While everyone is waiting on the reveal of the next Super Smash Bros Ultimate DLC character (who will be the first in Fighter Pack 2), players are still finding time to enjoy the newest character in the game in the form of Byleth from Fire Emblem Three Houses. There was some initial controversy over Byleth being brought into the game, but that’s since settled down some.
In an interview with Famitsu (as translated by Nico and Nintendo Everything), Smash Bros creator and producer Masahiro Sakurai talked about the backstory to Byleth being brought into the game and how the timing of Three Houses led to their inclusion:
“My preferences don’t play a role in which new fighters are added; Nintendo has a larger say in that decision and brings their thoughts to the table. At any rate, the “theme” for this character was the how much freshness they brought to the game. The fighters that we include in Smash Bros. tend to come from series that have histories. For instance, Dragon Quest’s “Hero,” “Banjo & Kazooie,” and Fatal Fury’s Terry Bogard all first appeared around 20 to 30 years ago – I want to include quite a wide breadth of characters.
For this fighter, an important factor was being able to turn the protagonist of a game that people are playing right now into a fighter that players could experience immediately in Smash Bros. As such, I tried my hand at working on the character while the source game was still in development.”
Sakurai also noted that the “too many swordfighters” problem led to him using the Hero Relics in Byleths moveset:
Smash Bros. has a problem of there being too many swordfighters. So, as a workaround I considered what techniques the character should use and ended up implementing the three houses’ leaders’ “Hero Relics” as some of their moves to keep with elements present in Three Houses. For instance, though the character uses a bow all the same, how the player uses it can differentiate it quite a bit from say, Link or Pit’s bows.
Oh, and as for the next DLC pack…
“All that aside, I announced during the same presentation that I’d start development on the next wave of DLC fighters, which I’ll go into some more during the next column. See you the week after next!!”
