Fortnite's new season is leaning hard into its favorite trick: pulling characters from everywhere in gaming and tossing them onto the island together. Season 4, dubbed Override, is reportedly going all-in on video game crossovers, with names like Ryu and Sonic headlining the lineup. Epic has been perfecting this particular move for years now and they've gotten scarily good at it.

If you've lost track, that's fair. The crossover machine never stops. One season it's anime icons, the next it's footballers and metal guitarists. But a season built specifically around video game characters feels like Fortnite getting back to its roots, if a game from 2017 can have roots. Ryu alone is a throwback that stings a little. I dumped entire weeks of my life into Street Fighter II on the SNES, and now the guy who taught me what a hadouken was is doing emotes next to a guy in a banana suit.

Sonic being there is the part that still feels surreal no matter how many times it happens. Sega's mascot spent the 90s as the face of the console war against Nintendo, the sworn enemy of everything Mario stood for, and now he's appearing in a game where you can buy him a pickaxe. Kratos showed up in Fortnite years ago and I wrote it off as a one-off curiosity, and now crossovers are so routine that a season announcement lists game characters like it's a Smash Bros. datamine.

That's really the comparison everyone reaches for, so I'll say it: Epic is building its own Smash Bros., except with a rotating door instead of a fixed roster. Nintendo spent two decades assembling the video game all-stars lineup. Fortnite does it seasonally, and unlike Smash, it doesn't have to negotiate permanent inclusion. Everyone's a guest star.

Whether you love that or find it exhausting probably depends on how attached you are to these characters having any weight of their own. Me, I've made peace with it. The original Final Fantasy was the game that convinced me this medium could build worlds worth caring about, and I'd be lying if seeing Cloud in Fortnite a few years back didn't land somewhere between delight and mild sacrilege. You hold both feelings. That's just how crossovers work when you've been playing since the NES era.

The full character list is still shaking out, and half the fun of a new season is the datamine trickle before the storefront confirms everything. If you want to play the naming game yourself, the original rundown over at MSN has the details on who's confirmed so far.

Season 4 Override is live now for anyone who wants to drop in and see Ryu fire a hadouken at a cartoon hedgehog. Somewhere, my 1992 self is very confused. He'll get over it.