Link This news kind of bugs me. I can't imagine a Smash Bros. game not developed internally by Nintendo. Namco Bandai makes Tekken and Soul Calibur, so they have fighting game experience, but they're nothing like SSB. Sakurai and Sora are apparently overseeing the project, but still...kind of wary.
Will we see Tales characters in the game??? Retro is second-party, but they've done good with DK and Metroid. Rare did well with DK back in the day. For third parties... Sega did well with F-Zero. I liked Namco's Star Fox Assault. Of Capcom with Zelda worked well. So, Nintendo does have some pretty good quality control when it comes to these kinds of projects. But I find it weird that they would do it with such a big and important entry. Namco is clearly capable of making a fighter, but.. I'm wary. Maybe Nintendo is using them more as hired labour since Nintendo has said they don't really have the amount of people on their dev teams to make multiple big modern games at once. And Sora is pretty small from what I remember.
Namco Bandai have made a lot of my favourite games up until this point - the Tekken franchise most notably, but also Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers for SNES :P - I say bring it on. I think we should give them a chance. At this point, the Smash Bros franchise is well-established and everybody knows what it is and what it's about. I can't see them making much in the way of dramatic changes to the core concept or gameplay. Because they know if they do, they'll get skewered.
I'm not really worried. There's not much they can change in terms of gameplay and I doubt Sakurai will even allow them to do so. Really, the only thing they can change is Adventure mode which I want them to anyway. I want levels and enemies based on the franchises included in the game as opposed to Brawl which had original levels and enemies and was boring as a result. To me, all Namco Bandai's involvement means is that we will be getting Tales characters in Smash which I'm excited about (as long as we don't get Emil :p).
I'm not sure how well that would work fandom-wise, though. I can imagine people just plain being pissed off that enemies weren't included as playable characters instead. :( "Omg but the model for ___ was in the game... why couldn't they just give him a moveset so I could play as him??" SSB fans have some pretty big entitlement issues from what I remember when I last paid attention to them. Anyway, I don't really have much of an opinion on this, honestly. XD I agree with the people saying that Nintendo won't let Namco do too much to change things up so we probably won't notice too much of a difference between this game and previous titles in the series. Just, hopefully, a better development time since a bigger team is probably assigned to it than Nintendo could have managed on their own. Fingers crossed for Tales characters but I'm not getting my hopes up too high since it seems like kind of a small franchise compared to the others that made it into Brawl. :[
I get what you're saying but not all enemies could work as playable characters: Goombas, ReDeads, Metroids, many kinds of Pokemon. What I really want is an expansion of the Adventure mode that was in Melee, levels based on the franchises and you fight the corresponding enemies.
The Subspace Emissary sucked. There's just no way to shoehorn SSB's fighting game mechanics into a platformer and not make it have control/gameplay issues. Plus it dragged on too long, and the random generic enemies didn't help it either.
Melee didn't have Subspace Emissary though. I like Melee's Adventure Mode. Each stage played a lot closer to a modern Smash-esque interpretation of the respective franchise. But the SSE played like a bland Kirby/Metroid hybrid with characters that did not fit the level design
.....I liked SSE. It just seemed really empty in some places but generally I thought it was fun. :x No real complaints from me.
