Sakurai Explains Why There Were No Spirit Battles With Kirby Until The Later Half Of World Of Light

During the third part of the Nintendo Dream interview with Masahiro Sakurai, the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate director briefly touched on Spirits and World of Light.

First, Sakurai explained the reason why players did not have any Spirit Battles against Kirby in World of Light until the second half of the game. Sakurai says the reason is because Kirby was “analyzed” at one point, so the Spirit Battles came later.

Next, Sakurai talked about how spirits were decided. The development team has to first consider whether it’s legal to use the character and if there’s any artwork for said character. Some planned spirits were dropped from the list as they had no artwork.

Initially, there were many contenders for Spirtis from the Kid Icarus series, but this was later reduced as they were too many of them. The reason why there were so many contenders in the first place was because Sakurai worked on Kid Icarus: Uprising, and he could envision how Spirit Battles would take place.

During development, the team debated on what to call Snacks, items that are fed to Spirits in order to level them up. At one point, “energy” was considered, but they decided against it as they wanted to give a fun name.

Last but not least, Sakurai revealed how the World of Light map was created. The developers decided to have the map created with a lot of routes and variation. Spirits were later organized around the map, and depending on the stage it would sometimes affect where Spirit Battles took place. The developers also created routes around difficult Spirits so players could avoid them.

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