Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U

• 1. Introduction

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  Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U arrived in 2014 as two separate games sharing a single vision: to find the ground between two very different versions of the same franchise. One version fit in your pocket; the other filled a television screen in high-definition 1080p. Together they would sell more than fourteen million copies worldwide. But when series creator Masahiro Sakurai sat down to make them, he was navigating a tightrope between competing audiences, competing hardware, and a fanbase that had strong opinions about which direction the series should go. The games began development in March 2012, following Sakurai's completion of Kid Icarus: Uprising, a project whose fingerprints would show up in unexpected ways. The roster would eventually grow to 58 playable characters, including fighters from outside Nintendo's own stable. And a character poll run between April and October 2015 would reveal, years later, some surprising winners Nintendo chose to keep secret. What drove those choices, how the two versions were pulled apart and stitched together, and what it cost to make them happen are the stories that follow.

• 2. The Design Tightrope

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  At E3 2013, on the 11th of June, Sakurai publicly confirmed what many fans had suspected: the new Smash game would deliberately sit between two earlier entries in the series. Super Smash Bros. Melee, released years before, was fast-paced and competition-oriented. Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the 2008 installment that Super Smash Bros. 4 directly succeeded, leaned slower and more casual. Sakurai's stated goal was to tune the gameplay to live somewhere between those two poles. He also confirmed at that same event that the tripping mechanic introduced in Brawl had been cut entirely. That mechanic had drawn persistent complaints from competitive players, who felt it introduced unwanted randomness into high-stakes matches. Beyond pace, the games introduced structural ideas that had not existed in the series before. Players could now customize the special moves of existing fighters, not just create Mii Fighters with unique loadouts. Customized characters and certain earned items could even be transferred between the 3DS and Wii U versions. For the Wii U version specifically, a mode called 8-Player Smash allowed up to eight people to fight simultaneously, a first for the franchise, though it was restricted to larger stages and could not be played online. The Wii U also introduced Smash Tour, a board game-type mode supporting up to four players, and Special Orders, a challenge mode run by Master Hand and Crazy Hand in which losing a round forfeited all accumulated prizes.

• 3. Two Machines, Two Compromises

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  Hardware limitations on the Nintendo 3DS shaped nearly every major decision that separated the two versions. The Ice Climbers, playable in both Melee and Brawl, were cut from the roster entirely because the 3DS could not handle the pair's synchronized artificial intelligence. The mid-match character transformations that had allowed fighters like Zelda to shift into Sheik during play were also removed; instead, those characters became separate, individual fighters for the first time. The Circle Pad Pro peripheral, which had added a second analog stick to earlier 3DS models, was left unsupported because of hardware incompatibility, though the newer New Nintendo 3DS model's C-Stick was supported for triggering Smash Attacks. The 3DS version also carried fewer music tracks per stage, limited to two songs each because of storage constraints, while the Wii U version had no such cap. To compensate for the 3DS hardware's smaller screen, the version added optional cel-shaded outlines around characters to keep them visible when the camera pulled back. Its two exclusive modes were Smash Run, based on the City Trial mode from Kirby Air Ride, and StreetSmash, a StreetPass game in which players knocked opponents off a top-down board using a disc. The decision to release the Wii U version weeks after the 3DS version was made deliberately, to give each version its own dedicated debugging period rather than rushing both to market simultaneously.

• 4. Building the Roster

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  Seventeen newcomers joined the base roster, drawn from Nintendo's own franchises and beyond. Wii Fit Trainer and Animal Crossing's Villager were among the more unexpected additions, alongside Rosalina from the Mario series, Little Mac from Punch-Out!!, and Greninja from Pokemon X and Y. Capcom contributed Mega Man and Bandai Namco contributed Pac-Man. Mii Fighters were added specifically in response to fan requests for personalized characters, though to prevent potential bullying and maintain online balance, Mii Fighters could not be used in online matches against strangers. Seven additional characters arrived as downloadable content between April 2015 and February 2016. Mewtwo, absent since Melee, returned on the 28th of April 2015, though Club Nintendo members who had registered both versions before the 31st of March 2015 received access two weeks early. Roy from Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade and Lucas from Mother 3, both returning from earlier entries, arrived on the 14th of June 2015 alongside Ryu from Capcom's Street Fighter franchise. Cloud Strife from Square Enix's Final Fantasy VII followed on the 15th of December 2015, driven by increasing requests for Final Fantasy representation. The final batch, released on the 3rd of February 2016 in North America, brought Corrin from Fire Emblem Fates and Bayonetta from the Bayonetta series. Bayonetta's inclusion came from a player-nominated ballot. She ranked first in Europe and in the top five in North America among what Sakurai described as negotiable and realizable characters.

• 5. The Ballot's Hidden Winners

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  Sakurai and former Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata, who had first announced the games at E3 2011, made a deliberate choice to keep the top vote-getters from the 2015 ballot private. Their reasoning, as Sakurai described it, was that revealing the names might lead fans to pressure the relevant game companies directly, causing inconvenience to any ongoing negotiations. That silence held for years. In October 2021, Sakurai finally disclosed that Sora from the Kingdom Hearts series and Banjo and Kazooie from the Banjo-Kazooie series had been the two most-requested fighters in the poll. Neither appeared in Super Smash Bros. 4. Both were eventually added as downloadable content for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the Nintendo Switch successor released in 2018. Iwata, who had been involved in those early decisions about transparency, died before he could see the outcome; his role in the franchise's history ran from that 2011 announcement through the period when the games shipped. The ballot itself ran from the 1st of April 2015 through the 3rd of October 2015, a span of six months during which players worldwide submitted their preferences. The gap between what players wanted and what could actually be negotiated drew a clear line around the practical limits of a crossover franchise, no matter how large its roster grew.

• 6. Music and Spectacle

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  The games assembled a roster of composers that spanned decades of video game history. Contributors included Masashi Hamauzu, Yuzo Koshiro, Yasunori Mitsuda, Motoi Sakuraba, Yoko Shimomura, Mahito Yokota, Akari Kaida, Michiru Yamane, Koji Kondo, Kazumi Totaka, and Masafumi Takada, among others. The original score came from Bandai Namco's internal sound team. Both versions featured a My Music feature letting players select which tracks played on each stage. The 3DS version added a Play in Sleep Mode option, allowing players to listen to the game's soundtrack through the system's speakers with the screen closed. Club Nintendo members who registered both versions before the 13th of January 2015 could receive a two-disc promotional soundtrack collecting selected pieces from across the game. Sakurai also made a significant structural choice about how to reveal new fighters. Rather than include a story campaign like Brawl's Subspace Emissary mode, he chose to release cinematic trailers for each newcomer, designed specifically to be shared on the internet. His stated reason was that cutscenes from the Subspace Emissary had been uploaded to video-sharing websites before many players had a chance to see them in the game, which he felt robbed those moments of their impact. Each trailer became an announcement event in itself, building anticipation one character at a time across the months between E3 2013 and the games' releases.

• 7. Reception and Sales

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  The 3DS version sold over a million copies in its first weekend in Japan alone, and had passed 3.22 million copies worldwide by the end of October 2014. By the end of 2014, it had sold more than two million copies in the United States. Nearly 2,190,000 copies had been sold in Japan by six months after release. By September 2022, lifetime sales stood at 9.64 million copies worldwide. The Wii U version launched in North America on the 21st of November 2014 and became the fastest-selling Wii U game in the country, moving 490,000 physical and digital copies in its first three days, a record that had previously been held by Mario Kart 8. By the end of March 2015, over 1.6 million units had been sold in the U.S., and by September 2022, global sales totaled 5.38 million copies. Critics praised the Wii U version in particular. Daniel Bischoff at GameRevolution called it the biggest leap forward for the franchise yet. Jose Otero at IGN credited it with appealing to longtime Nintendo fans while remaining accessible to newcomers. Both reviewers and players pointed to online performance as the main weakness; multiple critics cited stuttering frame rates and latency issues during online play as consistent problems. Online multiplayer and other online services were eventually shut down on the 8th of April 2024. The 3DS eShop, which had hosted the games' downloadable content, closed in March 2023, ending the ability to purchase that content. The GameCube controller adapter released alongside the Wii U version at launch was later confirmed in 2017 to work with the Nintendo Switch as well.