You might think you’d want a Disney All-Stars/Smash Bros./Metaverse, but you’d be wrong…

Super Smash Bros. has been the dominant crossover fighter series for over 20 years. There have certainly been other attempts to make some kind of fun mascot party fighter, some pretty good (Injustice & Mortal Kombat both have had fun guest characters from other franchises). But as of very recently, crossover fighting games seem to be way more of a thing with a couple of big companies taking a stab at it.

Firstly, we have the recently released Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, which seems like a decent effort for what is clearly a mid-budget fighter that for some reason Nickelodeon didn’t really throw their full weight behind but hey if it really finds a solid audience there’s hope for updates in the future.

Then we have the recently-leaked most definitely real Warner Bros. crossover fighter possibly titled “Metaverse”, which seems like a much more cynical effort. Though it’s not like Nickelodeon wanted to make a game for “the art” of it or whatever they are also just a company looking to exploit the various IP they have access to.

But I think it’s because of how this game is being approached and certain things Warner Bros. has made (specifically Space Jam 2 which is just literally a shamelessly bad mishmash of properties with no rhyme or reason) that makes us turn a cynical eye, most importantly that it’s reportedly a free-to-play game which just screams low effort cash grab.

And actually, for various companies, these kinds of crossovers, though maybe not exactly something of this scale, are hardly anything new. They have just been mostly relegated to the world of mobile games, often as gatcha-style turn-based RPGs, which while they aren’t completely devoid of effort, have all the usual trappings of free-to-play mobile games. Disney has several of these as well.

So, could a Disney-based Super Smash Bros. competitor be in the cards? Disney certainly seems more open to the idea than ever before, and the most telling thing might be Super Smash Bros. Ultimate itself and the latest and final fighter released for that game.

Sora is a Disney character or at least a character you have to get both Disney and Square Enix to sign off on, but bottom line, you can’t do anything with Sora without Disney agreeing to it. This. along with things like putting Pirates of the Caribbean in Sea of Thieves or Jungle Book in Fall Guys actually shows a Disney very willing to do some things in the realm of video games they seemed very unlikely to do just a few years ago.

While on the one hand I and plenty of others I’m sure would love to see a game that celebrates the rich history of Disney and its various properties, homegrown or otherwise, with deep pulls and fun Easter Eggs while seeing Donald Duck beat the hell out of Chicken Little, the end result would likely at best be something of a monkey’s paw on many levels.

While Disney may have a looser attitude towards video games and using their properties than they have in a very long time, it’s still a huge company with layers and rules, and getting things done can be a nightmare. There are just many levels of approval and even though it’s a videogame and not representative of the characters in any other medium, you’ll always get a pushback of things that the company thinks the character wouldn’t do or in their mind doesn’t make sense. Disney often can’t even seem to agree within in their own company when it comes to using characters across other properties (especially with their top original characters like Donald, Goofy, and especially Mickey there are a ton of rules).

People thought this would lead to a load of spin-offs or at least one movie. Nothing’s happened yet…

If we could get a game with the level of care and detail and effort put into a game like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, maybe there’s something worthwhile there. But there’s a good reason why only Nintendo (who is hardly infallible) has really been able to pull this off for the last 20 years and virtually no one else, much like how Marvel has really been the only one to pull off a huge ongoing cinematic universe and not have it completely collapse on itself by now (not that there haven’t been missteps, but there hasn’t been anything that’s threatened to derail the entire franchise). There’s a level of effort, care, and yes some luck that others who try just aren’t getting.

As much as you might think you’d want Disney to do something in the vein of a Super Smash Bros. game, there are just too many cooks in the kitchen (especially if we are bringing in Star Wars, Marvel, or other properties) to make such an idea really work the way it would need to. I’d be happy to be wrong, but if a Disney fighting game involving all or most of their recognizable characters was announced tomorrow, it would take one hell of a showing to convince it’d be any better than the Warner Bros. “Metaverse” game we are already pretty apathetic about and we haven’t actually even seen any of that yet.

That’s all for today, I will have some Guardians of the Galaxy thoughts next week but I want to put some more hours in before I really sit down and write about it (though so far so good several chapters in) so see ya real soon!