We all know Sony’s latest attempt at a multi-player brawler, Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale is a knock-off of Nintendo’s popular Super Smash Bros. franchise. Just in case you needed it confirmed from an outside source, game designer Hideki Kamiya agrees.

Destructoid reported a tweet from Kamiya where he said that All-Stars is “just a rip-off.” As the designer of Viewtiful Joe and Bayonetta, I suppose I can see his frustration. Sure, he didn’t create a new genre in either case, but he did manage to innovate within those genres (particularly with the Viewtiful Joe series, which I’ll still call one of the best side-scrolling beat-’em-ups of all time). Sure, large portions of the gaming world are moving towards derivation, but does that mean that we have to settle for blatant copyism? What happened to the days when we at least changed font-types, camera angles…something?

Playstation All-Stars may turn out to be fun, and that’s a good thing. There are plenty of great characters in the Sony universe that can be used for a game like this, and I hope they pull it off well. But just because there’s already a good formula out there doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be testing the boundaries and experimenting to see how we can better the system.

Side note: know what game tried to innovate the four-player battler that actually was kinda interesting? Viewtiful Joe: Red Hot Rumble. Go ahead, look it up. But maybe another reason Kamiya’s not thrilled is because All-Stars is getting better press? What are your thoughts?