Sakurai Answers Questions on Kid Icarus Uprising

Pit fans, rejoice! IGN recently asked Masahiro Sakurai questions from IGN’s readers on Kid Icarus Uprising.

IGN reader brandoradio asked, “What elements of the original NES version have you carried over into Uprising?” to which Sakurai answered: “Probably the biggest thing is the game’s sense of humour. At the time that the original Kid Icarus came out, you had games like Zelda, Metroid, Dragon Quest. It was a time when these adventure games or RPG games were coming out, and were very serious. They were squarely about fighting through a crisis and a sense of adventure. At the time Kid Icarus had this humorous, almost comical sense of humour to it, and didn’t take the user too seriously, so that’s an area that has really reflected in this new game. You’ll notice in the new title that you have a lot of conversation between Pit and Palutena, and between the two of them they’re cracking jokes a lot. There isn’t a sense that Pit is overcome with the stress of a crisis and is fighting through that in his battles, but that he has a light-hearted approach to it. And so, I think that it’s not too serious is a big thing that we’ve taken from the original game.”

This question was followed up by IGN, who asked, “Speaking of the characters, what can you tell us about Magnus?”

Sakurai answered, “The game is set up in chapters – going from chapter one to chapter two to chapter three, and Magnus is a guest character that appears in chapter two. So it’s very near the beginning of the game that he appears, and what we’ve done is we’ve set up this sort of ironic situation where you’re near the beginning of the game, but you’re set against what is made to be this ‘breaking the fourth wall’ final RPG boss type of character. So you discover that Magnus has some background history with this final boss character. Magnus is presented in the game as being the strongest of the strongest among humans, and all the humans have been fighting against the underworld and being defeated, but here’s this one character who’s stronger than everybody else. And when paired with Pit in the game, it’s a good way for the player to get a sense comparatively, of just how powerful Pit is too. And also to explore Pit’s character and personality by talking with another character in the game.”

When questions were raised about the locations in the game, Sakurai answered, “Between chapters what you’re doing is you’re returning to the heavens where Palutena is located, and when you return there that gives you an opportunity to prepare for the next chapter, to re-equip your character with different things. In that sense it’s sort of a hub, sort of a home…. I’d say it’s [the place] more like a menu.”

When it comes to gameplay, toonlinkuser asked, “Which is more heavily focused on, air combat or land combat?” Sakurai explained that, “Within the pattern of a given chapter, having air battle, land battle, boss battle, I would say in terms of time, from air combat to land combat it would probably be a roughly one to three ratio. The game is set so that Palutena can grant Pit the power of flight for only up to five minutes, so in that sense it’s limited to a specific amount of time. My thought on that was that if the air combat was too long, the user might get bored of that same type of gameplay, and it also gave me an opportunity to make that a very focused and tailored experience within those five minutes. In the ground battle stages, however, you have the ability to move along at your own pace, to explore a little bit, tactics might be different from player to player. In that sense the ground battles will most often be a lot longer than the time spent in the air. And that one to three time does not include the boss battles.”

When it comes to weapons, Sakurai said, “In the sense of there being customisation by the player, you’re going to be picking up weapons all the time. Lots and lots of different weapons, and each of those different weapons, in addition to having just – for example – stronger abilities or weaker abilities, will also have certain characteristics attached to them, like one giving faster foot speed or one providing extra range, and given the great wealth of weapon variety in the game, there are so many individual characteristics for each weapon that it becomes almost like the weapons are fighting game characters – the weapons themselves are the characters you play with in the game.”

The multiplayer function was also a question raised by an IGN user. Sakurai explained that “The main mode in the multiplayer is this mode called Light Versus Dark. During that game, Pit and Dark Pit will appear for each of the respective teams. In this mode the light team is light and the dark team is dark, as far as their coloring [goes], but there is also a free for all mode in which the color of each avatar will be customizable.”

Pit’s entrance into the Smash Brother’s universe has made him a popular character once again in the Nintendo world, so there is no doubt that this game will sell well with both old-school gamers and new, younger gamers. The game has great graphics and has interesting gameplay, according to the E3 trailer. I am definitely looking forward to this game, which will be flying to the 3DS this year!

Kid Icarus Uprising E3 Trailer