I'm not overly fond of it.
The references to the spirit you're fighting are neat and I appreciate they've tried to do something creative with a game type that doesn't offer much opportunity for variety
(though Smash has way more opportunity than typical fighting games), but I got bored of it very quick.
- The challenges are fairly repetitive
- They're either way too easy or ridiculously unfair against the player without essentially disabling the rules of that match via spirits. I never found there to be a balance in the difficulty.
- Where you unlock characters seems ill thought out a lot of the time, like they're largely just plonked down randomly across the map.
I much prefer classic mode.
- Just like WoL, each characters matchups are references to that character, references which I personally preferred to those in WoL which were essentially just "this is the closest character/costume+item we could get to the spirit".
- There's variety in it, whether it's the platforming section just before the last battle
(though I wish each character had their own personal level, much like with similar levels in past games), the unique bosses such as Giga Bowser and Ganon, not to mention the returning credits minigame that plays like a shooter.
- There's more of a balanced difficulty curve.
- I unlocked characters I actually wanted to play as much faster compared to travelling WoL with a bunch of characters I'm not particularly fond of playing as.
I mean, there's enough to differentiate battles from one another though? Stamina matches, opponents being Giant or Metal, lava/ice/sticky/poison floors, heavy winds, etc.
Most of the time it's just a case of "I'll just equip a spirit that basically disables that". Sure, it's the player deciding to take away the variety at that point, but a couple of matches in particular are ridiculously unfair against the player, especially since these rule sets pretty much never have any effect on the NPC.
Even without the spirits, there's really not much going on. I've noticed the largest amount of these battles are just stamina battles or "the floor is XXX", which only ever has the same results of me either equipping a spirit to ignore that XXX or just fighting on the 3 other platforms.
It's a shame they didn't add in some other tasks from other modes and games that rarely actually get played or haven't been seen since the game they were in. Couple target break levels, punching bag thing, maybe a few 'jump on the platform' levels like from Melee. It would have felt like more variety to come across something that isn't just "avoid xxx" and "it's Mario but he's big". Classic mode, as I've pointed out, does manage better variety than Ultimate's supposed main attraction for single player.
