Super Smash Bros 4 director Masahiro Sakurai spoke about the upcoming game being the most balanced of the entire series, and promised some changes to perhaps stale characters.

In his weekly column in Japan's Famitsu Magazine, Sakurai spoke of bringing down the power of some of the biggest attacks so as to not overpower opponents.

"Doing things like simply "lowering the performance' can make games lose its fun. Additionally, making a strong attack weaker can take away from the "good feeling'. By making adjustments that get rid of all advantages and disadvantages, it can turn a game into a mediocre one without any challenge," he wrote.

"Rather than directly weakening an attack's advantageous parts, we're putting effort into keeping them strong, while adding other weaknesses to them," he added. "Like giving the attacks punishable openings, or weakening the character's mobility or recovery rate. We're making comprehensive adjustments to characters, even for parts that might seem completely irrelevant."

In other words, strong attacks will also have some sort of reaction or repercussion to the character who did it.

IGN reports that Sakurai said Bowser got a bit of a makeover as far as strength and ability is concerned in the game. "Fans of Smash Bros. probably never saw [Bowser] as too much of a strong character, but this time, his ability to knock others out is very strong!"

For the 1st time this year Sakurai is taking a break from the "Pic of the Day" series.

"The pic of the day that runs Monday through Friday will be on break starting Dec. 27. I'll be back on Jan. 6, so I hope everyone has a happy new year!!" Sakurai posted on the Miiverse forum.

The image posted in the meantime appears to be a new level that showcases a battlefield floating in the clouds. The SSB emblem is seen on torn flags in the background. See the image here.

SSB4 is coming to the Wii U and 3DS sometime in 2014.