Is World of Light a Suitable Adventure Mode?

Super Smash Bros is known for mashing popular video game characters together and being a fun and engaging fighting game. Despite the series popularity as a party game, it has always had something for players to do alone, though Smash Bros for Wii U and 3DS were somewhat lacking. Smash Bros Ultimate has a new mode called World of Light, which is single player only.

While I appreciate a good adventure mode, Brawl set the bar for what a Super Smash Bros game's adventure mode could be with Subspace Emissary. I personally found most parts of the mode to be great fun, but by far the best part was watching the characters interact with each other. Plus you could play the mode entirely with a friend.

Does World of Light in Smash Bros Ultimate match the quality and fun of Subspace Emissary?

No. At least not to me.

Not only is World of Light missing any kind of multiplayer, it's also very short on cutscenes, and the characters don't really interact with each other. The entire mode is essentially fighting battles with other characters on standard Smash Bros Ultimate stages. There's nothing much to unlock either aside from spirits, which are useless in normal Smash Bros Ultimate modes. And not only are spirits all but required to progress the story, but they're a pain to manage.

By the time I finished the mode, I was so irritated by the repetition that I wanted it to have ended way before it did. It went far too long with too little content. The references to other games were nice, but with no explanation about what game was being referenced many of them went over my head. This also extends into the spirits themselves, which lack any description other than which game series they appeared in.

I found World of Light repetitive and slow. You can't unlock characters for the main modes, you can't play with two players, and characters hardly react to each other. Smash Bros Ultimate is still an amazing game, but adventure mode brought the experience down for me.