In the latest installment of Iwata Asks with SSBB lead Masahiro Sakurai, Sakurai and the Nintendo president talk about Brawl’s single story mode, The Space Emissary; more specifically, the storyline included in it.
Sakurai mentions the difficulties he first faced with the idea (there are a bunch of varying characters in the game, after all) as well as his own initial aversion to the idea of a singleplayer story mode. After realizing he wanted to use the side-scrolling aspect from the previous Smash Bros. game as a start-off point, Sakurai once again faced the challenge of figuring out a way to make the characters coexist, and to make a story make sense. Enter Kazushige Nojima, the man behind the story in games such as Final Fantasy VII and Kingdom Hearts.
"At that point, I decided to ask Kazushige Nojima-san to help us since he had composed the scenarios for titles like Final Fantasy VII," Sakurai tells Iwata. In typical Iwata fashion, he replies, "Wow, asking the person who crafted scenarios for Final Fantasy to write one for Smash Bros. is a pretty big deal."
Despite his credentials, Nojima’s first draft wasn’t exactly the stuff fanboy dreams are made of. "Some of the characters are on a bus on the way to the stadium. Samus is there. Donkey Kong is there and Snake is watching the bus from afar."
Eventually Nojima and Sakurai worked together to form a more agreeable story behind Space Emissary, and thus the mode was born.
If you haven’t been reading Iwata Asks, I’d highly recommend you catch up on it. It’s entertaining, and you never quite know when you’ll learn that your sixth grade creative writing project was better than the work of the man behind Final Fantasy VII’s plot.
[via Iwata Asks]
