Super Smash Bros. is a highly competitive game, whether Nintendo likes it or not. The company has most recently embraced the competitive scene with the Wii U version of Smash, but that hasn’t stopped long time fans of the Smash series from speculating on whether or not series producer Masahiro Sakurai favors characters from games he worked on before moving over to the Smash series. In fact, many competitive Smash players believe that characters like Kirby, Pit, and Meta Knight are only strong because they’re from franchises Sakurai worked on in the past.
In his most recent Famitsu column, Sakurai dispelled this rumor by admitting that some of Smash’s most strong characters are those that he is the weakest with and if he tuned them to be better for his use, they’d be even more OP. Here’s the relevant quote:
First off, what merit is there for me to play favorites with characters I worked on?” he wrote. Sakurai went on to note that Pit from Kid Icarus is in fact one of the characters he has trouble using in the game. “To bring up an example, two characters I have trouble with and can’t use very well are Pit and Palutena. Therefore, for me, I feel that ‘Pit and Palutena are weaker than the average character.’ If I were to adjust them to fit myself, they would become even stronger – but as you may notice, I haven’t.
Sakurai says he doesn’t play favorites with characters from franchises he’s worked on and that fun over the balance of specific characters is always the main goal. That’s something that Sakurai has been saying for years, especially with the releases of Melee and Brawl, where specific actions were taken to try and discourage competitive play. Either way, Sakurai says have fun with the game and stop worrying about character balance so much.
