Sakurai describes the challenge of balancing Super Smash Bros.

In a recent column published in Famitsu magazine, Super Smash Bros. lead Masahiro Sakurai explained that he is focused on capturing the "great feeling" of sending opponents flying and dealing high damage as balance adjustments are made to the in-development Wii U and 3DS installments, reports Siliconera.

It's not just about creating more powerful attacks, Sakuri wrote. In order to keep the game fair and all characters well balanced, Sakurai said the development team has spent a lot of time tweaking the game's strongest attacks so as not to be too overpowered. Sakurai compared this depth of work going into maintaining this balance to creating a role-playing game where many different working elements — such as obstacles within in environments and the items available to players — have to be taken into consideration. Simply making enemies stronger or weaker doesn't affect balance.

"Doing things like simply ‘lowering the performance' can make games lose its fun," Sakurai wrote. "Additionally, making a strong attack weaker can take away from the ‘good feeling'. By making adjustments that get rid of all advantages and disadvantages, it can turn a game into a mediocre one without any challenge.

"Rather than directly weakening an attack's advantageous parts, we're putting effort into keeping them strong, while adding other weaknesses to them," he added. "Like giving the attacks punishable openings, or weakening the character's mobility or recovery rate. We're making comprehensive adjustments to characters, even for parts that might seem completely irrelevant."

Sakurai added that separate balancing has to be taken into account for four player free-for-all and one-on-one matches. Sometimes nothing can be done about these, Sakurai said, because the circumstances while playing — number and type of characters — will rarely ever be the same. Regardless, the development team is working hard and hoping to release Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS "as soon as possible."

"The game balance of Super Smash Bros. Brawl started six years before its release, and it most likely goes back even further during its time of development, and it's never been reformed even through the updates afterwards," he wrote. "We're at a stage where we'd like to release the new title as soon as possible, and offer something more enjoyable than ever."