'I just want the game to let me play it already.'

- Game director Masahiro Sakurai (Super Smash Bros. series, Kid Icarus: Uprising) vents his frustration at unnecessary plot distractions in games in an editorial he penned for Japanese magazine Famitsu (as translated by Polygon). It's not so much that Sakurai is against storytelling in games, as much as it is that he feels that narrative and design need to work together like a well-oiled machine. It's why, he says, he took on the writing in Kid Icarus: Uprising himself. "I did it so I could write a story that jibed with the game, one that took advantage of the game's advantages," he says. "Every character, including the bosses, had their personalities shaped by their roles in the game, or the structure of the game itself. That let me develop the dialogue to firmly match the developments you encounter in the game. If I had had someone else write the story, I'd either have to keep explaining things to the writer whenever anything changed in-game, or I'd have to partition it away from the game and lose on that consistency."