During an interview with Nintendo about Super Mario Bros. Wonder, programming director Shiro Mouri, game designer Koichi Hayashida, and producer Takashi Tezuka spoke on a feature that almost made it to the full game. The feature was Live-Commentary and it was developed for half a year, even getting staff focused solely on developing it. The best part was that the popular choice among testers was the Tsundere voice.
In an Ask the Developer interview about Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Mouri said that Tezuka’s idea was to add live commentary to Wonder. The same kind of commentary you’d hear from a sports game like soccer or basketball. To quote Hayashida:
“We actually spent about six months seriously developing live commentary. We tried adding voices to match the player’s actions. Even though we’d added various voices, questions like, “Who’s doing this commentary?” started to pop up amongst the team.”
Of the over 2,000 ideas put in the game, this one would have been a great one, up there with the feature that was also in the Dark Souls games. The team was split on keeping or leaving it, and the two choices were between a newscaster and a Tsundere. In Japanese, a Tsundere is an adjective describing a personality or a person who has a hard, harsh exterior, but shows a glimpse of affection underneath. According to playtests, the Tsundere was a popular pick.
Although the team was split, those who liked it didn’t want to lose it, but it was becoming difficult to get all of the voice variations for everything that could happen. As a solution, the team “brought in an additional team member to dedicate themselves to this feature full-time.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough, and this idea that clearly showed how the team wasn’t trying to replicate what they had thought of as “ordinary” had to be shut down.
After all the hard work, the team knew it wouldn’t work out, so they “had to let it go.” It would have been a really cool way that they appealed to new movie fans, and another cool tidbit, much like goombas biting Mario. This kind of stuff makes us excited for the new game so we know you are too. Make sure to check out our countdown clock to see when the game releases in your timezone.
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