Masahiro Sakurai, the creator behind Super Smash Bros and Kirby Air Riders, recently explained the tricky balance between listening to fans and actually shipping a game. Nintendo published the fifth entry in the Kirby Air Riders: Development Insights series, and Sakurai used it to talk about how the team approached player customization.
In Kirby Air Riders the customization options include different vehicles and headgear, and Sakurai made a point of thanking the development team for allowing all characters to wear hats. He said that accommodating players who like to personalize their characters was important to him.
Super Smash Bros. Creator: We Try to Keep Players in Mind
Sakurai also explained that he tries to keep players in mind when designing games, but there are real limits. Adding features to satisfy requests can cost a lot of time and work, and some requests are simply impossible to grant for practical reasons.
He put it plainly: "I want to implement things because I understand the reasons behind the players desires. But it would be utterly impossible to grant every request. So we have to decide what should be implemented with that balance in mind. There will be players who think customization is pointless, but I definitely dont feel like our efforts were in vain at all."
Although Sakurai was talking about Kirby Air Riders, the same tension applies to the Super Smash Bros. series. Fans still ask for many characters who have not appeared in Smash, and some omissions are explained by third-party licensing or other hurdles. For example, characters like Dante from Devil May Cry and Crash Bandicoot are understandable misses, while Waluigi remains a particularly frequent request among Nintendo fans.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate launched on the original Nintendo Switch in 2018 and later received additional characters through downloadable content packs. At this time, there is no confirmed news about when or if a new mainline Smash game will arrive.
What would you pick for the next Smash lineup?
There are always more requests than development hours. Tell us which characters you think deserve a spot in the next game and why.
