Super Smash Bros creator Masahiro Sakurai discussed how the Super Smash Bros series is aimed at intermediate level players and not experts.

In an interview with Craptaku, Sakurai said the doesn’t take much of the core fighter fan feedback into consideration when designing the next game in the series.

 “Basically, Smash Bros. is designed to be sort of targeted at the centre, intermediate players, and if you think of sort of a skill graph or something where if you’re targeting just the peak of that performance level, you’re targeting a very small group of people,” he said.

“We wanna avoid a situation where it becomes a game sort of like other competitive fighting games, where it’s only apreciated by a very small, passionate group of sort of maniac players. We definitely don’t want that sort of situation. It’s supposed to be a fun game for a wide variety of people.”
That’s not to say Sakurai isn’t a fan of core fighting games and it’s players. He once won a 100 man Street Fighter tournament in Japan. Sakurai says the team balances the game by watching high level players battle in simple stages. While this is going on, the team collects data and sees what needs to be tweaked.

“Smash Bros. is all about position – where you’re at and what kind of power the player has based on where their position is at. So it’s something that players have to take advantage of,” he said.

“But if suddenly you create sort of a testing scenario where the position balance is removed from the equation, and you sort of start to see where, when you remove that one factor from the game, you’re basically testing two players in the same circumstances, that’s when you can really start to see the differences and balance between characters.”

“But that’s not to say that I don’t appreciate very high-level competitive play, the type of very refined competitive gameplay that happens in other fighting games. Personally, I have a lot of experience playing in the arcade scene, and personally came out as a champion of a 100-person battle in arcade Street Fighter II.”

When asked if this was recently Sakurai said, “A long, long time ago. So I don’t wanna ignore that there’s that type of pleasure to be had from the game.”

Some people in the comments section took this article as if Sakurai wasn’t going to be putting advanced mechanics in for pro players. Which is not the case. He just wants his game to be accessible enough people can pick it up and start playing, Yet still have the depth to master for experienced players.

So... the same as Brawl and Melee?

As an intermediate player, YAY!

At least there is no more tripping!

He's doing it wrong!!!!!!!!!!!!

Great games like Starcraft can be played by anyone, but are deep enough to be almost indefinitely masteres. Thus appealing to everyone.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!! Stop making me so frustrated Sakurai! You did it right with melee!

according some people Melee was for experts

Clearly you didn't play competitve Melee...

That's sort of alarming.

I think he said the same thing about Brawl, too. Personally, I never took the time to master wave dashing, L-cancelling (is that right?), and the sorts that weren't obvious besides small jumps, falling down quicker, 180 turn grab, recovering from ground quicker when falling onto it by pressing the shield button, and moving the controller stick perpendicular to where the character was flying off to decrease momentum, but all of those can be found throughout experience and constant replaying, not actively looking for the game's glitches and loopholes in a character's speed and timing.

edit: Oh yeah wavedashing wasn't in Brawl. My point is the same though.

He said he wants it to be pretty much between Melee and Brawl in terms of accessibility. Since both games are great, a graph drawn between one and the other will also result in a great game in every point of the line.


Also, Mega Man.