Sakurai on Smash Bros. Ultimate – newest fighter reveals, modes, and more
Smash Bros. Ultimate director Masahiro Sakurai returns to Famitsu this week with his latest column. In it, he goes over information revealed during the Nintendo Direct earlier this month.
Sakurai wrote about the inclusion of Simon, Richter, Chrom, Dark Samus, and King K. Rool, going a bit into why they were added. He also covers modes plus the huge amount of stages and music.
Here’s our full translation:
The Direct on August 8th was Nintendo’s second Smash Bros. Ultimate-centered presentation. This column was written just before then… I’m looking forward to seeing everybody’s reactions!
Castlevania Enters the Fray!
The Castlevania series serves as yet another third-party series represented in Smash Bros., and having it included was a mountain of a hurdle. Nevertheless, even if it was overkill, I did my best. Simon and Richter. The whip’s physics. The guest boss characters in the Dracula’s Castle stage. Dracula’s second form. Alucard. 34 tracks from the Castlevania series. As for the reveal movie, I put my absolute all into making it, even if it was just a character reveal. I’d imagine there were a lot of people that went, “huh!? Who’s Richter!?” too. I’d be happy if those people could become more familiar with the character through Smash Bros. Ultimate.
Echo Fighters
The Direct also revealed that Chrom from the Fire Emblem series and Dark Samus from the Metroid series would be joining the fight. Both Chrom and Dark Samus were highly requested fighters, the former mostly being within Japan and the latter being overseas.
Echo Fighters aren’t mere substitutes for other characters. While we started by changing their victory poses and their taunts, we also changed other aspects of how they play where we felt it was necessary. People tend to overlook the characters’ artwork – despite them being still images of the characters posing, there’s a lot of fine tuning that goes into perfecting even one character. We also have to add in the eight color variations, of course. A game where you can completely change a character’s color in earnest… I don’t think there’s anything else like it.
100 Stages
And including Battlefield, Big Battlefield, and Final Destination brings the total up to 103. If you include the Training Stage too, that’s 104… And if you were to include each stage’s transformations that’d be over 300 stages!! It’s truly outrageous. When you line them all up on the Stage Select screen though, it can be kind of troublesome to find the stage that you want. Ah, looking back on it now, stage development was the one of the things that took up most of our time. We were primarily porting stages from previous entries, so updating the graphics increased our workload significantly; there were a number of stages that took over a year to develop. Developing the Battlefield and Final Destination versions of each stage wasn’t easy, either. Even though hitting that 100-stage mark was a challenge with our strained manpower, I hope you enjoy the various stages present in the game.
An Overwhelming Amount of Music
The number of songs you’ll hear in the stages alone is around 800 – that’s over 27 hours of music!! We’ve accumulated everything up until this point in the series, and that’s nothing to scoff at. We must’ve been aiming for a Guinness World Record or something!
I want to be clear though, this game isn’t just packed with music alone. Here’s the backstory: due to advancements in compression technology, we were able to compress this game’s music to ¼ the size of what it was in the previous game… while maintaining the same sound quality. It must be magic!!
Squad Strike
In order to make the ever-expanding roster of Battle Modes even more fun, we’ve added things like the 5-on-5 Squad Strike, Tournament Mode, and Smashdown. We think we’ve prepared a number of ways to allow players to make use of the full roster of characters! Squad Strike is a 5-on-5 or 3-on-3 style mode that allows players to participate in either a knockout-style tournament between multiple players, or a battle between two players’ chosen characters. The former is a style commonly seen in martial arts like Judo or Kendo, while the latter allows the winner to keep using the same character until they lose. The truth is, I wanted to include terms like “Senbō,” “Chūken,” and “Fukushō,” but I wasn’t sure they would translate well.*
Final Smash Meter
You can also turn on the Final Smash Meter, which charges over time (by default, this function is set to “off”). In most fighting games, there’s usually a gauge that when full allows the player to perform some kind of finishing blow or a super combo – the Final Smash Meter was meant to imitate that. It can cause the match to unfold in a pretty exciting way, so it’s probably more suited for parties and the like than serious matches.
King K. Rool Comes Aboard!
When deciding what fighters would be included in this game, we used Smash for Wii U/3DS’ character survey as reference. Ultimately, we found that King K. Rool from the Donkey Kong Country series was one of the most popular picks! In the reveal, I felt it’d be better if I left room for imagination, so I didn’t really explain his moveset or the character’s peculiarities.
To capture King K. Rool’s likeness, I based his fighter on the fact that he “stands upright.” Yet because of the height limit, I had to make him a little smaller compared to his original appearance, so he’s not exactly to scale – sorry about that.
As for development, we’ve all continued busying ourselves with final preparations for the game; I work pretty tirelessly every day as well. But until the day the game is released, I have every intention of giving it my all!
* Senbō refers to the athlete that competes first in a team competition in sports like Judo and Kendo, Chūken refers to the middle athlete, and Fukushō refers to the fourth athlete.
Translation by provided by Nico Thaxton on behalf of Nintendo Everything
If you use any of this translation, please be sure to source Nintendo Everything. Do not copy its full contents.
