Two years ago, in 2011, it was announced at E3 that a new Super Smash Bros. will be coming to the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U. As with all new releases to this series, the tension created for the fans is largely based in which characters will make an appearance. Will we be blessed with new soldiers to compete in this cross-title fighter? Or will we be denied further access to some of our favourites? What I can say is this, Sonic just might not be there this time.
Director of Software Development, Masahiro Sakurai, has recently revealed the difficulty in including third party characters in the new Smash Bros. He stated that:
In the last game, when we added Sonic and Snake, there were lots of different hoops to jump through as far as getting approvals and making sure all the parties involved were happy with the way things went. You can consider it a very special circumstance for that to happen.
Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega’s own, and Solid Snake, from the Konami’s Metal Gear series, were the first third party characters to appear in Super Smash Bros. but this may in fact simply be a one off appearance as Sakurai tells us that “Adding third-party characters should be considered a very special case … it’s much tougher than people can imagine.” Given the confirmed inclusion of Megaman, Sonic may have gotten the boot.
What new characters would you like to see in the new addition to the Super Smash Bros. series? What old ones are you praying remain?
I understand the red tape nonsense, but the fact that the next 3 Sonic games are going to be exclusive to Nintendo systems causes this improbability to make even less sense. Even though he was the cheapest character in Brawl, I still loved seeing him on the roster (and Knuckles running in the background!).
Agreed