always gonna be a little sad that so much of masahiro sakurai's time in game development was devoted to super smash bros because i think that man has a knack for making monstrously cracked single-player-focused action games that he ended up not getting to flex nearly enough
kirby super star and kid icarus uprising are actual masterworks of game design
This a hundred percent. If Sakurai's columns over the years and especially his YouTube series have demonstrated anything at all, it's that there are probably very few devs working in Japanese games today who are as literate in as many genres and styles of games as him and I think it's long overdue that he finally go back to freelancing other stuff again. His contributions are always at the very least academically fascinating, especially when they come from a more detached place where he isn't necessarily a personal fan of the genre in question, yet still clearly gets what makes them tick like with stuff like Meteos.
I won't necessarily go so far as to say his talent is wasted on Smash Bros. when that series has clearly had such a tremendous impact. But he's too fluent in too many types of games to deserve to be chained down to it forever at the very least, in my opinion.
That's the dilemma facing commercial game developers in general, isn't it? Although finding work relies less on producing high quality games so much and more on your ability to reliably generate profit for your publisher (which can mean making a big hit, but also running a consistent and cheap production where called for), nobody wants to be known as "the person who helmed Doraemon: Nobita to Fukkatsu no Hoshi." They want other people to value their creative output, and they want the space in which to produce creative output that's worth valuing.
The problem, however, is that commercial game development specifically precludes the latter - think of the oversized role crunch plays in the industry - and, where it does offer the former, only offers a hollowed out version that primarily serves the publishers' best interests. The minute you create a successful enough game to tie to your name specifically, that's ALL you'll be working on until you die. Capital values nothing more than predictable return on investment, after all. Meanwhile, the developers whose name is now tied to that creation realizes they're effectively shackled to said creation, and express the dissatisfaction you'd expect. This article reflecting on Miyamoto's reflecting on his own legacy in the 90s (the 90s!) comes to mind.
As always, now comes the part where I beat my head against the problem of how exactly we encourage a better culture in the here and now without paving the way for more of the sufficiently-similar, EG pointing to altgame/indie devs whose games you should buy, thereby encouraging the formation of tomorrow's celebrity indie devs trapped in a prison of their own success.
