I find it silly how people keep trying to draw a false equivalency between fans obsessing over random background elements in videos or reading hints into unrelated tweets, and Sakurai deliberately recording and including a statement saying that it would sure be great if someone would port Kid Icarus Uprising to a home console.
I think there's a vast gulf between Sakurai not anticipating that people would extract meaning from a couple of chairs that happened to be in the room, and him making a conscious decision to record himself musing about a Kid Icarus port and place it at the end of one of his YouTube videos. Especially considering Sakurai is well aware at this point that there are people who will overanalyze everything he says. At the very least, Sakurai certainly intended to get a discussion going about a Kid Icarus port.
I’m not saying he
didn’t want to get a discussion going (and get it going he sure has), but that’s not the same as “omg guys he’s working on a kid icarus port/it’s in the works and he knows about it”. I find it very hard to believe that Sakurai would deliberately hint at any future project in the works, his or otherwise. Dude has to know better than anyone how strict NDAs are, and as leaky as the previous two Smash games have been (I think Vergeben leaked pretty much every third party DLC character for Ultimate aside from Kazuya and Joker, and some of those leaks were
all the way back in 2018) absolutely none of those leaks ever came from Sakurai’s accidental slips of the tongue. Dude was
really steadfast about not giving away anything during Ultimate’s lifetime; same deal with Smash 4, and so on.
Nintendo (I realize Sakurai is independent) rarely teases projects like this, so I think that a KIU remaster is happening. Why else would Sakurai try to get people's hopes up about it?
In a way, you said it yourself: Sakurai is independent. He’s not going to hint at a project he knows is in the works at Nintendo, because doing so risks jeopardizing his relationship with them.
I think people in general kind of tend to both over- and under-estimate how many leaks the industry springs. Leaks are by no means a rare occurrence, but by no means does every project in the works at a given dev or publisher leak. (Otherwise, we would have known what Hi-Fi Rush was long before the Xbox Presents this past January.) Generally, the later in development something is and
the more people involved, the more likely it is to leak, and even then a lot of leaks are flat-out wrong. If the industry seems leakier than ever, I’m willing to bet that’s in part because of the tribulations of simultaneous localization. Generally speaking, that means projects that are still early along in development are much more airtight for both the aforementioned reasons, all the more so if they’re from non-Western parts of the industry. Leaks due to people “hinting” at something? Those almost never happen, and someone gets fired when they do. (Don’t believe me? Remember back when Byleth was supposed to be voiced by Chris Niosi?)
NDAs are taken seriously in entertainment, and while breaking one isn’t a death sentence, it’s not something most professionals are willing to risk. If Nintendo or Sakurai “rarely [tease] projects like this”, that’s because no one in the industry does so outside of official channels. Until those say something on the matter, the existence of a KI:U-related project is up in the air.
