Let's start with the music, because it's the first thing you'll come across when booting up Arms, Nintendo's all-new Switch exclusive. Caixa and surdo drums burst into a rhythm met by a bright chorus being sung through the widest of smiles. It's a tune I haven't been able to stop humming ever since first hearing it, an infectious little samba that sets up the cartoonish capoeira that is Arms' combat - a heady dance of swirling limbs and dazzling colour as players duke it out. Not since Mario Kart 8's joyous cover version of the series' original theme tune has a title screen done such a wonderful job of starting you off in the best possible way. Let's do this, it sings. Let's play!
Mario Kart 8's also as good a place to start as any, actually, given how Arms is what many of the team behind 2014's exquisite racer did next. This is nominally a fighting game, but if so then it is to the likes of Street Fighter or Tekken what Mario Kart is to Forza or Gran Turismo. It's a potent distillation, with a few of Nintendo's own ingredients thrown in for good measure: you take part in one-on-one fights in busy arenas, exchanging blows via your comically extended limbs in a series of simple, brutal fights where you don't have to worry about the fussiness of special inputs. In Arms, it's straight down to the business end of things.
It's tempting to say there's never been anything quite like the overstated pugilism of Arms, but in truth there has - in part, at least. There's a pinch of Punch-Out!!, Genyo Takeda's rhythm-infused brawler, in the close quarters camera and the heavy emphasis on timing, just as there's a little Cyber Troopers Virtual-On or Gundam Versus in the merry jig of its combat and the importance it places on the arenas themselves. Similarities abound, but perhaps the best way of understanding it is thus: it's Nintendo does fighting games, a high concept that should tell you all you really need to know.
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