Ever since the full roster of Super Smash Bros. 3DS has been revealed with the release of the game, there are plenty of fans who feel that the separation of some of the characters from their counterparts were just an attempt to fill up the roster with characters who have the same moves. Dark Pit and Dr. Mario seem to be the characters that people are most unhappy with being included, while there’s a vocal minority that are sad that Sheik and Zelda are now separate characters.
In his weekly column in Famitsu magazine, developer Masahiro Sakurai has discussed why such “clones” were added to the game as original characters and he laments that most of those whining about this seem to be children.
There are 3 fighters [Lucina, Dark Pit, and Doctor Mario] that are alternate models (clones) in the game. Each was originally a color variation, but during development, they were given balanced characteristics. Since their functionality had differences, forms were separated from each other. However, it was vital that this didn’t increase the required man-hours. Some relative tuning was sufficient as it wasn’t necessary to create balancing from scratch.
This is like a free dessert after a luxurious meal that was prepared free of charge. In a restaurant with this type of service, I don’t think there’s anybody who would say, “Change this to a meat dish!!
Yet, I’m told [to do that] about Smash Bros. But, I guess since a lot of them are children, it cannot be helped.
Following that, Sakurai says that those who are whining and complaining about these characters being split from their original characters should stop complaining and leave it to him, the developer to select which characters should be in the game. That’s something we can understand as Sakurai is not the only developer that deals with this sort of whining from Smash fans. Most recently Platinum Games developer Hideki Kamiya told Smash fans to “f*** off” and stop begging for Bayonetta to be put into the game.
Could you please leave it to me to select [characters] with man-hours and costs in mind? However you look at it, the game is a great bargain buy as a result.
