We probably won’t be seeing a new Ice Climber game anytime soon either.
Masahiro Sakurai, the director of the new Smash Bros. games, stated the Ice Climbers were running on the Wii U version of the game, but were cut due to the technical limitations of the 3DS version. A higher priority wasn’t given to the duo because the odds of a new Ice Climber game coming out in the near future is rather low.
Sakurai also went on to mention that the trophy descriptions found in the new games were written by Akihiro Toda. Toda is known for working on the Mother (Earthbound) series.
Additionally, Sakurai reiterated that the reason why the 3DS and Wii U versions were released at separate times was in order to give each game adequate time for debugging. If it had not been for this separate debugging process, both games would have likely been delayed until 2015.
All of this information comes from a bi-weekly column Sakurai writes in Famitsu.
Why not just make them WiiU Specific? I mean if the 3DS can't handle them then why not?Because reasons.
So in other words, the 3DS version existing made the Wii U version worse. The concessions we have to make to convince the Japanese audience to buy games...*sigh*In a manner of speaking, I guess. Sakurai is just arbitrarily withholding Ice Climbers from the Wii U version. The 3DS version existing isn't stopping the characters from appearing in the Wii U version as the games function independently of each other. It's really just a bizarre choice. The 3DS version is already worse, but it's also $20 cheaper. There's no need to try to justify this as "Well, we want both games to be even" because they aren't in many ways.
So does this mean we can expect a new Duck Hunt game soon...?