Sakurai Reflects On Every Super Smash Bros. Fighter Reveal In New Blog Post (Part 2)

Last week, Nintendo shared a special ‘Part 1’ Super Smash Bros. Ultimate article on its official website.

It’s now back this week with ‘Part 2’ – which encourages fans of the latest game to reflect on the history of Ultimate with Masahiro Sakurai, as he talks about each of the fighter reveal scenes.

Here’s the full message from Sakurai in this blog, in case you missed it the first time round:

The Super Smash Bros. series is a project where we undertake collaborations you can’t see anywhere else. We wanted to use that opportunity and create nice content that people could enjoy, and that’s why we started making the fighter reveal videos.

It was a lot of work to make the videos while working on the game at the same time, but there were always big reactions from fans, so it was worth the effort. In this article, I’ll give some brief commentary as we go, so I hope you’ll enjoy looking back over all these videos.

Please take this opportunity to reflect on the history of Super Smash Bros. by watching the scenes where each new fighter first appeared. You may have seen some of the videos before, but they are well worth another look!

And here are just some of the reveal trailers featured within the latest blog. A lot of focus is on the DLC fighters, which is rather interesting:

Piranha Plant joins the battle!

The Piranha Plant reveal was an additional video for the early purchase bonus. So, there isn’t a CG part, only the in-game part. Piranha Plant isn’t included in the Fighter Pass, so you need to buy them separately. At the time, people were saying that they never expected Piranha Plant to join the battle.

The Masked Rebel

This was the announcement video that revealed Joker as a fully fledged fighter. The actual announcement was made with “Take Your Heart”. It was made with the concept of Joker sneaking into The Game Awards 2018 to steal a Super Smash Bros. invitation, so there were two sets of dialogue: one for The Game Awards, and one for the web version. The animated parts were made by Domerica, who also worked on the cutscenes in Joker’s original game.

Best Friends

With the Banjo & Kazooie reveal video, we were aiming for what’s called in Japanese comedy terms a “tendon” (in English, a “call back”), where we repeat the same joke again. In this case, we followed the King K. Rool video. The ending is, of course, inspired by the defeat of Gruntilda in the original game.

One-Winged Angel

The FINAL FANTASY movie released in 2005 had a huge impact. For the reveal of Sephiroth joining Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, we created a high production video with the aim of achieving something close to that impact. As a result, there was an extremely large reaction, and the video is something you can really enjoy. It’s also the debut of Cloud’s additional Final Smash, Omnislash Ver. 5.

The Last Key

This is the last fighter to be revealed, so we went back to the beginning and made it a finale. Creating that many fighters in CG would have been a lot of work! Instead, we made the background black and plain, but I think this is the best way. The in-game part also came out really well. I think it’s a fitting end.

Once again, this isn’t every single trailer highlighted in the latest blog, so head on over to Nintendo’s page to see every other character that was covered. You can also see our previous post for more characters:

What was your favourite fighter reveal trailer for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate? Tell us down below.