Smash Bros Ultimate: How to Unlock All Characters

How to Unlock All Characters in Smash Bros Ultimate

Super Smash Bros Ultimate has the largest roster of characters that the series has ever seen. Whether you were outraged that the Ice Climbers were snubbed in the Wii U entry, or you just wanted to see the return of Pichu, fear not, because Smash Bros Ultimate has them all. As you may have guessed, though, not every character in the Smash Bros Ultimate roster is unlocked from the start. Here’s how to unlock all characters in Smash Bros Ultimate.

Alright, so let’s get one thing out of the way straight away. To unlock characters in Smash Bros Ultimate, there’s no specific thing you need to do like in past entries. For example, Snake doesn’t require that you play 15 matches on Shadow Moses Island. Instead, unlocking fighters in Smash Bros Ultimate happens in a dynamic way.

Essentially, there are multiple ways you can unlock characters, which we’ve listed for you down below in a bullet point list. We’ve then gone into a little more detail down below, should you need it.

• Playing through World of Light
• Playing other game modes and winning the ‘Challenger Approaching’ fights.
• Beating a character’s Classic Mode

However, there is a bit of a trick for a faster method for unlocking every character in the game, if you just want to get straight to the full roster. We thought we’d post it here before going into detail, so here’s what you need to do.

• Play some Smash matches until you face your very first challenger, this usually takes roughly ten minutes after starting up the game. You can play one ten minute round, or a few shorter rounds, whichever you want.
• After you’ve fought the first challenger, don’t play another match. What you should do instead is hit the home button, back out to the Switch menu, and then close the game by pressing X and hit confirm.
• Now reopen the game and this time create a custom Smash playlist with a stock of one ruleset. This is basically the fastest match possible.
• Play a match with your best fighter against a single CPU. If you want to make things even faster, however, you can use a second controller to add another player, then have that player simply walk off of the edge.
• Most of the time after beating the match and getting through the results, you’ll immediately get a new challenger. You can rinse and repeat this method over and over to drastically cut down the time to unlock characters. Do note, however, this may not work each and every time, but 9 times out of 10 it will.

How to Unlock Characters in World of Light in Smash Bros Ultimate

The first method to unlock characters in Smash Bros Ultimate is in World of Light. You can unlock every fighter by playing World of Light, and unlocking them in this mode will ensure they’re playable in the entire game.

While exploring the world map within this mode, you’ll come across fighters that you need to ‘Awaken,’ which means beating them in a battle. The entire roster can be found in this mode, and are scattered across the world map.

Simply head over to the character you’d ideally like to unlock on the World of Light map, choose to ‘Awaken’ them, beat them in the battle, and you’ll have unlocked them in Smash Bros Ultimate’s roster.

Playing Other Game Modes and Winning the ‘Challenger Approaching’ Fights

Alternatively, Smash Bros Ultimate continues the series’ trend of allowing you to play the game as you wish and unlocking characters in one vs. one ‘Challenger Approaching’ fights. Simply beat them in this match and you’ll unlock them as part of the roster.

From our experience, rather than characters requiring you to reach certain pre-requisites to trigger their ‘Challenger’ fight, we got a Challenger every two Smash matches initially. As we unlocked more and more of the character roster in Smash Bros Ultimate, however, this then changed to about a Challenger every four fights.

The order in which you unlock fighters in Smash Bros Ultimate with this method remains the same, unless you’ve already unlocked a character via one of the other methods listed within this post.

You can check the unlock order down below:

• Ness
• Zelda
• Bowser
• Pit
• Inkling
• Villager
• Marth
• Young Link
• Wii Fit Trainer
• Ice Climbers
• Captain Falcon
• Peach
• Ryu
• Ike
• Jigglypuff
• King K. Rool
• Sonic
• Simon
• Zero Suit Samus
• Little Mac
• Isabelle
• Shulk
• Lucina
• Wario
• Ridley
• Pokemon Trainer
• Lucario
• Daisy
• Roy
• King Dedede
• R.O.B.
• Falco
• Luigi
• Pichu
• Richter
• Lucas
• Diddy Kong
• Meta Knight
• Snake
• Ganondorf
• Corrin
• Mega Man
• Bayonetta
• Toon Link
• Rosalina & Luma
• Incineroar
• Sheik
• Olimar
• Pac-Man
• Dark Samus
• Wolf
• Mr. Game & Watch
• Robin
• Dark Pit
• Cloud
• Duck Hunt
• Ken
• Greninja
• Chrom
• Mewtwo
• Bowser Jr.
• Dr. Mario
• Palutena

How to Unlock Characters in Classic Mode in Smash Bros Ultimate

While playing the Classic Mode in Smash Bros Ultimate, we also found ourselves getting a Challenger popping up each time we beat it with a new character. Though this could have been simply down to us having reached a set amount of time playing Smash Bros Ultimate and triggering an unlock this way, it seems a little too coincidental to us.

While these methods all resulted in us unlocking characters in Smash Bros Ultimate, it’s also possible that you’ll simply unlock characters by simply spending time playing Smash Bros Ultimate. Once you hit certain amounts of time spent within the game, it may trigger a random Challenger to approach.

However, as soon as we can get confirmation on this, we’ll be sure to update this post and let you know.

How to Retry Challenger Fights in Smash Bros Ultimate

While the Challenger fights used to simply crop back up once you won another fight in previous Smash Bros titles, Smash Bros Ultimate allows you to access this and retry challenger fights whenever you wish. We’ve broken down the steps on how to do this down below.

• After losing against a challenger, first, wait a while. Play a couple Smash rounds or hop into World of Light for a bit.
• Once you’ve played a couple of rounds, select the ‘Games & More’ option from the Main Menu.
• In the bottom right-hand corner, you’ll see a little door icon pop-up with an option called ‘Challenger’s Approach.’
• Select this, and you can now refight any challenger you’ve lost against in Smash Bros Ultimate. You’ll have to play through one at a time, in the order you took them on orginally.

And there you have everything you need to know to unlock characters in Smash Bros Ultimate. For more tips, tricks, and guides, be sure to check out our ever-expanding Smash Bros Ultimate guide wiki.

It’s filled with guides on how to play All-Star mode, what the install size is, how to play as new characters such as Ridley, Incineroar, and Inkling, as well as how to get spirit points, how to level up spirits and how many spirits there are.

TLDR;

Question: How do you unlock all characters in Super Smash Bros Ultimate?

Answer: There are a ton of characters you can play as in Super Smash Bros Ultimate, seeing as how the entire cast in back in business. In order to get all the different characters, you’ll need to just plain ol’ play the game. Over time, they will show up as a new challenger, at which point you’ll need to face off against them and beat them in order to get them. Check our list of unlockable characters to find the order.