The cast of Super Smash Bros. for the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS will be joined by Captain Olimar and his Pikmin companions, Nintendo revealed in an update on the game’s website .
Captain Olimar comes from Nintendo’s Pikmin franchise which, as it happens, will be getting its latest entry, Pikmin 3 , released in just a few weeks after a long, long wait for fans of the franchise. This isn’t the character’s first appearance in the Super Smash Bros. series; Olimar also appeared in Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii.
Super Smash Bros. is still roughly a year out from release, so Nintendo still has plenty of time to reveal the rest of the game’s roster. So far we know that Mario, Pikachu, Donkey Kong, Link, Samus, Kirby, Fox, Bowser, and Pit will be making a return in the latest entry of Nintendo’s crossover brawling franchise.
Some new faces to the series have been confirmed as well: Mega Man , the Wii Fit trainer, and a Villager from Animal Crossing.
As revealed during a Nintendo Direct feature from E3 2013, there will be some differences between the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS versions of Super Smash Bros. . Masahiro Sakurai, director of the franchise, noted in the video that since the 3DS features a much smaller screen, characters will be “outlined” on the battlefield to make them easier to see when the camera zooms out.
While the Nintendo 3DS version will feature the same number of playable characters as its Wii U counterpart, the stages you’ll be playing on are different. As Sakurai demonstrated in the video, Super Smash Bros. on the 3DS will feature stages from handheld games; the Wii U version, on the other hand, will feature stages from console games.
If you missed the video showing off the differences between the two versions, you can check it out for yourself in the video embed below.