Johnknight1
Upward and Forward, Positive and Persistent
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2007
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- Johnknight1
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Yep. Whenever I make rosters or theorize rosters or characters, I consider a lot of things. It's crazy how every time I seriously do this I super deeply consider a new character each time. This happens tenfold when a new kind of character is confirmed. When Ryu was confirmed, I legit started theorizing half of the Street Fighter II roster (plus Alex, because I'm a Alex mark). I got some incredible theories and ideas now that I've seen and played Ryu in Smash (aka basically SFII in Smash 4, lol. It's easy to go off what you've known for over 2 decades!).I'm a developer. Not a game developer (yet, hopefully), but a developer nonetheless. I can say from experience from an application planning standpoint, and I expect in many other mediums as well (if not almost everything), the first thing you do is throw out as many ideas as you possibly can, super crazy and ridiculous, outlandish ones included, in order to get things on the table. Then you filter through that to find the best ones.
In just making my own fan roster, I looked through character after character and game after game just trying to think about what the best options would be. It would be shocking, especially knowing how detail orientated Sakurai is and how much he likes to push the limits of what he makes, if they didn't do that with each version. I wouldn't even be surprised if he looked at the same old list of said dozens and dozens of characters for this game.
His criteria and themes for the roster are what have changed with each iteration. With Melee, he had specific ones such as a "NES rep." Brawl seemed to be filling out existing series with their other primary characters, and Smash 4 was "non-fighter fighters" and unique/gimmick based movesets.
There's so many details to characters that it is literally insane to think about the totality of it. I divide it generally into moveset (physical moves used by characters), skillset (what a characters' specific skills, strengths, and weaknesses are), and playstyle (how a character plays and how a character is most effectively played) to condense it, but you can break all of that down into so many sub-categories it is utterly mind-boggling.
Also, it usually isn't Sakurai doing this, but rather a huge team. Sakurai is just the one with final say. Often he puts in the glue for characters that connects pieces together for how they are built. Out of all the jobs he's done on Smash, this is definitively the one he's most effective at.