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Sakurai on Smash Bros. Ultimate - Deciding Spirits, creating New Donk City Hall, choosing a Splatoon stage, and much more

by rawmeatcowboy
20 February 2019
GN Version 5.0

Nintendo Dream recently sat down with Masahiro Sakurai to discuss all things Smash Bros. Ultimate. We now have some tidbits from that interview, courtesy of PushDustin. Check out the details below!

- when making Smash Bros. Ultimate, Sakurai had a chance to get a good look at the history of the series
- he feels that the quality of the stages and characters has dramatically improved over the series' lifetime
- when deciding how the boss fights would work, Sakurai looked at the original work and thought how that fight would evolve
- these fights also had to adapt it to the limitations of Smash
- Marx was actually scarier before, as Sakurai told the staff that he wanted Marx to be represented as a 'bizarre being'
- when deciding on the ATs and fighters for the game, Sakurai considers representation in Smash from all of the various series'
- if the series will get more installments, it'll get a number of fighters/ATs
- Sakurai also tries to pull characters from more niche series
- it was a bit difficult to select a stage from Splatoon for Smash Bros. Ultimate
- Moray Towers was selected because its ramps, and it would offer a new kind of stage that hadn't been seen in Smash before
- Sakurai heard Jump Up Super Star without the vocals quite often during development of Ultimate
- this is why thought to include both the vocal and non-vocal tracks
- while making New Donk City Hall, Sakurai often checked development progress on Odyssey to make sure things lined up
- when deciding Spirits, the Spirit Team would consider the legal use of the character, and if artwork could be found
- in some cases, Spirits were dropped from consideration if the art could not be found
- a number of contenders for Spirits from the Kid Icarus series were dropped as the team had too many
- since Sakurai worked on Uprising, he felt he could clearly envision how those Spirit battles would take place
- at the start of World of Light, there are no Spirit battles with Kirby because he survives
- in the later half of World of Light there are Spirit battles with Kirby, as Sakurai feels he would have been analyzed by this point
- there was some discussion on what to call 'Snacks' (items that level up Spirits)
- the team considered calling Snacks 'Energy,' but decided they'd rather go with a fun name
- when deciding the World of Light map, the team wanted include a lot of routes and variation
- this led to Spirits being organized around the map
- the stage used would sometimes impact where spirit battles took place
- routes around difficult Spirits were also made

[Link]