Smash Bros Series director expands on why Brawl was designed differently to Melee. What he says makes a lot of sense.
Dang it. Didn’t I once say it was suspicious that Rosalina and Luma are okay on 3DS, but Ice Climbers were too much?
I like Kirby and King Dedede as much as anyone else, and I like games that Mr. Sakurai has worked on, but I really don’t like the way he approaches game design. “They still found a way to ruin it for me”, he says, as if people playing a game in a way you didn’t intend is a terrible thing.
A good approach to game design is to build in as many ways to let the player make of it what they will. If your player might want to play a sword fighter or might want to play a mage, make both viable—don’t make the mage three times stronger at everything. If a player might play a game competitively or might play it casually, cater to both, don’t lock one out. On top of that, the percentage of players who play competitively is much smaller than the vocal part of the internet would have you believe, probably 10% or less.
It wouldn’t bother me so much except that Mr. Sakurai has made other self-focused statements like this. “Players are uploading cutscenes online? Cutscenes are only good as a reward for playing the game and can only be enjoyed the first time you see them*! No more cutscenes or story mode in the next game!” “I love Luigi’s delightful awkwardness, let’s make him even more over the top silly than he is in any Mario game and give him a double chance of tripping.” And now most recently, “Screw competitive players, let’s take out a broken character who isn’t the ridiculously broken character I made.” *Nothing in this sentence is actually true, by the way.
To anyone who is a fan of Mr. Sakurai or adores the work he does or pities him for the stress he says he goes through, and especially to my friends who feel this way: I’m sorry if I seem a little harsh in my thoughts on this. I don’t imagine he’s a bad fellow. I just don’t think he approaches game design very well, and I feel like he gets a lot more praise than he should for spiteful decisions and blaming players for choices he makes.
If there is another Smash Bros game, Sakurai has said he won’t be working on it. Hopefully whoever takes his place will be a little more considerate toward players rather than only considerate toward the players they want.
brawl is probably going to go down as the weirdest smash bros game
like it simultaneously wanted to be casual by making everything slower and floatier and wanted to be hardcore by making everything duller and darker and dingier and adding solid snake. there’s a huge story mode but instead of using nintendo’s (and sonic’s and metal gear’s) many memorable worlds and enemies it included a series of drab, realistic environments and forgettable enemies. it ended with sonic saving all of nintendo’s heroes from their impending deaths. it invented the new version of the kid icarus universe that we know today. it made an nes accessory playable. it for some reason featured a list of every nintendo game ever that you could read through, not that anyone did. jigglypuff’s final smash just makes her slowly inflate. luigi’s final smash cannot be explained with logic, luigi just has this weird aura for no apparent reason. there was a stage builder with only three generic locations. it put silver the hedgehog in green hill zone. otacon and snake had codec calls about every character in the game. it had the great maze. it turned level 1-1 into a post-apocalyptic wasteland and added tripping
