Sakurai has spoken. Apparently he tweeted a heckling fan, telling him to "knock off looking down on them [Namco Bandai] with narrow-minded thinking". Just lolz. Was not expecting that. If Nintendo is short on staff, like they've been hinting at lately, why not team up with HAL again? That seems like a better fit to me.
Has HAL even done anything worthwhile lately? I don't recall seeing their names prominently on many things and a glance at the Wiki page shows the only Wii games they even developed were two Kirby games (only one developed on their own) and Brawl (from which most of their dev team jumped ship to Sora, iirc?). They made a fair few DS games but nothing that makes me implicitly wanna trust them with another big console title. :/
^This. I like the idea of having an Adventure mode that has separate levels based on various Nintendo franchises. That was one thing I loved about Melee.
Don't know how I forgot this but I just remembered that Namco Bandai owns Pac-Man so if any one character from Namco Bandai were to be in the next Smash, Pac-Man would probably be it. He's an icon. While a Pac-Man inspired stage would be cool, Pac-Man himself being a playable character in the game isn't something I'm looking forward to.
Huh, I forgot that they made a Mario Kart game. Wasn't it that arcade one? I want to say I saw it somewhere before.
“It isn’t a matter of ‘if the next game has 50 characters, that’ll be enough.’ There is a certain charm to games that have huge casts of playable characters, but they tend to have issues with game balance and it becomes very difficult to fine-tune each character and have them all feel distinctive…. In terms of quantity, we’ve probably already reached the limit of what’s feasible. I think a change of direction may be what’s needed.” - Masahiro Sakurai So I guess this means the amount of characters won't increase...at least not drastically. I always thought Smash would reach it's limit when each franchise had 4 playable characters.
I played it very briefly in an arcade in France. I don't remember anything about it except that Pac-Man was a playable character.
If it's good, I don't care who makes it. I love Smash Bros, but I really want a better storyline. I would love for them to blend the overworld map with different games. Like how NSMB's overworld looks for Mario series battles, Star Fox plane style map for Star Fox battles, etc. It would just be better than crappy, boring backgrounds and that lame map from SSE.
