Sakurai on Smash Bros. Ultimate – deciding new characters, reveal trailers, how Spirits came to be, more
Game Informer published a new interview today with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate director Masahiro Sakurai. Sakurai had plenty of interesting comments to share about how decisions are made regarding new characters, the handling of reveal trailers, how and why the Spirits mode was implemented, and more.
You can find a few excerpts from the interview below. Head on over to Game Informer for the full discussion.
On including so much content in the game with a ton of fighters and stages…
This time, I worked with the same company and same team that worked on Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS titles. And in those titles, we were able to include quite a few fighters. So I thought, if we work a bit harder, we can make the dream of including all fighters come true, so we went for it.
There will be people who might feel disappointed if fighters that appeared in a previous title are not included. I didn’t want any players to feel that way, so we worked really hard to make this happen.
But what I learned is that regardless of doing our utmost, no matter how hard we try, and no matter how many fighters we include, there will always be people who feel that way.
On deciding new characters…
It is a project after all, so we take into consideration things like labor, man-hours, the time in which the title will be sold. We decide on the fighters from the very early planning stage, and from there, we calculate and begin production. We don’t add or remove any characters during the project.
We do things like base our consideration on the results of the Smash ballot, and also balance things out so that there’s a difference in the types of fighters.
By the way, as for Incineroar, during our planning stage we knew that a new Pokémon game was coming, so we intentionally kept one spot open for that, and we decided which character to create once we received more info on the title.
On how involved Sakurai was with the character reveal trailers…
I create all the plot, including that of “World of Light.” I make dense adjustment requests to the CG staff, and I also review things like the audio. I of course take a look at the gameplay portions as well.
Thinking in terms of game development, I should probably entrust this all to someone, but I haven’t really found that someone yet…
On surprising fans with unexpected characters like Piranha Plant…
I’m actually not paying too much focus on the surprise element when we introduce a new fighter. The surprise element quickly fades once the announcement has been made.
Rather, I believe it’s important to have a good balance as a game. In the past titles in the series, Mr. Game & Watch, R.O.B. and Duck Hunt Dog were some of the examples we offered outside of people’s typical expectations. However, if we don’t have these types of fighters, and we only had typical “hero/heroine” type fighters in the lineup, there’s not much difference. It’s probably not very interesting. Correct?
Also, unlike some main characters from some (not widely known) franchises, Piranha Plant is a character everyone knows well. And, I want to make sure to remind everyone that it is a limited-time offer fighter everyone can get for free as an early-purchase bonus.
On the initial idea behind Spirits and why they were implemented how they are…
We wanted to provide a solid single-player experience, but at the same time, we didn’t have enough development resources especially for creating character models. That’s where the idea came from. We needed to come up with a system that is fun and not a repetitive experience even when you battle against [computer players] repeatedly.
Cons for this system are:
– Because there are so many fighters, we can’t tell stories for each individual fighter in detail.
– We can’t support creating exclusive stages/terrains (i.e. side-scroll action game terrain, etc.) for it.
– We can’t add new rules, etc.
On the other hand, pros are:
– We can utilize a variety of characters (But not featuring figures anymore)
– We have a large pool of music, stages and fighters.
With all that in mind as a whole, we concluded that we should create something themed after this large library of characters outside of fighters, and let players enjoy simulating fights using them. Everything else expanded from that base idea.
On whether Ultimate is the end of a chapter in any regard…
With the background I just explained here, every time I work on this game, I’ve devoted myself to making it under the assumption, “this is the last one.” That said, I have no idea what future holds, so I can’t deny that there’s no next one either.
