If you watched Nintendo’s E3 conference, you probably saw the Smash Ultimate invitational. Like what Nintendo did for Smash 4, they invited a bunch of Smash pros (from both the Melee scene and the 4 scene) to duke it out with new characters and stages after the Ultimate news. This was teased on Twitter on the ELEAGUE VS official account.

Smash Ultimate Invitational Details

Well, this might be a little less interesting to note, because the tournament results are already public and finalized. Heck, you can even watch the matches on YouTube in all their glory. Regardless, it’s a pretty exciting format for a Smash tournament, so it deserves explaining.

Besides the typical “best-of-three, a certain amount of stocks, certain time limit” details, there were extra rules regarding the character picks:

• Each player pre-drafts three characters out of the available roster (which was incomplete, even missing known characters that weren’t ready for the tournament)
• Once a character is picked for a match, it is invalidated, and cannot be picked again until the other two fighters are picked. This keeps the characters in a “rotation” for the individual players. Going through the rotation opens all the characters again.

Here are all the players and each of the characters they drafted:

• Abadango: Corrin, Pac-Man, Mewtwo
• Armada: Pokemon Trainer (which includes Squirtle, Ivysaur and Charizard), Kirby, Samus
• Lucky: Bowser, Fox, Marth
• Mang0: Link, Ganondorf, Inkling
• MKLeo: Bayonetta, Sonic, Snake
• Mr. R: Little Mac, Ryu, Cloud
• Plup: Pit, Villager, Ridley
• ZeRo: Sheik, Ike Mario

After drafting, there was an official bracket that used doubles into singles. There was a winner’s bracket and a loser’s bracket, and players who were knocked out of the loser’s bracket through doubles were not able to show off their skill in 1v1.

For the doubles teams, Melee players were partnered with Smash 4 players. ZeRo was with Armada, Abadango was with Plup, Mr. R was with Lucky, and MKLeo was with Mang0.

In the earlier rounds, items were on too. Nintendo was more focused on showing off the new content here than absolute competitiveness. It also gave the viewers a chance to see some beautiful final smashes in action without the backdrop of a character trailer.

Oh, and there were plenty of Exhibition Matches too! Smash 4 all-star Nairo faced off against the real-life pro wrestler Ember Moon, football player Mike Daniels, and actress Olivia Holt in a 3v1. He crushed them easily. Some cosplayers who won a mini-competition during E3 played against each other as the characters that they cosplayed (well, mostly). Zelda Williams, the late Robin Williams’ daughter, played some Zelda and Sheik on stage.

Between the Smash Ultimate Invitational, Nintendo was trying to make it less like a competition and more like an event. If you’ve ever hovered around a college dorm room lobby, they’re often called “Smash fests,” and it felt like that at E3.

However, we’re not sure what will be shown at the event, but if it’s everything, the exhibition matches will be a part of it for sure. It’s hard to tell without more previews what kind of energy the broadcasters (and Nintendo themselves) will go for.

Drumming Up Hype for the Smash Ultimate Invitational

As we said before, the Smash Ultimate Invitational is going to get broadcast only a few weeks before the game’s release. The tournament itself showed the world that Nintendo wants to market Smash as a serious heavy-hitter in the esports world and pushing the tournament even farther months after its conclusion shows they genuinely care about what they can do for players and viewers.

Plenty of community members don’t have high hopes for the tournament’s viewership. Re-showing a tournament that doesn’t even have access to the full roster doesn’t look great for Nintendo, and there were plenty of things that made the game look “bad.” Mostly, Bayonetta showed how overpowered she still was in a match versus Ridley. (There was even a bug that let her triple jump while juggling Ridley off the top of the screen.) There were also some complaints about characters like Mario and Sheik still being overpowered and relatively unchanged.

E3 was also the first chance for viewers to see in-depth gameplay. Immediately after, they were able to see plenty of practice matches played casually by the Nintendo Treehouse, which also allowed them to showcase characters that didn’t get much gameplay in the tournament like Captain Falcon, Snake and the Inkling(s). IT would be smart to show that content on the ELEAGUE broadcast as well, but we’re not sure what it will contain yet.

Still, it will matter a lot more for casual players as opposed to the hardcore audience. Most of ELEAGUE’s broadcasts serve that purpose; most of the entrenched audience for games like Dota and Overwatch would rather watch tournaments and events on Twitch rather than TBS.

On the other hand, casual players might get upset when they don’t see a character they want even on the roster. Some people might get upset too when fan favorites like Ridley get crushed by Bayonetta.