Yoshi’s Story Is Back In This Weekend’s Smash Tournament

“Yoshi’s Story” is an extremely small Super Smash Bros. stage that first appeared in Smash Bros. Melee. Now it’s in Smash Bros. Ultimate, and the organisers of Genesis 6 have decided to make it playable in one of Smash’s biggest annual tournaments this weekend, showing a healthy willingness to experiment when it comes to the game’s evolving rulesets.

Smash Bros. Ultimate includes 103 different stages for players to battle across; 305 if you include all of their Battlefield and Omega variants. Tournament organisers try to set rules that help narrow that selection down, but since the game’s only been out for eight weeks, nothing is set in stone.

As a result, Yoshi’s Story will be one of 11 stages top players can fight on at Genesis 6.

Not everyone has been in favour of the addition. While some players like the idea of using a new game in the series to try and mix things up, others are opposed to anything that could introduce more bias into the equation, and note that the stage is otherwise quite similar to the standard Battlefield stage.

Since it’s relatively easy to got knocked off the screen in Yoshi’s Story and the stage isn’t completely flat, some characters such as Marth or Fox arguably have an advantage. Some Smash fans feel that’s unfair. Others don’t know the meaning of the word and would be happy to see pro players battle it out on nothing but chaotic nightmare stages such as “WarioWare, Inc.”

Only time will tell what the best balance between keeping things equitable and indulging in the game’s whimsical idiosyncrasies will be.

Genesis 6 kicked off today, with matches going until 5:00PM AEDT before resuming Sunday at 5:00AM AEDT. Top eight will take place on Monday at 1:30PM AEDT. You can watch the main matches for Smash Bros. Ultimate streaming on VGBootCamp’s Twitch channel, with a full list of times and streams for the rest of the games and matches available on Smash.gg.

Outside of Nintendo’s platform fighter, there’s also a big Gears of War 4 tournament going on this weekend. The Mexico Open, featuring a $US200,000 ($276,303) prize pool, will see dozens of teams, including both top sides like Optic Gaming, competing in the Gears Pro Circuit’s first event of 2019.

Play began today and resumes on Sunday at 3:00AM AEDT and the same time on Monday. You can watch that tournament live on the Gears of War Twitch channel.