Sakurai talks about working on the next Super Smash Bros. games

In the latest edition of Famitsu, Sakurai talked about working on the next Super Smash Bros. game. According to him, he is suffering a lot of pain in his right arm and hand, and this is hindering his progress. He also mentions that he has trouble finding the time to work on the games, as a lot of his time is spent overseeing other people working on the games.

“As a director, I don’t have much time in the weekdays to proceed along with my own work. The entire day is spent overseeing other people, holding meetings, working on other proposals, making visits elsewhere and so on. If I can get everything squared away, then I can work on my own stuff, but most of the time there’s just an overwhelming lack of time. Often I go in on my off-days to catch up on my own work, but with my body going on me like this, I have to cut these extra days out of my schedule and even with that I can’t use my right arm very much to control things. If this disorder lingers, or if it never gets fixed, there’s no telling what impact that would have on the project.”

Sakurai noted that, until his right arm gets better, he’s forced to gnarl his left hand around a game controller in order to do any sort of playtesting work on the current version of Smash Bros. ”I’ve had to control two characters at once in a lot of game projects up to now, so as long as I keep it to simple moves, this works well enough. It doesn’t go that easy with the Nintendo 3DS version, though, and the debug camera is pretty hard to control. Still, now I realize how important it is to have your health. I’m glad I’m still in good enough shape to work.”

http://mynintendonews.com/2013/02/27/sakurais-right-arm-pain-is-hindering-smash-bros-wii-u-and-3ds-progress/

Oh I saw this on GameFAQs. I hope he gets rest.

According to another source, he is suffering due to the fact that he has been on the computer (repetitive movement) for most of his life. I can't really recall the name of his condition, but I believe it was related to arthritis. I can't recall exactly, either, but I believe it was also permanent.

I saw an article related to this long ago. I just did not have time to write about it. And when I finally did, the news was so old it was not worth writing about anymore.

On a completely unrelated topic, around the same time I saw this article, I also read news that Iwata might resign if Nintendo's performance does not improve. This was also something I had hoped to write about but never got to it due to time.

Does he have carpal tunnel? That might be it.

I hope this doesn't have too much of an impact on the game. Get better soon, Sakurai!