Even before last month’s DLC was added to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the game already had too many Fire Emblem characters! Developer Masahiro Sakurai is well aware of this fact.
In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the playable Fire Emblem characters include Marth, Roy, Lucina, Ike, Robin, Corrin, Chrom and Byleth.
In the most recent Weekly Famitsu, Sakurai wrote, “First of all, there are too many Fire Emblem characters. And there are too many swordsmen.”
Sakurai explained that he’s not making the call about which fighters are thrown into the mix. “New fighters aren’t picked based on my preferences, but rather, through talks Nintendo brings to us.” So once this decision is made, the team moves forward with development. “The things that I need to think about were elsewhere.”
One of the things Sakurai needed to think about was all those swords swinging about:
“In Smash Bros., there are issues with [having] so many swordsmen,” Sakurai explained. To combat this, the team gave each character their own tactics. Sakura compared this to how, even though both Link and Pitt have bows and arrows, they’re not the same. Differentiating each character is something that Sakurai and his team have always tried to take into account.
At the end of the article, Sakurai mentioned how Fire Emblem: Three Houses was a hit and was well-received by players, something that made him happy. He mentioned how there was no mistaking that it was a good game, and it was nice that there were more people playing Fire Emblem. He certainly doesn’t seem upset about all the Fire Emblem characters in the game. Rather, he wanted to point out that this was something he knew and that this fact posed challenges the team had to overcome.
Read Kotaku’s impressions of Fire Emblem’s Byleth, the latest sword-wielding addition, right here.