Sakurai not prioritizing Namco Bandai characters for Smash Bros. Wii U/3DS
If you thought that Nintendo’s collaboration for Namco Bandai with the new Smash Bros. Wii U and 3DS games would open the floodgates for all sorts of third-party characters, you’ll be disappointed to hear that this isn’t the case. Chances are we won’t be seeing any characters from Tekken, Tales, or any other series.
Masahiro Sakurai told IGN that the team isn’t prioritizing Namco Bandai characters just because the company is assisting with development.
“Just because the game is being cooperatively developed with Namco Bandai involved, that doesn’t at all mean that they’d be given any special consideration for having characters in the game. Smash Bros. can still be considered as an all-star collection of Nintendo characters. Just like with Mega Man or any other third-party character, it would have to be a very special situation.”
When I asked about the volume of third party characters present in the new Smash Bros. game, Sakurai noted that Mega Man himself was a very special arrangement – that bringing in non-Nintendo characters can be quite the challenge.
Sakurai went on to discuss the difficulty in adding third-party characters to Smash Bros. Even Pokemon characters aren’t the easiest to bring in.
“Adding third-party characters should be considered a very special case. In the last game, when we added Sonic and Snake, there were lots of different hoops to jump through as far as getting approvals and making sure all the parties involved were happy with the way things went. You can consider it a very special circumstance for that to happen. Even in cases like adding Pokemon characters, there are a lot of parties involved and there’s a lot of wrangling. It’s much tougher than people can imagine. I know lots of people have requests and their own ideas about third-party characters that would work, but I want people to understand that adding a third-party character like Mega Man is a very special situation.”
