Nintendo’s apparent war against YouTube has carried into what it’s going to put into one of its upcoming games. Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai has written in his column in Weekly Famitsu magazine that the next Super Smash Bros. game won’t include cutscenes.

In his column, Sakurai said:

Unfortunately, the movie scenes we worked hard to create were uploaded onto the internet. You can only truly wow a player the first time he sees [a cutscene]. I felt if players saw the cutscenes outside of the game, they would no longer serve as rewards for playing the game, so I’ve decided against having them.

The column was written in Japanese but translated by Kotaku from which is has taken off through the gaming media landscape. I should note that Kotaku’s translation does not explicitly state that the story mode has been completely removed from the game but that is the widely accepted and reported interpretation of Sakurai’s comments.

Whether there’s something lost in translation and only cutscenes are dropped or the whole story mode is canned, this is about as flimsy an excuse for dropping a mode from the game as possible.

Nobody plays Super Smash Bros. solely for the story mode cutscenes. People play fighting games for the gameplay. Sure, they can have a nice story but that’s not going to be the big selling point. You want to beat up the computer or friends or random folks online.

If “nobody is particularly interested in story mode” was used as a reason for dropping it, we could live with it. There hasn’t been a hue and cry over Titanfall not having a traditional single-player campaign. If the reason was to focus on new mechanics and graphics, that would be acceptable. We’re getting that with character intro scenes and character customization coming to the game.

Instead, we get a continuation of Nintendo’s war against YouTube. For whatever reason, Nintendo seems to consider YouTube videos of Nintendo products detrimental to their financial health. If Telltale Games got every video of The Walking Dead pulled because the game’s plot is central to its success, I would understand it because watching The Walking Dead would be a somewhat acceptable substitute to playing it. The same can’t be said for Nintendo games.

I think Nintendo is too busy looking at any possible external reason for why they haven’t been selling Wii Us rather than looking at the obvious reason. There isn’t a must-buy game or interesting enough reason for the Wii U that would drive people to buy the Wii U. Wii Sports and Wii Fit were interesting enough with the motion controls to get people into the Wii.

There’s just nothing grabbing people’s attention on the Wii U. I think that people will gravitate to the Wii U when very good games start launching on the console. When you get great Mario, Zelda, DK and Metroid games on the Wii U, people will come. Until then, Nintendo needs to stop blaming YouTube and start blaming their poor planning with this console.

Source: Kotaku