In the recent “Mr. Sakurai Presents” video update, the newest DLC fighter Sephiroth was confirmed to be releasing worldwide on December 22. Interestingly, though, players are actually able to obtain the character several days early by completing the limited-time only “Sephiroth Challenge”. You can access the Sephiroth Challenge from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s title screen until December 22. For today’s (rather short) post, we’re going to talk about some easy ways to beat the Sephiroth Challenge on the hardest difficulty!
Of course, if you’re reading this post on or after December 22, 2020, this won’t be of much use to you because the challenge will no longer be available! But we’ll keep this post up to preserve history or something like that.
Best Strategies
There are several ways to cheese this challenge. As we know, Ultimate’s AI is highly exploitable, so there are many ways to take advantage of it. First, the Sephiroth challenge is a stamina battle, so you’ll need to whittle down Sephiroth’s health all the way to zero. On Easy mode, Sephiroth has 100 HP. On Normal difficulty, he has 150; and on Very Hard, he has 200. There’s not much of a difference in these matches other than his health count, so keep that in mind. You’re also able to play each difficulty over and over as often as you’d like, so don’t worry about being locked into just one.
One really popular method of beating the challenge in a matter of seconds is picking Mr. Game & Watch and hoping for an instant 9. If used near the ledge, it can send Sephiroth right off the map, even if his health hasn’t been fully depleted. This takes some luck, though, but with repeated attempts, you can definitely prevail!
Another method you could use is playing as Ness and spamming PK Fire just like they do in Elite Smash. Ultimate’s AI is really bad with DI and SDI, so if you use PK Fire as close to Sephiroth as you possibly can, you’ll be able to rack up lots of damage in a short amount of time. Using Ness, I was able to beat the Very Hard difficulty in only about thirty seconds, so it’s certainly a good way to win the challenge. You could also use a character with super armor, but this is less effective considering it’s a stamina match.
Beating the Sephiroth challenge is – generally speaking – pretty easy! Players have been having fun trying to go for world records. Last I heard, the record for Very Hard was under three seconds, which is simultaneously insane and completely believable. While we’re here, here’s a miscellaneous site update: once we’ve had ample time to play as Sephiroth, we’ll be making an AI prediction post. In the meantime, why not check out our article on Banjo & Kazooie, Terry, and Byleth AI predictions?
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