"In all previous Smash Bros. games," he explained, "I've entered in all the data for fighter skills and hitboxes by myself, and it's quite nearly that way with this game too. I've thought about leaving this work to others and I've actually tried it once or twice, but it hasn't worked out. I don't want to release an incomplete game, and I want everything to be as successful as possible, but it results in a massive amount of work for me. It's a big problem, but there are reasons for doing it this way."
One of those reasons is consistency. Since it's Sakurai coming up with ideas for character motions and fighting moves, once he completes work on damage rates and hitboxes for a character, they'll already fairly playable at that point.
"Characters' in-game balance and features are something that I'm thinking about from the start while coming up with motions," he said. "If I left that to someone else midway, that'd make things more difficult. It's faster and more accurate to just input the numbers myself than try to explain it in words to somebody."
