PwerlvlAmy said:
It ranks up there with Sakurai saying ''we wont have cutscenes in Smash Bros on Wii U because we dont want them to be uploaded to youtube'' lol |
If anything, I think this lack of voice chat is much more ridiculous than Sakurai's single player comments.
Sakurai has made a bunch of games since his career began in the early 90's, but they generally lacked an emphasis on traditional storytelling methods in games. The Kirby and first two Smash Bros games had minimal stories at best, and even Kid Icarus: Uprising, despite its non-stop chatter, has surprisingly few minutes of cutscenes. Even Melee's opening on the GameCube required help from an outside company.
Speaking of Melee's opening, it was given a fair amount of focus for a reason. Sakurai is not the hugest fan of cutscenes partially because their main advantage (in his mind) is leaving a strong impression that stands out from everything else. Hence, Melee's opening was made into a spectacle in order to show how many characters were in the game and how powerful the GameCube was.
Subspace Emissary was therefore largely out of Sakurai's comfort zone. It was largely intended to give players a whirlwind tour of the many characters the game had to offer, allowing most unlockable characters to be awarded for playing through it at least once. The narrative tying it together was not exactly deep, but it had to be able to tie all of the characters together on a big adventure, which necessitated storytelling. And since half the cast is effectively mute anyway, this meant that Sakurai had to focus more on the characters moving around and creating expressions, which requires cutscenes.
In Sakurai's defense, the cutscenes of Subspace Emissary are well spaced out and show all sorts of characters and environments at their best. He used them as a way to reward players for putting another 15 minutes into a stage, possibly learning the basics of how to play as Fox or Diddy Kong along the way. Since Subspace's stages were a bit awkward, since they were platforming/action levels in a fighting game, this hour or so of high quality cutscenes were a good incentive to push through.
The thing about the videos being on YouTube is that this means that many players who would otherwise have their minds blown after playing Brawl would now just look at the screen, skip the bit they saw on the interwebz, get bored of the bad platforming, and play more conventional modes.
For Super Smash Bros 4, Sakurai removed any equivalent to Subspace Emissary, but also removed the need for one. A much greater portion of the roster is immediately playable compared to Brawl, modes like Smash Tour force people to be exposed to new characters quickly, and without the need to work on mediocre platforming segments, Sakurai could instead focus on making new stages. Not to mention that SSB4 DOES have cutscenes of sorts: the trailers. This game took advantage of YouTube by using high-quality footage to advertise and get people excited in advance, instead of competing with YouTube's ability to show any cutscene for a notable game over a week old. And since even the 7 second videos at the end of Classic mode need to be unlocked, there are still reasons to play Classic with each character.
I miss Subspace Emissary, but considering everything else added and how tough that mode was to make, I'm mre than content with the tradeoff.
