Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: How to Unlock All Characters Fast

Everybody has their favorite fighter, but the true joy of playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is found when you have unlocked all characters in the game. 77 fighters have come to the battlefield at launch, with more to come (see the full list here), but at the beginning you’ll only have the eight originals from the N64 classic. To get all 77 available for use, you’ll have to work to unlock them. Thankfully there’s a few ways to do it, and most are pretty easy. Here’s how to unlock all characters in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

To unlock all characters in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate you’ll want to play through either World of Light, Classic Mode, or Versus. World of Light is SSB Ultimate’s single player campaign, so this will take awhile, but the reward should be every character in the game, along with hours of fun playing through this epic adventure. Classic Mode takes quite awhile, tasking you with multiple fights that result in unlocks. By far, the best way to unlock all characters is found in Versus.

Each match of Versus has the chance of unlocking a new character, but there’s some behind the scenes stuff going on that prevents it from happening every time. Load the game up and do battle in Versus Mode, no matter the settings (so set it to one stock and jump off the edge to end the match fastest if you just want to unlock everyone as fast as possible) and you should unlock a character right after the first match. However, a timer is now running and until it hits ten minutes a new one will not unlock.

To get around this, some players recommend restarting the entire game. This seems to clear the timer and allow another character to unlock right away. Simply hit Home, hover over the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate icon and hit X, then close the game. Open it back up, load Versus Mode up and you should get another character right away. There may also be a “distance traveled” requirement, so if you don’t get an unlock, just play around a bit and one should kick in soon. It’s not clear if this was intentional, so watch for an update to change this in the future, but for now this is the quickest and easiest way to unlock all characters in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.