Mario & Luigi: Brothership’s Connie initially had human-like design

Nintendo and Acquire have shared concept art for Mario & Luigi: Brothership’s Connie, who initially had a human-like design.

We have a look at the concept art for the character above. Art director Hitomi Furuta said in an interview published today that the design changed once the team “settled on the motifs of outlets and electric plugs, and the ideas of an outlet-like face and a plug design that looks like a hat fit right into that world.”

Here’s the exchange with Furuta and producer Akira Otani:

Furuta: Connie, an original character that appears in this game, was initially designed to look like a human. Afterwards, we settled on the motifs of outlets and electric plugs, and the ideas of an outlet-like face and a plug design that looks like a hat fit right into that world. Eventually, we landed on the current design.

Otani: If other characters looked too human, for example, you may end up with a world where Mario seems superfluous as a protagonist. When creating original characters, it’s important to develop characters and a world that Mario wouldn’t feel out of place in. From that perspective, Acquire has studied the previous games in this series very closely to achieve this. Furuta-san, your efforts came across clearly in the development materials you shared with us. There were a lot of hand-written comments representing your inner voice, such as, “This should work this way… Nope…do it all over”. (Laughs)

Nintendo and Acquire also shared some information about Snoutlet:

Otani: Speaking of original characters, if we only had Mario and Luigi’s reactions to go on as the story developed, we’d miss out on some detailed information. So that necessitated a partner character for them. That’s how the partner in this new world, Snoutlet, came to be.

Furuta: Since the decision for an electric plug as a motif was made early on, we considered various options regarding what form Snoutlet should take, including whether to go for a plug-shaped design.

Ohashi: I was intrigued by one of the ideas that came out of this – a piggy bank-like character whose features could either look like a nose or eyes. Snoutlet is my favourite. (Laughs)

Furuta: We first designed Snoutlet so that the eyes were at the top of the head, but while leaving just the eyebrows, we made the nose look like the eyes so it’s fun to guess where the real eyes are.

Thanks to Nintendo for the news above. You can also find some interesting concept art for Mario himself here.