Masahiro Sakurai is a name well-known by Nintendo fans, as he’s not only the creator of Kirby but the long-time director and face of the Super Smash Bros. franchise. Last year Sakurai launched a YouTube channel where he talks about a multitude of game design concepts and titles he’s worked on. His latest video is particularly interesting as it dives into one of the creator’s most overlooked titles, Kid Icarus: Uprising, as well as his desire to see the franchise fly back into development.
One of Sakurai’s more popular series of videos is called “Game Concepts,” where he does a deep dive into the concept and development of games he’s worked on. In the latest video, he talked about Kid Icarus: Uprising, a 3DS exclusive action/shooting title that Sakurai served as director and scenario writer. There are loads of interesting little details in the video, like how Uprising was prompted by the late Nintendo President Satoru Iwata asking Sakurai to make a 3DS exclusive title.
What’s really interesting, however, is what Sakurai says at the end, where he coyly says “It sure would be nice to play Kid Icarus: Uprising on a home console. I wonder if anyone will port it?”
This is actually the second time Sakurai has expressed this sentiment, as he said almost the exact same thing in November 2022, in a video that mentioned Kid Icarus: Uprising’s difficulty features. In the latest video, Sakurai goes on to say, “It’s a shame that it’s only lived on 3DS, as I’d love to play on a bigger screen with smoother graphics, but without a team around to work on it, crafting a follow-up seems difficult.”
It’s abundantly clear that Sakurai really wants to see Uprising get, at the very least, some kind of port, and the fact that he’s mentioned it multiple times now means it couldn’t be more obvious that he’s gunning for it to happen. Creating a new Kid Icarus game does seem unlikely, but a port would be much simpler.
Nintendo is certainly no stranger to porting older games to the Switch. Even though most ports have been Wii U games, the company this year also released Metroid Prime Remastered, Pikmin 1 and 2, and a host of Game Boy Advance games. It’s certainly not unreasonable to think Nintendo could release some kind of enhanced port of Uprising. Because of Pit’s inclusion in Smash Bros, he’s become a much more well-known character, and the Switch has now sold over 125 million units sold, which means that the install base alone reduces some of the risks of a port not doing well.
While Uprising was received well, it could seriously benefit from coming to a modern system, not just because of the graphical potential but because of modern control schemes as well. The game was notoriously difficult to play on 3DS, as it was an action shooter on a system that only had one control stick. Nintendo had released a Circle Pad Pro accessory to add on another stick, but Uprising strangely didn’t support it. His latest video also explains that as Sakurai says the game was already pushing the 3DS’s hardware to the limit and the Circle Pad Pro, apparently, increased the processor load by five percent.
A Nintendo Switch port could fix Uprising’s biggest problems simply by the fact of being on a modern system, and with its creator so eager to see it happen, it seems baffling to not jump on that chance. Of course, re-releasing Uprising would also be a good way to gauge interest in Kid Icarus as a whole.
