If Super Smash Bros. Melee was for hardcore players, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl was for casual players, the next Smash Bros. game will fall somewhere in between, creator Masahiro Sakurai says.


This time around, Sakurai is going for the best of both worlds.

This morning, Sakurai and I had a long chat about all sorts of Smash-related topics, like third-party characters and tripping. I'll have a longer story up in the coming days about everything we spoke about, but for now I wanted to share a few words on the vision of the next game in Nintendo's massively popular mascot fighting series.


I had asked Sakurai what sort of weaknesses he thought were in the last game, Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I asked what he wanted to fix for this new one.

"I would consider the changes that we're making this time around not as fixes, but that we're changing the direction," he said through a translator. "And so the vision for the overall balance of the game in Smash Bros Melee, it was sort of more focused towards more hardcore players. Then when it came around to making Brawl, this was a game that was targeting a Wii audience where there were a lot of beginner players, so it sort of leaned a little bit more in that direction.

"So now, for this time around, we're sort of aiming for something that is in between those as far as the speed of the game. Because I don't really think this time we're in a situation where we're trying to accommodate that many new players."


Super Smash Bros. Goldilocks. Look out for more from my conversation with Sakurai in the next few days.