It's all in the hands mate

Every day, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Director Masahiro Sakurai shares developer screenshots of the game with fans via his Twitter account, and sometimes they even reveal some things that didn't end up making it into the title's final release.

The latest example of such is the Smash creator's new post which shows off an unused design for Sans' Mii Fighter costume in Ultimate before the Undertale developer asked Sakurai's team to make some alterations to his look.

Eagle-eyed fans of the skeleton character will probably quickly notice one change to the model that compares to its final counterpart: Sans' hands.

This "beta" version of the skeleton warrior's design featured small, individual fingers on his non-weaponized hand which caught the attention of Undertale creator Toby Fox before it was finished.

"Originally, the Sans they showed me had tiny, tiny, fingers, but I asked them to replace them with a larger mitten-like hand instead," said Fox in a reply to the unused costume's image.

Not knowing what to make Sans' hands like would be quite understandable on the part of the Smash developers considering the character spends most of his time in Undertale walking around with his hands in his pockets — most fan art I see usually includes him having skeleton hands as well.



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It's hard to tell due to the lighting and angle, but a side-by-side comparison of the two costumes may also show the beta one had slightly different eyes on the Gasterblaster.

Sakurai also recently talked about the origins and meaning behind his 'Pic of the Day' posts in a Famitsu column which started as a way to share progress on game builds with the other developers on the team dating back around a decade.

He eventually had a big enough stockpile of custom images for Smash Ultimate that he then decided to share them with the wider audience.

Previously, another Pic of the Day caught the eyes of fans when one appeared to show Inkling on the Smash 4 version of the Battlefield stage though Sakurai later clarified that it was used as a testing area for Ultimate.

It's not a massive change in the grand scheme of things, but the alteration does give us a small and interesting glimpse into the world of developers re-designing characters that are owned by different companies.

Stuff like that makes me wonder how many iterations full on third-party fighters like Snake and Cloud needed to go through before they were finally approved. Now, those are some beta versions I'd really like to see.

Sans first joined Smash as a Mii Gunner costume back in September of 2019 alongside Banjo-Kazooie bringing two more wholly western properties to a series that's always had the strongest roots to the Japanese side of development.

You can take a look at the different Undtertale costume selections below thanks to Sakurai's post and PushDustIn's comparison images.



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