Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: Masahiro Sakurai, nintendo, Smash Bros., Super Smash Bros., super smash bros. ultimate

Masahiro Sakurai Discusses Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Roster

In a recent interview with GameInformer, Super Smash Bros Game Director Masahiro Sakurai discussed the process of adding characters and stages to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, as well as new inclusions, the future of the series, and his past work on the series. Some of the best information comes right at the start of the interview, which focuses on the character process and development, as well as the reason why Ultimate has the largest number of characters and stages of any game in the series.

From GameInformer:

Game Informer: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate includes substantially more fighters and stages than any other game in the series. Why did you decide to include so much content in this game in particular?

Masahiro Sakurai: 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.

While every character in Super Smash Bros. history is in this game, several new characters have also been added. What is the process of deciding new characters to add to the roster?

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.

Sakurai's commentary on Smash is pretty straight forward and frank, which is a nice change from dev interviews that focus too much on buzzwords and concept. So, it is definitely worth a read.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!