Nintendo’s Arms Gets Its Last New Character

Arms

Nintendo’s carnivalesque boxing game Arms, released in June, just received what looks like its final content update. Arms 5.0 just dropped along with the new fighter Dr. Coyle, the “empress of the ARMS lab,” and was appended by an announcement that, from now on, Arms will only be receiving balance patches.

“As a big update, this time will be the last update,” Arms‘ team wrote in Japanese on a Nintendo blog (which Kotaku‘s Tim Rogers kindly translated). “Of course we’ll continue tuning game balance, so please continue to enjoy Arms, which we have filled with so many lively characters up to this point!”

Dr. Coyle’s trailer is remarkable. It’s dark. The music is insidious. As the director of ARMS Laboratories, she wants to be the most powerful fighter of all time — and in the process, subjects herself to her own experiments.

Dr. Coyle is the fifth and apparently final Arms fighter to join the game’s roster post-release. While Max Brass came out a month after launch, players had to wait two months for Lola Pop. Dr. Coyle is the last of three fighters to come out in a little more than one month. We favourably reviewed Arms’ newer additions.

Arms wowed early Switch owners with its slinky fighting mayhem. Its concept, music and wild world of characters led the game to sell over a million units in its first release month. It’s an impressive figure, but after a few months playing the game and monitoring its community, it seemed like Arms did not have legs.

Arms only had one major Twitch streamer immediately after it launched. Arms will make its major fighting games debut at EVO Japan in 2018, but fans still aren’t sure how it will fare as a competitive game — especially since its esports debut involved motion controls. At the time, I speculated that was because Arms plays like a great minigame but falls a little short of the robust fighting game lots of folks were looking for.