World of Light

[Dark Jaguar]

Removing the words from the song makes it a lot better! I do generally prefer music without words (classical, electronic, and such) to vocal music of course, and yeah, it's the same here.

As for which of the themes is best, it's really hard to say... the original game has the worst music, but the best concept, as the 'kid playing with toys on a desk' idea is explicitly shown. Melee's is a classic and as an intro video is certainly my favorite, though that Melee's the Smash game I played the most of by a wide margin is surely part of that. I only ever played lots of Smash because I was in college and the people I knew there often wanted to play Melee, after all. As for the newer ones, I don't know. They keep scaling up the length and ambition of the songs, but does that make them better?

All the games seem to continue that "land of imagination" theme the very first game explicitly set up. I'm a little wary of what this "world of light" subtext is intended to be. Are they saying the fans are too pure and trying to erase Nintendo by asking for change? Is it an anti-sjw screed? Or maybe it's some internal politics instead, Nintendo is making stories blander, and this is a fight against erasing the "character" they used to have (compare Chibi Robo Gamecube to modern Chibi Robos, the charm is lost when you take out the darker themes of a marriage under threat and a child trying to escape from it).

As for my favorite intro and song, Brawl's won for me, even though the gameplay has some major issues in retrospect. Both the song and the nature of the intro are just legendary. Smash 4's intro felt like a step down on both counts. Ultimate, that's going to be something Special. If the game's startup cinematic uses the instrumental theme and isn't a collection of in-game captures but a fully rendered intro, it should be good. The cinematic they did give us, that's for the story mode, so I doubt we've seen the "startup" scene yet.