Micropost: AR cards in Smash 4? Sakurai’s Famitsu column Vol. 376

Note: Do not repost the full translation. Please use the first two paragraphs and link to this translation. For additional information, please read this post. This translation is for fan use only, and may not accurately reflect Masahiro Sakurai. The following is a selection from Masahiro Sakurai’s book: Think About Making the Video Games 2. If you enjoyed this article, I would strongly encourage you to support Sakurai by buying his books. If you have any questions about this article, please contact the administrator.

You may be aware that Kid Icarus: Uprising featured AR cards, cards that could be scanned by the 3DS camera to project a three-dimensional animation. You can scan up to three at a time, and you can make the cards, which project one character each, “face off” against each other in battle. In any case, this is just a small post translating the “Looking Back” segment of this column, where Sakurai talks about his desire to put AR cards into Smash.

“Dance! O-dolls,” vol. 376, June 16th, 2011

Looking Back

Interviewer: “Odore! O-dolls”¹ is just a name that really makes you want to say it out loud, isn’t it (laughs). This clever title must have come from you, right?

Sakurai: Do you think so? I wanted to put AR into “Smash for” as well…

Interviewer: Although there ended up being figures (amiibo) in it.

Sakurai: In reality, yes, that’s right (laughs). Of course, O-dolls are an extension of the figures you can use in Smash. I put some thought into it, thinking that if we used movement during the game, creating them wouldn’t be impossible.² Unfortunately, although we had a large amount of cards, production simply wasn’t smooth. There wasn’t a great way to get these cards out to everybody.

Interviewer: Did the majority end up getting them for free as bonuses from magazines or books? I even at the snacks to get them though…³

Sakurai: Ah, thank you. But there were more different types of cards than there were cards in circulation, so in the end we ended up selling them on Nintendo’s official site in packs.

Interview: I bought those. I bought those.

Sakurai: Well, that’s…but, I wanted them to spread like trading cards. Although because of market reasons, I gave up on that. That was disappointing.

Footnotes

1. “Odore” is 踊れ, which is “dance,” as a command. “Odoru” is 踊る, which means “to dance.” Saying the English word “doll” in Japanese becomes ドール, pronounced “dooru,” so O-dolls becomes “o-dooru,” which sounds like “odoru,” or “dance.” So it’s a little bit of wordplay there.

2. This is a weird sentence in the Japanese too.

3. It’s fairly common in Japan for snacks to have little promotional items like these in them.