translation:

“So far, we have created all kinds of fighters and stages. Bringing together all these games, new and old, and compiling them into a single product is a task that has meant a lot to me. Come to think of it, it has been almost 10 years since Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and Nintendo 3DS was in development. I have been working on this for a long time. You could call it the work of my life. But, finally, the next DLC fighter will be the last. There will be none after that. It will be a while until that announcement, but it will be available this year, as planned, so please be patient. It seems the team will have to finish this project at home, to the very end.”

The last sentence recalls the moment: in the middle of the pandemic, the team kept working remotely.

To grasp the scale of what was ending: Ultimate launched on December 7, 2018 for Nintendo Switch, bringing together every character that had ever passed through the series. Then came Piranha Plant, the first Fighters Pass, with Joker, Hero from Dragon Quest, Banjo & Kazooie, Terry Bogard and Byleth, and Fighters Pass Vol. 2, with Min Min, Steve from Minecraft, Sephiroth, Pyra and Mythra and Kazuya. For fighting game players, the arrival of Terry and Kazuya, from Fatal Fury and Tekken, was a nice gesture of respect toward other schools of the genre.

What came next

The last fighter was Sora, from Kingdom Hearts, released in October 2021. With him, Ultimate reached 89 fighters counting the DLC and ended its cycle of new content there. The game remained one of the best-selling Switch titles and became the best-selling fighting game in history, with more than 37 million copies by December 2025.