Sakurai on how he's preventing Kid Icarus: Uprising from causing eye strain

In a GamesMaster interview (the same one during which he revealed tentative plans for online play), Kid Icarus: Uprising producer Masahiro Sakurai discussed strategies for preventing 3DS users from ruining their eyes. "In my experience of development and actually using it," he said, "when you have a lot of objects flying towards the user I find that it's more likely to cause eye strain so during development I'm using objects moving away from the user which doesn't have that effect." It sounds like the 3D effects will be most notable for Pit's arrows and projectiles, then, rather than things being flung at the winged hero.

The path of those projectiles is also noteworthy, according to Sakurai: "In standard shooters or FPS games you see the bullet travel to its destination and it's just a dot because it travels in a straight line," Sakurai explained. "But because of 3D technology you can use arcing shots and get a sense of a bullet travelling with real depth."

Sakurai also mentioned that he had an indirect role in the system's development. "Early on, Nintendo were soliciting lots of feedback from within the company and from me. And I had very specific requests from Mr. Iwata in regard to what my ideal picture of the device was, etc." He didn't say what his specific recommendations were, but he did subsequently call the combination of the touch screen and the Slide Panel "very important" for 3D games.