Full transcript on DQ Producer Hokuto Okamoto about Hero coming on DQ

From the PAX West Dragon Quest panel

We were fortunate enough to be approached by Mr. Sakurai, and he was really excited about this idea of doing something to get a Dragon Quest character into Smash Bros.

As you may know, the character of the Hero in Smash Bros. Ultimate can use a lot of spells and specific moves from Dragon Quest. And it's not that we want to make sure that these got all in there, but Mr. Sakurai himself pulled out these specific spells and different Dragon Quest abilities he wanted to make sure got into the game, and we just kind of looked them over.

One thing that we did contribute was the idea of the character, you know, who would be the best character to put in the game, and we thought, well, we're dealing with Dragon Quest XI now, so let's make the character of Hero from Dragon Quest XI. Then we also had the idea that Smash Bros. has this feature to change your color variations based on what style you want, and we thought it might be cool to include the Heroes from past Dragon Quest titles as some of those options, so you can have four people playing -- you know, player 1 is maybe the Hero from Dragon Quest XI, and then you also have player 2 playing as the Hero from Dragon Quest III, player 3 can be playing from Dragon Quest IV, and then we wanted to include the Hero from Dragon Quest VIII as well because that game's popular overseas.

I used a Kamikazee in making this sort of proclamation about what I thought would be a good idea in adding these character switching options. I may have caused a bit of trouble for the developers with that, but... (laughs)