Watch All Your Favorite Nintendo Characters Die in This Smash Bros Ultimate Intro

Nintendo held another Nintendo Direct online press conference today, this time entirely about Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. We’ll have another post wrapping up all that news shortly, but until then we wanted to bring one particular thing to your attention. It’s apparently the intro cut-scene to the game (or at least part of the game), and it’s, uh, kinda nuts.

This here is a straight-up Nintendo snuff film.

See what happens at the beginning of Super #SmashBros Ultimate that caused characters to transform into spirits! pic.twitter.com/oOdsBj6JrK

— Nintendo of Europe (@NintendoEurope) November 1, 2018

So one of the new wrinkles to Smash Ultimate are spirits. These are a bit like stickers and a bit like trophies, in that they assist your main fighter while also referencing tons of other Nintendo games and characters. Apparently these spirits exist because, uh, a flying armada of man hands wipes out all the stalwart defenders of Nintendoland, or something?

Look, Smash can be impenetrable even to those who play it, so I’m not going to try to make sense of this. All I know is what I see, and what I see is the most beloved videogame characters of all time get incinerated en masse.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will be out for the Switch on Dec. 7, so stock up on tissues between now and then. You know the waterworks will be spewing overtime when our sweet young Villager gets evaporated.