Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai recently gave some insight on his views regarding the online component in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. If you’ve attempted to play Nintendo and Hal Laboratory’s entertaining mascot fighter, chances are you’ve encountered a specific brand of players. By that, of course, I mean that these individuals just wait for the other person to attack so they can attempt to counterattack. They also don’t use items, which a lot of folks will argue takes away from the fun of Smash Bros.

As indicated by Polygon, a player recently wrote to Sakurai, and the series director stated that the fan’s disinterest in playing Brawl online was certainly justified. “I’d like people to take some freer approaches with their gameplay, but the sort of battle style you describe in your letter is not interesting or fun,” said Sakurai. “That’s why I’ll probably be thinking of a way to deal with that in the next game. We’ve learned a lot about net play since Brawl was released, after all, so a lot more is possible.”

Sakurai mentioned that the dev team did what it could with Brawl and the Wii’s online options, which, let’s face it, were pretty damn limited. “I suppose the fact that we’ve still got no-fee online battles available in a game that was released five years ago is another cause of the problem,” explained the director. “It would have been nice if we could have revised the game rules as appropriate, but with the system we had, that wasn’t possible.”

Brawl is one of my favorite games on the Wii, and my favorite entry in Nintendo’s fighting franchise. That said, I never cared much for the online scene. Now that it’s become a wasteland where mostly only tourney players reside, I think I’ll stay away. I mean, I like having fun while playing Brawl. Here’s hoping the next iteration of Smash Bros. doesn’t suffer a similar fate when it lands on the Wii U and 3DS now that Nintendo is seemingly taken this whole online thing a bit more seriously.

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