After arguing against super long games, Super Smash Bros' creator Masahiro Sakurai praises the "great" Astro Bot because it "doesn't take that much time"
Sep. 12, 2024Astro for Smash?
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Masahiro Sakurai - the man who created Kirby, led Kid Icarus: Uprising, and has directed every single Super Smash Bros game to date - has gushed about Astro Bot.
Astro Bot might be celebrating 30 years of a competitor’s history - you’re literally rebuilding a PS5 mothership throughout the game - but that didn’t stop the legendary Nintendo developer from enjoying the platformer anyway.
Sure, Astro Bot is great, but Sakurai praised the game while retweeting his recent vlog about exorbitant game lengths - the same video in which heapologized to Super Smash Bros fans who’ve played his games for “hundreds or thousands of hours.”
The famed director discussed how unnecessarily long games compete against, well, everything for players with limited free time. Phones, social media, music, life, and everything else compete with games, so Sakurai urged game designers to think of playtime as a “cost of sorts.”
Clocking in at around10-12 hours for a non-completionist playthrough, Astro Bot hits that sweet middle ground: it runs long enough to milk all of its good ideas but not long enough for that good milk to expire. That also puts Sakurai in line withAstro Bot’s director, who recently said that “12 to 15 hours of condensed fun” beats 40 hours with parts “you feel like skipping.”
PlayStation’s short platformer will be getting slightly longer, so check outeverything we know about Astro Bot DLC.
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Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that’s vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he’ll soon forget.
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