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.
Two more Monster Hunter 4 creatures have been revealed, thanks to a new update on the game’s official website.
First, the Hidden Shark Zaboazagiru
– Amphibious monster and adult Sukuagiru
– Spits out a special liquid built up inside its body
– Its surroundings are freezing and it wears ice-like armor on its body
– Earned the nickname Hidden Shark because of its unimaginable transfiguration
And the Iron Dragon Kushala Daora
– Ancient dragon with outer skin like iron that wears the wind
– Known as the Wind Soaring Dragon
– Form flies about the sky
– When it wears the wind, hunters are unable to to approach it due to the wind pressure
Someone has created an image comparing every character from the Smash Bros. games based on the currently-known roster of the Wii U/3DS titles. Look for it below:
Nintendo’s new Smash Bros. games for Wii U and 3DS will not be capable of cross-play functionality. However, Masahiro Sakurai confirmed to Joystiq that players will be able to take customized characters and transfer them to the Wii U version.
The specifics on the customizations aren’t entirely clear. But we do know that they aren’t related to costumes and won’t need to be unlocked through repetitive tasks. The developers want to avoid these kinds of tasks as the team makes a “stress free, easy connectivity” between the two versions.
In other news, Sakurai had nothing to say about the possibility of the level editor’s return, saying: “no comment.”
Platinum Games’ Hideki Kamiya showed interest in working on Star Fox in 2010. The same held true last year. When interviewed at E3 2013 this week, Kamiya once again said that he’d love to work on Star Fox or Nazo no Murasame J?.
“Of course I’d like to work together with Nintendo to make original games going forward. But as far as Nintendo franchises, the reality is that these are big franchises that have lots of fans and lots of history and it’d be really hard in my position to say ‘Oh, let me make one of these games.’ But tomorrow, if suddenly somebody came to me and said ‘We want you to make Star Fox,’ of course I would be pleased. So Star Fox is one, another series, Murasame J?. I grew up on Nintendo games so there’s a whole lot of respect for those.”
