Lakitu Cruises Through Smash Bros. Brawl

Nostalgia won out.

Well, that or aesthetic laziness.

Last night’s update to the Smash Bros. Brawl blog revealed that Super Mario Bros. mainstay Lakitu will be popping up as an Assist Trophy — and as his two-dimensional, pixilated Super Mario Bros. self, no less. As in his original appearance, he’ll be cruising in on his deceptively smiling cloud and raining Spiny eggs down on those below. What fun!


It’s worth noting that another original Super Mario Bros. baddie, the Hammer Brother, will be appearing in a fully realized three-dimensional form. Lakitu’s not, and I’m not sure why Brawl’s designers chose to go in this aesthetic direction. It’s odd looking back on Lakitu’s original in-game likeness. Today we all know him as the bespectacled Koopa in a cloud, but it’s hard to discern glasses or even a shell when looking at the debut sprite. He actually looks more like a human than Mario does.

Anyway, figuring that his Smash Bros. cameo hearkens back to his eight-bit roots, I thought I’d take this opportunity to reflect on Lakitu’s growth since his debut.

Who would have thought that such an irritant would become such a central figure in the Marioverse? Initially he was worth only the 1,000 points Mario would get for stomping him. His appearance in Super Mario Bros. 3 functioned much in the same manner: Lakitu more or less just served as a vehicle to bombard Mario with his pets, the un-stompable Spinys. The third Mario game did offer American gamers some insight into his personality overseas, however. They could score his cloud as an item and use it to fully bypass stages. Despite clearly being Lakitu’s cloud, the item was referred to in instruction manuals as "Jugem’s Cloud" — a nod to Lakitu’s Japanese name, “Jugemu.”

As the Mario games entered the sixteen-bit generation, Lakitu diversified his game. His Super Mario World incarnation now hid in the kind of pipes that normally only housed Piranha Plants and would sometimes dangle 1-up Mushrooms a trap for unwary passerby plumbers. This allowed Lakitu the handy job of snatching up errant go-karts in Super Mario Kart, a job he’s held in every subsequent incarnation of the game. The little guy became playable for the first time in Tetris Attack and worked behind the scenes throughout Super Mario 64 to record Mario’s every movement with his faithful camcorder. (Sure, controlling him made for some angle-in-the-corner headaches, but we can hardly blame Lakitu for that.) Perhaps most tellingly, an individual, non-generic Lakitu appeared in Paper Mario — two actually, Lakilester and his ladyfriend Lakilulu — alongside a host of Mario’s other most popular baddies.

Today, Lakitu is serving as a judge in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. The title features him alongside some fairly major faces in the Mario and Sonic universes: Toad, Cream the Rabbit and Espio the Chameleon among them. It just goes to show, I guess, that if you hang around long enough in the video game world, you’ll get to do all sorts on things — on the good guy side and on the bad guy side.