Below is an unedited excerpt from the interview in which Sakurai reveals that the Smash Bros. Brawl story was written in collaboration with Kazushige Nojima of Final Fantasy fame.

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Sakurai
Right. With older games, players were thrown into the game without any particular objective. With games nowadays though, you just can’t do that, leading me to the conclusion that we couldn’t have a game without a storyline. With Smash Bros., however, there are way too many characters and the game is made without a main character. Therefore, I had a really hard time figuring out how we might establish a storyline.

Iwata
I see.

Sakurai
At that point, I decided to ask Kazushige Nojima-san to help us since he had composed the scenarios for titles like Final Fantasy VII.

Iwata
Wow, asking the person who crafted scenarios for Final Fantasy to write one for Smash Bros. is a pretty big deal.

Sakurai
I know! (laughs) I didn’t ask him to write everything from scratch though. I explained the world of Smash Bros. and its characters and then asked for his help. The first storyline he came up with, however, wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.

Iwata
It was different than what you had envisioned.

Sakurai
Right. It wasn’t bad at all and had its own appeal, but it was a bit different than what I had envisioned it would be. It went something like this…"Some of the characters are on a bus on the way to the stadium. Samus is there. Donkey Kong is there and Snake is watching the bus from afar." It was like that. (laughs) I had envisioned a more serious tone for the story. Something with some misfortunelike a single character escaping total annihilation of his squadron and then fighting back while rounding up his allies. Ultimately, we worked together and successfully organized our ideas into the storyline for The Subspace Emissary.

Iwata
In other words, you came up with a storyline that neither of you could have produced on your own.

Sakurai
Right. That’s something you might say about this entire game. This project is the result of people coming together and talents colliding. If we took one person and replaced them with another, the project would have definitely been different. That’s another reason the project was only possible this time around.
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PG's Take: Amazing. First Game Arts and now Nojima!?!?!?!?!? So is Smash Bros. Brawl adventure mode going to be a hybrid between Lunar and Grandia with Final Fantasy-esque cutscenes mixed in? Probably not. But this has to be the most unlikely collaboration for a fighting game featuring Nintendo characters.

Thankfully, Sakurai rejected Nojima's initial idea of all the Nintendo characters riding on a bus, prefering a more serious storyline to Nintendo's typical campy fare, i.e. Super Mario Sunshine.