Sakurai Reveals How A Chance Encounter Led To Sora In Smash Bros. Ultimate

After ongoing requests, Sora from Kingdom Hearts joined Super Smash Bros. Ultimate earlier this week as the final DLC fighter.

For a lot of fans, it still seems too good to be true, so how exactly did it happen? In Sakurai’s latest column (translated by @PushDustIn and @KodyNOKOLO), the Smash director goes into details about how it all played out. While it was clear Sora was a fan favourite after the Fighter Ballot results, Sakurai himself still thought it would be highly unlikely.

That was until he one day had a chance encounter with a Disney representative at a certain awards venue, who said they were all for Sora’s addition to the all-star roster (it sounds similar to Kingdom Hearts’ original elevator pitch). This then apparently led to a lot of “long and careful discussions” between Square Enix, Nintendo and Disney.

From there, Sakurai apparently had to follow a lot of guidelines and overcome many hurdles when developing the character. His team also had some difficulties creating the model:

“The first Sora model that the Smash team sent to Disney / SE was very quality and there weren’t a lot of issues…just kidding. It was quite difficult.”

In the same column, Sakurai also mentioned how Fighters Pass 2 was originally planned to have only five characters – like the original Fighters Pass until Sora’s addition got approved by higher-ups.

Are you glad Sora made it into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in the end? What do you think of this latest DLC fighter in battle? Leave a comment down below.