Would you believe it? Super Smash Bros producer Masahiro Sakurai has revealed that Bowser Jr was almost cut from the game. The team had a bit of a headache regarding which characters to use for inclusion and which to drop. Sakurai says he is aware that certain characters have certain fans so it was hard deciding which ones to include and which ones not to include. Thankfully, the team left Bowser Jr in the game.

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.

Thanks, Sam