ARMS is only just in its beta phase before its release on June 16th, but already the game’s characters have become very popular amongst the player community. Twintelle in particular has especially garnered a lot of fans for her character design.
In a recent interview with Game Informer, ARMS producer Kosuke Yabuki and artist Masaaki Ishikawa were asked what their thoughts were of Twintelle’s overwhelming popularity and the large amount of fanart that has already been created of the game’s characters, despite the title having not even released yet.
However, to start off, Yabuki was asked what kinds of lessons learned from his time working on the Mario Kart series were helpful while developing ARMS. This was his reply:
“For Mario Kart Wii we had the steering wheel attachment so players could use motion controls, but you could also play with the motion controller and more traditional controls so that really offered players the freedom to play however they wanted to in Mario Kart. For Arms, we kind of carried this lesson over. Motion controls are a big feature of this game, but players can still use pro controllers or traditional controls like in handheld and choose the way that they would like to play. That’s one of the lessons that we learned from Mario Kart.”
When asked his thoughts about Twintelle’s overwhelming popularity within the fanbase, Yabuki had the following to say:
“We weren’t really expecting the fans to be so taken with her, so that was a very pleasant surprise! And like I just mentioned, she has that really strong build to her and that seems to be something that the community has picked up on so I’m glad that we were able to create this new character design.”
In regards to the huge amount of fanart being created of the characters just after the game’s one beta, Ishikawa responded with the following:
“As for the fan art, we’ve seen a lot of that come through social media and as a character designer I feel pure joy at seeing what the fans are creating. Looking at the fan art and how the artists draw Twintelle with different poses and how they match her with other characters, there’s a lot of variety and vibrance to that art and I love looking at that. I see a lot of it.”
ARMS will release for the Nintendo Switch on June 16th, 2017.