IntelliHeath
As in "Heathcliff"
Thanks to Garou for the translations, and he posted it in Nintendo Dream thread.
Also I think the translation isn't completed since someone brought up that he did mentioned something about DLC, Third Party and explain the reasonings behind new characters.
Garou, thanks again for the translation.
Another snippet from page 3-4
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ND: When not you are not developing and there is a new title or character released, you are not thinking about "How about that one in the next Smash Bros?", right?
MS: Absolutely not! I'm always thinking that doing Smash Bros. again will be impossible. Impossible, impossible...is what I always think, but I ended up making it again (laughs). But once I decide to do it, I'm very fast about creating moves and such. For example Greninja, even before his name was decided I received several illustrations. I took them home in the evening and around midnight I had already done all his actions, normal moves, special moves and pose-pictures and sent them around asking "What do you think?".
ND: That's incredible speed! By the way, when deciding on which characters to use, are you looking into unreleased new games?
MS: At the very beginning I did that. This time our project-proposal is dated May 2012, at that time all characters were decided already. Then as production moves on we will say "We won't put that chracter in" and cut out low-priority-characters.
ND: That means in your project-proposal there are more characters than ended up in the game?
MS: Yes, but I won't tell which of course.
ND: (laughs). We were wondering all the time "Which characters will be in", and then the "long-time heroes" are announced just like that. We were wondering if that was the right way to announce them.
MS: After all we were planning on including so many characters, in the end this pace of announcing them was enough. Each and every character has fans, we wanted to drop as few as possible. About the order of which character has priority, the characters that don't have a new title coming up have an overwhelming disadvantage...even characters that we ended up including could have been left out if development had progressed differently. But even if 1 former character is left out, for the fans this is a huge thing. On our side, we are re-creating characters from the previous title, and keep on adding more, so the word "reduce" is not appropriate. There are cases where we simply couldn't make it in the end, but on the whole we did a good job I think and the people at Bandai Namco Games did a great job. We had discussions on giving up on something many many times, Bowser Jr. was on the brink of being cut but the staff said "We'll do our best!" and we made it.
ND: Were there Smash Bros. or Nintendo-fans among the staff of Bandai Namco Games?
SM: Of course. People who love Nintendo, people who love the characters, people who aren't a fan of something specific but love games as a whole...it depends on the individual.
ND: Was there something you didn't ask for but got created because one of your staff was obsessed with it?
MS: There are several cases of this. For example, Sheik's movement is completely different to Brawl, someone made a proposal to me for those motions.
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So once you hear about a new Smash Bros. being in development you are not asking for which characters to be included, but which characters shouldn't be cut.
Started reading a bit of the Sakurai-interview, small excerpt from the second page. The interview was done shortly before the release of the Wii U version in Japan.
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ND: These games were produced together with Bandai Namco Games, how did this happen to be?
MS: When we created Kid Icarus 3DS we assembled people from several places, but we experienced problems and had some regrets with that. I had to do interviews and other HR-duties, which amounts to a lot of time and work. Obviously, everyone has different levels of experience and different ways of working, so bringing everything together was difficult. To solve this problem we thought it would be better to have one single company work for us, so we choose to work with Bandai Namco Games who produce Tekken and other games. When thinking about a Japanese company that can make a large-scale fighting-game, there was only this one company. It would be quite difficult for other companies I think.
ND: Are you content with how the actual production went?
MS: I learned how to hold it in and not go to the toilet. It was quite far away from my seat (laughs).
ND: Please don't do that! You actually had some health-concerns, right? We heard you couldn't move your right hand anymore.
MS: Even now a tendonitis or something like that hasn't healed yet, I for example use my left hand to move a trackball. Smash Brothers is always a extremely hard development-process. Thinking about it now, I was quite lucky not getting sick in the past. I took care of myself a little better this time and it kind of worked out.
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From the Sakurai-Interview "The reason why those 50 (-47) fighters are in the game"
Mii-Fighter
MS: This time customization was a factor, I thought that we had to take a step towards being able to create something to your own liking during development. Although, we were thinking a lot about whether people would be happy to see the Mii Fighter as their opponent. For example if "My mommy" would come up as an opponent, would that really become a heated battle...? As we thought about that, if the character were to look and come out nonchalantly like in Mii Plaza, this would have been a definite failure. In the end by having the head of the Mii and changing up the body as well as giving them proper moves we managed to bring it into existence.
The reason for the return of Dr. Mario
MS: Actually all "Model-change"-characters that we have now were originally just supposed to be color-configurations. Just like the Little Mac-wireframe or how Olimar and Alph are included, we planned to just make the look and maybe the voice a possible configuration. But, when talking about Dr. Mario, including his abilities he had a lot of individuality in Melee compared to Mario. Also there were fans that said things like "I'm a doctor!", or "A back-alley doctor!" when they chose the black color-config. When you have such fans and you just change the character-model and leave it at that and it becomes "The same as Mario", we thought people might get angry (laughs). That's why we forced ourselves and changed that. But, unlike we did in the past when we separately added abilities and monitored the results, this time we used the customization-system and entered the adjustment-process by starting with a "Mario that's a bit heavier, with added attack-power". Although even then it still took a lot of work. During the regular adjustment-process we have each fighter battle all others and try to grasp the "strong" and "weak" problem areas, but in this case we had Dr. Mario go against Mario and tried to adjust it so it would most likely result in a tie. We did the same for Marth and Lucina, as well as Pit and Black Pit.
The reason for Duck Hunt joining the battle
MS: You think Duck Hunt is a rather minor character, right?
ND: We...think so. (laughs)
Everybody: (laughs)
MS: Please try to have a look at the sales-numbers. It might be the most-sold shooting-game in the world. It might be because it came bundled with the NES outside of Japan, if you look at worldwide numbers you come up with a huge number. I thought to create a character based on that would be appropriate, so we included that character from the very beginning of the project.
ND: So it was a candidate all along for the whole Smash Bros.-franchise?
MS: No, that would be exaggerating...in past titles we had our hands full with the characters we included back then. Even if we had tried even harder back then we couldn't have included it. But this time it was fun to do "Duck Hunt" and its shooting-like presentation. Like having a third person intervening the action, being able to say "It's actually a trio" was fun. That's how we finalized it during development of the concept, saying "That's how we can make it work!".
Also I think the translation isn't completed since someone brought up that he did mentioned something about DLC, Third Party and explain the reasonings behind new characters.
Garou, thanks again for the translation.
