A portion of a Kotaku interview with Masahiro Sakurai.
Kotaku: My first question is, what is the process like for deciding which characters in a Smash Bros. game to include and which to cut from game to game?
Sakurai: First of all, in regard to cutting characters: at this point there's nothing I can say in any official position regarding that process. But let's go ahead and talk a little bit more about how we decided what characters to have.
Kotaku: Okay.
Sakurai: The first thing is to take an idea. For example, imagine a game and characters within that game. Take a character such as the villager in Animal Crossing. The next process is think about that character's role in their game and then the structure of the game we're making. How do those work together with each other? What kind of interesting things can you do within the structure of the game? And then if you were to actually implement that character, how would the end result be, how it works with other elements of the game?
An important thing is that the characters stand out from one another—for instance, we might wanna be able to take characters that aren't typically combat-based characters. So you might have a sword-based character, but other characters are not necessarily going to [have swords]. You're not gonna wanna focus on that sort of element, just so there's a distinction between all of the other combat-based characters.
They have to have something really unique that makes them stand apart from other characters in the game, and not limit yourself to characters that are just combat-based.
Kotaku: I know that you can't talk too much about the characters that will be in the next game, but for previous Smash Bros. games, have there ever been characters that you wanted to include but couldn't figure out a good mechanic for them, like a way to fit them into the game?
Sakurai: Yeah, there's been a lot of instances like that. For example, there are places where we planned to have a character but then implementing that character just didn't work out. Or we wanted to implement some character but there was too much overlap with other characters from the same title, and it didn't work out. Or there's places when I wanted to implement some character, but the image for how it works in the game just never comes to fruition.
Kotaku: I know Mega Man is a character that has been requested for a very long time - is there something different about this game that will make it okay to bring in Mega Man? Have you tried to include Mega Man before?
Sakurai: No, actually, there was never any consideration to having him in previous games, and if you think about it, there hasn't been really a precedent for third-party characters joining other than very special cases like Sonic, during the last game. It's something that wasn't even possible. We're now going into versions four and five within the series—this is only something that's now possible.
Kotaku: And how will they be able to connect, the 3DS and Wii U version? Will I be able to play against Wii U people if I'm using the 3DS?
Sakurai: It'll be possible, in fact, on the 3DS version there'll be a certain degree of character customization. You can have your own personalized character that you'll then be able to take over and move onto the Wii U version and play.
Kotaku: On a personal note, I remember hearing that your shoulder was hurting, and I wanted to ask if you're feeling better now?
Sakurai: The reality, and very unfortunate reality of the situation is that it's still a considerable problem. I'm in a lot of pain. I'm in a position where I can't use the mouse at this point, so I'm using the trackball, and as the creative director behind an action game, that's a real critical issue, unfortunately. But still, all things being said, I'm still 100% committed to the creation of Smash Bros.
Kotaku: Could you talk a little bit about how you balance it out, because there's so much going on in Smash Bros.—how do you make it so each character is as strong as the others?
Sakurai: So in regards to overall game balance, what we do is we use sort of this monitor playtest where we set up players of a certain level to play highly-skilled players in an arena. For example, an arena just with maybe a single platform and we watch them fight over a certain amount of time and view video from that and decide at a high level how to make adjustments to that for the base.
Smash Bros. is all about position—where you're at and what kind of power the player has based on where their position is at. So it's something that players have to take advantage of. But if suddenly you create sort of a testing scenario where the position balance is removed from the equation, and you sort of start to see where, when you remove that one factor from the game, you're basically testing two players in the same circumstances, that's when you can really start to see the differences and balance between characters.
As far as the overall balance, if you were to take that and then put it in a flat playing field and have characters fight, you get a situation where suddenly, it's no different than any other fighting game. We realized that having different positioning, there's a lot of factors that occur in vertical elements of the stages. Once you get the core balance, then you can stretch out from there and realize, well, players don't want to play a normal flat fighting game: they want the special peculiarities of Smash Bros., where there's a lot of verticality, where the collision detection is a little broader. And the overall balancing goes factoring in those vertical elements as well.
Kotaku: It seems like that must be very difficult, to take all those factors into account. How do you manage to make each character still feel strong and still feel like they can be competitive with the rest of the characters, even with all those positional factors?
Sakurai: Yeah, if it was just a flat playing surface, it would be one thing, and you could determine pretty quickly which was the stronger character. But given the circumstances of the series, and there are so many factors, it comes down to a quite simple process, where you give characters a special—something special that no other character has. A special technique. And at the same time, as that ratchets up their strength, you also have to take something away, so it becomes a sort of game of checks and balances where you're adding and removing.
So again, it's very important to have that system of checks and balances where if a character has some very strong point, you have to give him something weak. If a person really likes that character, and they want to have that special strength, they're going to have to sacrifice something to be able to take that weakness and create sort of a balance in that sense, where each character has something that certain people like.
Kotaku: Ah. Could we talk about the Final Smash, will it still work like it did in Brawl?
Sakurai: So, yes, the Smash Balls will be included, and each character will have a Final Smash.
Essentially, the incorporation of the Smash Balls and the Final Smash was something to accommodate, or to counter a situation where in a game you'd have a strong player and without those things, you would have a situation where clearly always the strong players would come on top. And so we wanted to add a little bit of some accidental or random elements to help sort of narrow the possibility of who would come out on top in a match. And so our opinion on it was that it sort of helps balance the game. Of course, hardcore players might take issue with it, so that's why we decided to make it an option you can turn on or off.
That goes along with thinking about how I think each player should be able to customize the experience so we can accommodate different play styles. It's very important for me for everybody to have the play experience that they want. It's also very important for me to be able to accommodate the opinions of the most passionate players, of course, which tend to be the more advanced players.
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