We all know that the next Super Smash Bros. games are coming to both the Wii U and 3DS, thus making it the first time that the series has ventured into the handheld terrirtory.

It does, however, beg the question as to whether Masahiro Sakurai has ever thought about bringing Super Smash Bros. to previous Nintendo handheld devices?

This is what the designer had to say in an interview with GamesTM.

Masahiro Sakurai: "It’s not that I haven’t wanted to – I thought about it, I did. To be honest, we purely didn’t have the opportunity, it just never came up. And also, to speak freely, if you look at a handheld device preceding anything before the GBA, I don’t know that it would have the capabilities to fully realize Smash Bros."

It makes sense, especially when you look at the fighters that came from the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS systems. Believe it or not, one of the best examples of a 'Smash-like' fighter was actually published by Nintendo. I'm talking about Jump Ultimate Stars.

It's a 2D fighter that was released in November 2006 (Japan only) developed by Ganbarion, featuring over 300 characters of which 56 are playable from 41 different Shōnen Jump manga series.

The game had a single player mode, a local & online multiplayer mode (2-4 players), mission mode, quiz mode etc. The basic gameplay focused on four main buttons. Jump (A), two attack buttons (B & Y) and a special attack button (X). Simple right? but like Super Smash Bros. it also let you combine those buttons with different directional inputs (including neutral) to provide you with a wealth of attacking options, but then add in support and help characters and you can open up a world of strategy.

Even though this title never came to the west it never stopped fans all over the world from buying it seeing as Jump Ultimate stars is one of the top DS imports around.

If you're still interested, you can chek out this trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbMgmOSyBHg

Would you have liked to see Smash Bros. arrive on the GBA or DS? or are you happy to have it on the 3DS now?