Smash Bros. Brawl director Masahiro Sakurai has been answering fan e-mail on the Japanese Smash Bros. site, and fans on the Smash World forums have been translating his responses as they come in. Through this, occassional smatterings of new details about the game appear here and there, with the highlights from the most recent update covered below.

• As mentioned in earlier updates, they're working to "moderate" the speed of the game, most likely to slow it down.
• They will be adding one or two more non-Nintendo characters, but those characters must have appeared on a Nintendo system at some point (which covers just about everybody you'd want in the game short of Master Chief. Even Crash Bandicoot has appeared on a Nintendo platform).
• Not all characters will return.
• In contrast to the bold statement at last year's E3 that the game would be online, they say they're still working on it, and if it shows up, it won't have any kind of ranking system.
• The team didn't want to use characters that only appeared in Japan, though with the popularity of the Fire Emblem characters Roy and Marth, they may make exceptions to the rule.

The full translation of everything he talked about can be found at the Smash World forums.