Andrew Cunningham
The creator of Super Smash Bros. can be permanently burned out in the series. In an interview in the latest issue of Game informant (available only in print or with a digital subscription) director Masahiro Sakurai said that while he “cannot state with certainty that no [more Smash Bros. games in the future]… as for myself, I don’t think there will be.
With the recent release of sister Smash Bros. games for the Wii U and 3DS, Sakurai says the team packed in so many features that “in terms of scope and number of characters, we’ve long since crossed our limits. And yet, if we’re going to increase the number of fighters or modes in a future game, I’m sure there will be complaints.”
The development of the latest games was extremely difficult, Sakurai said Game informant. “It felt like after we managed to stagger past a target that we had to ourselves, there was another target further out that we then had to sprint for… testing all of these things took quite a bit of time,” he said. By all accounts, Sakurai is an extremely practical director who hurt his arm quite badly from overwork during the Smash Bros. development process.
Although Sakurai said he has “a personal desire to continue to give gamers as much as possible…I feel like we’ve landed in a really tough place.”
But that doesn’t mean the series has definitely reached a tough stopping point. “One thing I can say is I hope people don’t think that Smash Bros. has naturally come to its natural conclusion.”
This isn’t the first time Sakurai has vowed to stop working on the Smash Bros. series neither. “With both Melee And Brawl, I made those games thinking there wouldn’t be any more sequels. That’s why I really can’t deny the chance of another one,” he said.
Sakurai isn’t alone in breaking a promise to stop working on a video game franchise. Metal Gear solid director Hideo Kojima has said he planned for every game since then Metal Gear Solid 2 to be the last he worked on in the series, but that he was “forced to come back and work on it” for various reasons. Keita Takahashi was working on the sequel to Katamari Damacy only under protest and the threat that publisher Namco would make a sequel without him if he refused; when Takahashi left the company, that’s exactly what Namco did.
While we sympathize with Sakurai’s feeling of burnout after nearly four years of working on the latter Smash Bros. games, we hope he can happily return to the series after getting some well-deserved rest… Child Icarusat?