Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash team on HD development, new characters, amiibo, and online play

Fixation on the characters

Famitsu: In this game there are characters appearing for the first time in Mario Tennis series like Toadette and Sprixie Princess. How did you decide on these characters?

Shugo: We determined the playable characters while consulting with Nintendo.

Toshiharu: We wanted to include new characters, so we also consulted with the character-specialist staff from our company, and chose the appearing characters.

Hiroyuki: We want to add characters people who bought the game will want to use, so from among the historic Nintendo titles, the popular characters would naturally get gathered up.

Famitsu: Characters with lots of personalities are appearing, so I think it might be hectic in terms of balancing.

Hiroyuki: Of course it’s hectic (laughs). We’re thinking about the character stats from their images, but if it doesn’t fit their images, the fans wouldn’t accept it, and neither would I. Having said that, my image may deviate a bit from the public’s, and I also had a failure in the early times where a character couldn’t be accepted by fans, but we’re doing the balancing from the experience we’ve stacked.

Famitsu: Care to elaborate more on the failure in early times?

Shugo: I’m sorry we’re digressing to Mario Golf 64, but in that early game, Mario’s specialty shot was a Curving Draw Ball. In my mind, the image of ‘Golf is about Draw Balls’ was strong at that time. On the other side, the public image turned out to be ‘Mario = Straight Ball’ (laughs).

Hiroyuki: Balancing is really hard indeed. For example I think Mario is a character anyone would want to play as first. However, if the first character you use is too strong, it wouldn’t be established as a sports game. Having said that, it wouldn’t be right either if we make Mario too weak. For our company which has created RPGs for a long time, our specialty field is in detailed balancing, but we always have a hard time deciding stats for Mario (laughs).

Famitsu: It’s because you have the know-how, you can make a well-balanced tennis game, while unleashing the characters’ personalities.

Toshiharu: Camelot really loves the Mario series, so they did a well done job on not only the stats, but also the staging of minor characters, so I’m thankful on that.

Famitsu: It’s fun to look at the stagings like Boo disappears for an instant after hitting the ball, isn’t it.

Hiroyuki: Speaking of Boo, when we wanted to add the character in MT64, Nintendo was strongly against it. They said “Boo can’t even wield a racket” (laughs). But it’s because we have disappearing characters like Boo, I think we can experience things that make Mario games interesting, and on the other hand if we don’t include those features there would be no meaning in making a Mario game.