Masahiro Sakurai has finally mentioned why Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS won’t be seeing the famous Ice Climbers duo. This is due to the 3DS’s hardware. Sakurai has stated that the team had the Ice Climbers working in the Wii U version, but the 3DS hardware had issues keeping them from being able to perform on the handheld system. This lead to dropping Ice Climbers from both games, giving priority to characters who were more likely to have games released in the future.
This news could be seen as both good and bad. Ice Climbers won’t be in the new Super Smash Bros. and now shows no sign of being implemented later on, even if Nintendo decides to offer DLC for the franchise. Alternatively, this shows their commitment to making the portable version of the game as similar as possible to the console version.
The worst news of all is that it appears that Ice Climbers will never see a true sequel as they were passed off in development for other characters that will more likely to see another future release in their own games. We’ll miss you Ice Climbers.
