ARMS producer talks development, updates, characters, testing, lore, eSports, sequel potential, and more

Earlier in the week, we told you about a Famitsu interview with ARMS producer, Kosuke Yabuki. Famitsu has now shared that interview online, and we've got a breakdown of the juicy tidbits, courtesy of a NintendoEverything translation.

- Nintendo had initially planned to update ARMS multiple times until it was updated to version 5.0.0 by the end of 2017
- the team decided on the update content based on internal ideas and player requests
- there were many small updates that came along that weren't originally planned
- the team originally planned to only add four fighters between version 2.0.0 and 5.0.0
- the Springtron idea came in the middle of that plan, so they added him in, which brought the total to five
- more small updates are planned to make the game easier to play
- the team aimed for a game balance where a lot of things could happen
- the team balanced ARMS based on analyzing various data from testing
- Spring Man is the first character created, and happens to be Yabuki's favorite
- the team didn't release fighters that require deep strategy at launch, and saved those characters for later
- the aim was to create a new versus game unlike anything before
- team members would play against each other and then make adjustments from the feedback multiple times
- the game starts slow to allow players to learn how things work
- the team aimed for the game to be playable equally with both normal and thumbs-up controller-holding methods
- there are still many deeper world setting aspects in ARMS that haven’t been revealed yet
- the current Spring Man is the third to hold the name
- Yabuki would like to reveal more of these unknown stories if there’s the chance
- the team thought of the ARMS tournament in the ARMS universe to be analogous to the World Cup of soccer
- Twintelle is very popular worldwide
- the picture where she is working out while doing her hair and weightlifting got a lot of positive attention
- Biff is the mascot of ARMS and acts as liaison between the real world and ARMS through tweets
- Nintendo is currently in the phase of looking at how eSports can exist in a Nintendo-like way
- they don’t have any plans to use eSports business-wise right now
- Yabuki says players are training hard like real sportsmen when ARMS tournaments are held
- it's still too early for sequel discussion since not even a year has passed since ARMS’ release
- the team would like to talk about this topic again when they’re in the right time and condition to provide a big surprise