Ever since Masahiro Sakurai started his “Creating Games” channel on YouTube, gamers of all types have been drawn to his videos for numerous reasons. The biggest being that the videos were well crafted and helped provide a true insight into the man who created numerous franchises and titles over the years. He’s talked about games in general and the ones he personally had a hand in. His latest video detailed Super Smash Bros Brawl, a title with a somewhat divisive place in the Nintendo gaming community. However, after watching this video, you might be more grateful that we got what we got.
For example, Sakurai reveals that the late Mr. Iwata told him that if he hadn’t directed the game as he had, we might’ve gotten a port of the GameCube title instead. That’s a bit hard to swallow, given the success of that title, and we truly dodged a bullet there. It also speaks to Masahiro Sakurai himself that he was fine with doing the game, even with the various constraints that were put on him this time.
He noted that the biggest things asked of him were to make the “campaign mode” that would eventually be called Subspace Emissary and then add online gameplay to the mix.
The former was challenging in numerous ways but also added some unique opportunities. Sakurai loved how he could use the campaign to help show off the characters more and infuse their personalities into things. However, the extra work was quite a strain. The development team, which was over 100 people for the first time in Sakurai’s career, would initially give the cutscenes to another dev team to help lighten the load. The problem? They couldn’t find anyone worthy of doing it, so they did it themselves.
As for the online functionality, Sakurai stated that Super Smash Bros Brawl had some difficulties in getting it to work properly. To the point where even he was amazed when it worked. But as many gamers would note, it wasn’t the best, and the online functionality still plagues the franchise to this day.
However, the twist is that Sakurai also felt that adding online battles with random people actually weighed the franchise down. He felt the franchise was at its best when gamers were playing with their friends or family right next to them.
But he did it because that’s what was asked of him. The game is technically the 2nd-best-selling game of the series, further proving its value.
