New Super Smash Bros. Dropping Story Mode, Cutscenes

The internet is a great place to see the latest videos and images of your most-anticipated games as soon as they’re uploaded, but in the eyes of some developers, that leads to a loss of some pizzazz when the full game is actually released. Super Smash Bros. designer Masahiro Sakurai confirmed in his bi-weekly column for Famitsu (via Kotaku) that while cutscences were lovingly crafted for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the latest Wii U and 3DS editions of his classic character mishmash won’t even attempt to insert such a feature.

Why? Thanks to leaks of the Wii game’s Subspace Emissary scenes years back, Sakurai has decided that the novelty has worn off.

“Unfortunately, the movie scenes we worked hard to create were uploaded onto the Internet." Sakurai said. "You can only truly wow a player the first time he sees [a cutscene]. I felt if players saw the cutscenes outside of the game, they would no longer serve as rewards for playing the game, so I've decided against having them."

This doesn’t mean there won’t be any cinematic videos for the many recognizable characters in Nintendo’s upcoming brawler. Similar to what we’ve seen with the Villager, Mega-Man, and the Wii Fit Trainer, character-specific videos that are launched online (and not within the actual game) can be expected in the future.

No cutscenes means no story mode, either, although the 3DS version of the game will include something that will “act as a separate mode from the standard versus play," but other than that description, we don’t know much. Even without a few of what many people see as key features, the world will watch with big, nostalgic eyes when Super Smash Bros. launches on both Wii U and 3DS next year.