Smash Bros. director Sakurai praises Team Asobi for Astro Bot

Masahiro Sakurai, the director of Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series and creator of Kirby, recently shared on his Twitter account that he has been playing and enjoying the new PlayStation 5 hit, Astro Bot. And the development team at Team Asobi even responded to his kind words.

The Super Smash Bros. director appreciates that Astro Bot didn’t waste his time

Sakurai claims that he rescued all the 300 bots in the game. He confirmed that this didn’t take him much time to achieve, but that the game was interesting enough for him to do it. Furthermore, he even signed off his tweet by explicitly praising Astro Bot, saying it’s a “great game”.

This tweet was made in response to his most recent YouTube video, in which he explains how important it is for developers to be mindful of the time players are giving them when playing through their games. After all, modern audiences have a variety of different options for things they can do with their free time, and therefore they must feel like their time investment must be worthwhile. He kept this philosophy in mind when he developed Super Smash Bros. and, with this new tweet, Sakurai seems to pose Astro Bot as an example of a good game that doesn’t waste any time.

Team Asobi, the developer behind Astro Bot, responded on its official Twitter/X account to Sakurai, and said: “Dear Sakurai-san, thank you so much for taking the time to play Astro Bot! Love from Team ASOBI”.

Twitter users responded positively to this exchange, with many of them even asking Sakurai to add Astro Bot as a playable fighter in a future installment of Super Smash Bros.

The parallels between Super Smash Bros. and Astro Bot are evident, since both titles work as gigantic celebrations of not only their console brands (Nintendo and PlayStation respectively), but also of the gaming industry as a whole, thanks to the inclusion of many third-party IPs.