The team has been reviewing some of Sakurai’s Super Smash Bros. for Wii U / 3DS design documents, and we’ve discovered that Alph was once considered as a potential full-blown clone character!

We hadn’t realized until reading through several separate interviews and comparing the terminology Sakurai uses to describe clone characters (モデル替え/”model swap”) and palette swaps (カラーバリエーション/”color variation”). Sound like an arbitrarily confusing-yet-subtle semantic difference? Rest assured you aren’t alone in thinking so!

In addition, I mentioned this in a previous article, but Rock Pikmin were also considered for inclusion. As originally planned, Rock Pikmin would be heavy and short-ranged, but extremely powerful. Ultimately, however, they were scrapped, presumably due to time constraints.

To give you an idea of what sort of aspects Sakurai and his team consider when re-balancing veteran fighters, we’ve recreated and translated an excerpt from Sakurai’s balance notes for Pikmin & Olimar in Smash 4. Enjoy!

(Note: The following excerpt is taken from sometime midway through development, so some items are marked as “On Hold” despite being included in the final game.)