This weekend, the Nintendo Live 2018 event was held in Japan. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate director Masahiro Sakurai took the stage once the event's tournament concluded, in order to live play and comment the game's Classic Mode and Spirits Mode.

As we already know, this time in Smash Ultimate, each character has its own Classic Mode, with their own set of opponents and stages. Each character's Classic Mode also has its own subtitle, which are all puns or references to their game of origin. For example, Megaman's classic mode is subtitled "Dr. Mario's Mystery", referencing " Dr. Wily's Mystery", the subtitle of the Japanese version of Megaman 2.

Sakurai-san shows a bit of Isabelle's Classic Mode. Its subtitle is hard to explain and is basically a pun on a Japanese idiom, pointing out the fact that her mode has her facing all 23 female characters in the game.

We then see for the first time how to set the difficulty in Classic Mode. It's done by choosing a part of a mural, which was also shown for the first time here. The mural's illustration has its leftmost side being quite peaceful, meaning its easy. As you go right on the mural, it turns into a battle, which gets fiercer and fiercer as you go right, meaning the difficulty rises. As you play the game, you'll unlock more and more parts of the right side of the mural, until unlocking the highest difficulty. The highest difficulty you pick, the better the rewards you'll obtain.

As you win matches, the mural will also move to the right depending on your performance, making each following match harder.

Next, we get to see Ryu's Classic Mode, which imitates Street Fighter II. All the battles are duels, on omega version stages and with HPs instead of percents. Just like in Street Fighter II, the music even changes into panic mode when one combatant hits the last part of their HP. Ryu's first opponent is Ken, and his second opponent is Zero Suit Samus because she's dressed in blue and proficient with kicks, just like Chun-Li. Chun-Li's stage BGM even plays during the fight. Ryu also fights Incineroar as a substitute for Zangief, as they're both wrestlers clad in red.

Classic Mode is also playable with two players teaming together.

After that, we get to see the Spirits Board. Along with Adventure Mode: World of Light, it is one of the sub-modes in Spirits Mode, where you can get new Spirits. Each time you enter the mode, ten different spirits are listed on the board, and they change after a certain time, which is 5 minutes most of the time. Sakurai-san enters the mode and describes the various Spirits that appeared. He cracked multiple jokes here, like how he has absolutely no idea who Tetra's real identity could be, and how Super Sonic looks a lot like a certain race of extraterrestrial warriors.

If you don't want any of the Spirits currently listed on the Spirits Board and don't feel like waiting until their time limits expire, you can also use items to shuffle the selection. You can shuffle them all, or make it so only the currently empty slots of the board are shuffled. You can also make it so only a certain type of Spirits appear.

To win a Spirit listed on the Spirit Board, you must win its Spirit Battle and then manage to hit the Spirit during the roulette after the fight. Following the hint displayed and equipping yourself with the right Spirits will greatly help in winning Spirit Battles. As we previously detailed, the Spirits follow a rock paper scissors system similar to the Triangle Weapon System in Fire Emblem. Moreover, each Spirit has different specificities. For example, Fireman, despite being an Attack-type Spirit, is stronger than Whispy Woods, a Shield-type Spirit, because Whispy Woods is weak against fire.

If choosing your Spirits yourself is too tedious, you can also automatically equip some of the most adequate Spirits you own by pressing Y button. You can also pre-register differents sets of Spirits to quickly change them.

If the Spirit Battle's too hard, you can also use items that give various handicaps to the enemy. You can either slow down their charge attacks, give them constant overtime damage,  make their teammate weaker, disable item spawns, or make it so enemies start the fight at 50% damage. After winning the Spirit Battle, if the roulette's too fast, you can either slow it down or reduce the shield by using items. And even if you fail, you can spend your SP points to retry right away, though it's very expensive.

You can also feed Spirits to level them up, recycle them to get items or fuse them into stronger Spirits. All the fusions are jokes or puns that actually make sense too. For example, you need Cutman and Cardboard to make Paper Mario. Lastly, some spirits can evolve when hitting Level 99. For example, Maria Renard starts as her 12 years old Rondo of Blood version and can evolve into her 17 years old Symphony of the Night version. Meanwhile, Naked Snake evolves into Big Boss.

Lastly, Sakurai-san also shows the Help Mode, which this time includes a video illustrating each entry, and a full moveset list for all characters. He also shows one of the new systems in Ultimate: when grabbing a ledge successively without touching the ground, the time a character stays invincible becomes shorter each time they grab the ledge, until some point where they can't grab the ledge anymore.

At the end of the video, Sakurai-san mentions that he knows everyone wants to see more of Adventure Mode: World of Light, but he wants players to discover it when the game releases. It seems we won't see much about it until release, and we'll have to make do with its reveal trailer.

You can watch Sakurai-san's live play and comments below. You can check our full coverage of the game's latest Direct here. You can also read our eulogy for the characters that didn't make the cut, and check out one of the many Infinity War parodies of the World of Light trailer.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate releases for Switch on December 7th. You can pre-order the game on Amazon.