Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 15 (Patreon)

Welcome, everyone, to the 15th issue of Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone.  

Today, we are going to take a look at the VR mode in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and how it allows us to see parts of stages that were not intended to be seen.

Edge of Virtual Reality

VR mode was introduced to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in the 3.1.0 update on May 30, 2019. The mode is relatively limited; only about half of the stages can be selected and all matches must be timed, with the maximum of 10 minutes. Items, online functionality, and multiplayer (the last one for obvious reasons of two or more players not being able to share a VR screen) are disabled as well.

Still, there are a number of Mario franchise-related stages selectable in the mode. The thing that makes modeling spaces for VR different from normal 3D applications is that it is not possible to restrict the camera. The player will always be able to move their head around; to not move the in-game camera in response to the VR headset (or in this case, the entire console) moving would both defeat the purpose and induce headaches in the user due to their movements being improperly reflected in the game world.

Of course, the stages in the game were never modeled with VR in mind; the functionality was added far after the game was finished and there is little chance it was discussed during development. Even if it were, the vast majority of the game's stages are returning stages from previous games in the series and as such were originally designed years ago. As such, the space behind the default position of the camera in most stages is devoid of meaningful content as it was never intended to be seen.

The game deals with the player turning around in VR mode in one of two following ways: on some stages, the player can just look at the empty space and see whatever little content there is, mostly the back of skyboxes. On other stages, the camera does move, but the screen very quickly blacks out when it swivels too far back. Even then, it is possible to see some of the otherwise hidden content if a screenshot is taken fast enough.

I will now go through a collection of screenshots I have taken in that mode on stages related to Mario, Donkey Kong and Yoshi franchises and point out some details that can be seen in VR mode.

First off, the only Mario-related stage in the game that does not originate in an earlier Super Smash Bros. title, New Donk City Hall:

Moving the camera to the left shows what is at the end of the long Brooklyn Bridge-like bridge. The building that would normally be at the end of the bridge is missing, resulting in the end of it floating in mid-air. There is also an irregularity with the shading in the water, this is due to the ground-level structure (i.e. city streets that turn into docks near the water) that would usually make a closed circle around the New Donk City stage being cut off, so there is empty space under the water between the end of the bridge and the flat texture at the very back of the stage, resulting in conspicuously dark water.

Please excuse the Russian language setting in this and several other screenshots; I had taken them while simultaneously doing research on the Russian localization of the game.

View behind the default camera position. Here we can see the low quality of the city textures used for the back of the stage; in Super Mario Odyssey, these are several times further away from the camera and thus their low resolution is not as noticeable.

View to the right of the stage. This bridge ends behind a cluster of buildings so it does not appear as broken as the other one. Note the utter desolation of the building that would normally contain the Mayor Pauline Commemorative Park - it is missing all the features like the trees, fences and benches, except the grass and the Spark Pylon. This is actually reminiscent of how it appears during the nighttime section of New Donk City in Super Mario Odyssey, where it is also stripped of content.

Next up, Mushroom Kingdom from the original Super Smash Bros.:

This is one of those stages where turning around completely makes the screen black out, but it is still possible to turn around enough to see the back of the skybox, which is in this case a literal box.  The area behind the default camera is a simple wall with the same hill texture as the visible walls behind and to the sides of the stage.

Here is the left side. Note that the red "danger" signs on the black background have been a part of this stage since its original appearance on the Nintendo 64; for an unknown reason, this is one of the few stages in the series with walk-off blast lines (i.e. where it is possible to lose by walking off-screen to the side) where the blast lines are indicated by an object within the stage (which is visible even without VR simply by pausing and moving the camera).

Rainbow Cruise from Super Smash Bros. Melee is a stage where it is possible to turn the camera around completely, and the area behind the camera is surprisingly well-modeled with only minor visual discrepancies like a seam in the skybox texture (near the right edge).

A look at some of the landmasses to the left and right of the stage.

Kongo Falls from Super Smash Bros. Melee is another stage where the camera cannot be turned around completely without blacking out, but whatever is visible just by looking down and to the sides is enough to see that the stage is floating entirely in mid-air. As floating landmasses do exist in the Donkey Kong series (such as the Fungi Forest lobby island in Donkey Kong 64 or the entirety of the Secret Seclusion world in Donkey Kong Country Returns), this may be a very pragmatic but also universe-consistent way of depicting the waterfall.

More views of the edge of the floating island.

Jungle Japes from Super Smash Bros. Melee is programmed to fade to black extremely quickly, so the screenshots I could take are darkened, but it is still visible what is happening to the background. The entirety of it only takes up 180° of the view and just ends beyond it, leaving only the skybox. A piece of the background juts out slightly beyond the cut-off point - this is very common when looking at the edges of backgrounds with free-moving cameras as that piece must have been saved as an irregularly-shaped texture and it is much easier to have it protrude beyond the viewing field than to deliberately cut it off.

The same can be seen on the left side of the stage.

The Yoshi's Story stage from Super Smash Bros. Melee also fades to black, but not quickly enough to hide that the skybox here is not fully modeled. The floor and back wall of the stage are entirely missing, revealing a solid color, which in 3D environments is one step above complete darkness and a non-updating area (a glitchy area where the screen does not rewrite itself between frames, resulting in objects leaving trails behind themselves, see the Super Mario 3D World glitch at 3:20 in this video for a good visual example) in terms of effort to create.

More views of the missing skybox.

Delfino Plaza from Super Smash Bros. Brawl also gets darkened quickly, but a few interesting things can still be seen. In the distance to the right of the stage, there is a small texture of the Delfino Airstrip.

The top of the skybox has vertical blue lines (very faint, may require zooming in on the image to view) converge on the apex. 

On the Figure-8 Circuit stage from Super Smash Bros. Brawl, moving the camera to the right shows that one of the walls of the audience stands is missing, so that the sky is visible through it (thin blue rectangle to the left of the tall grey block near the center of the image). There is also a noticeable cutoff in the clouds on the very edge on the right.

For an unknown reason, I was able to turn left further without the screen darkening. Here, we can clearly see the cutoff of the far background on the left and the ground being angled in such as way as to suggest the stage is completely square (wich would fit with the checkerboard mowing pattern in the grass). Interestingly, there are isolated bushes on the edge of the stage that would never be seen normally.

Luigi's Mansion from Super Smash Bros. Brawl has an extremely quick fade-out reaction time, so the most we can do is see the stage from afar, revealing the entirety of the umbrella-shaped rock supporting the mansion. This location slightly resembles the Treacherous Mansion from Luigi's Mansion 2, although this is likely to be a coincidence.

Paper Mario from Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS has a unique variation on the missing skybox. Instead of just being a default color as in the Yoshi's Story stage, the yellow rectangle behind the camera has a glowing effect. This is actually the same glowing effect used by the sun in the background of the Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door portion of the stage.

The same visible from the other side.

Finally, Mario Circuit from Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. While these floating islands can be seen during regular gameplay, they require pausing the game when the playable platform goes through loops to view. These were not actually present in the original racetrack in Mario Kart 8; while it does feature similar floating cliffs, none of them are this large. Also note the low-polygon river model.

Another, even larger island visible on the right side of the screen. This is only a 2D texture; if it was a 3D model, it would be large enough to be able to function as a level in Mario platformer.

Unfortunately, Kongo Jungle from the original Super Smash Bros. and WarioWare, Inc. from Super Smash Bros. Brawl have all their visible content on screen already even without VR, leading only darkness to be displayed to the sides and behind the camera.

This  concludes today's issue. Thank you very much for reading.