Solly

I'd be thrilled because Jill & Leon are both some of my most-wanted characters. They might be hard to make work without realistic guns but the series has other weapons.

Every Gamestop and Best Buy I know is doing a midnight launch. We've had 9PM launches on other big games like Red Dead but it doesn't look like that's happening for Smash. Are you on the West coast by any chance? This might be a timezone thing.

This. And even then, Shovel Knight's AT status probably owes itself, in-part, to the fact that Nintendo is the publisher for his game in Japan. Don't get me wrong, I'd love for both of them to make the cut, but I just don't see it happening.

I wasn't saying he's above criticism or that people weren't allowed to get salty (I will continue to defiantly hope for Waluigi). What I was getting at was that if you look at just about any one of Sakurai's tweets, the replies are full of people just randomly posting pictures of characters they like, and/or begging for them to be made playable, and the vast majority of the time they're from non-Japanese accounts. People need to learn to behave themselves. Agreed. They also don't seem to come with a stage like the other fighters, so it wouldn't make sense to sell them in one of the standard DLC packs.

It's tragic that this is one of Sakurai's only English tweets. And we all know why it's in English. I have to wonder how much the DLC picks being "curated" by Nintendo is going to matter in the end. Answering that would probably require a lot more insight into the normal character creation process. It's interesting that Sakurai even shared this piece of information with us, thinking about it.

It's hard to imagine them deciding on the exact number of DLC characters + stages, as well as when they'll begin work on them (which is really soon by the way) without also deciding who/what they are. I'd be willing to bet that all of the planned post-launch fighters are set in stone by now.

Can be viewed here. He looks to automatically target K. Rool in the video. I wonder how it'll work in matches with more than one opponent.

@LongcrierCat Lucina's so similar to Marth that it doesn't make sense to not have both of them as a two-for-one deal. If this sort of thing bothers you then you can just stack them on the CSS. And yeah, obviously development resources are finite and there are a limited number of characters they could make each game, but I don't think fans should sweat that. The circumstances of every fighter's inclusion is unique and it's presumptuous to say "if only they cut A B and C, we could've gotten X Y and Z instead." Let's not get stuck in the bargaining phase. We'll agree to disagree. You're right that the FE cast being mostly sword wielders sucks though. Before today I wouldn't have considered Slime getting in over one of the main protagonists, but we DID just get a potted plant as a fighter. Oh shoot, source? How does the Levin Sword even work as a neutral air? Isn't it normally done with Smash attack motions?

What's the harm in it, though? It's not as if cutting the clone characters would have guaranteed us more wholly original newcomers. Sakurai has been saying since Melee that they don't require nearly as much time and resources to develop. I just think of them as a bonus, and I know people who are genuinely excited that Young Link and Pichu are returning. Every character has fans-- yes, even Dark Pit (I play Smash Bros with my sibling too, and he certainly likes Dark Pit). We know Ultimate uses Smash 4 as a base and wasn't built from the ground up, so it really doesn't even make sense to cut someone like him. I'd also like to reiterate that you mentioned Marth as unneeded baggage alongside the clones, which tells me that this is less about who is truly redundant and more about who you personally care about. Maybe you don't realize how selfish that looks? I know we currently have the gift of hindsight here, but how many times did Sakurai say "don't expect too many more fighters" only to have people ignore it? The writing was on the wall and people dismissed it time and again. Sure Nintendo hyped (advertised) the game, but I can absolutely blame fans for not keeping their expectations in check. I'm not even telling people that they shouldn't be disappointed, and I definitely have concerns of my own, but people are acting a little ridiculous IMO.

We can only speculate but I don't think the devs were ever looking for that sort of parity between third party franchises; the process of character selection has always been more intuitive than that. Castlevania and Street Fighter getting echo fighters has a lot more to do with who the characters themselves are rather than what they're from. Richter, for instance, probably got in because he's the original practitioner of many of Simon's moves. Simon is obviously the more well-known Belmont, but he doesn't use Grand Cross, his d-tilt, dash attack or even his recovery move in his own games. Like Sakurai said, it's hard to tell who's echoing who, so Richter was probably thrown in as a bonus to make things feel proper. Meanwhile Ken is essentially the original fighting game clone character and he's been around ever since the original Street Fighter. It's hard to mention Ryu without mentioning Ken as well-- they're two sides of the same coin. He makes a lot of sense as an echo pick simply because of how established he is, both as a gaming icon and how he might play when compared to Ryu. When looking at it like that, Shadow isn't nearly as obvious a choice. He'd be neat for Sonic fans but Sakurai will probably always be a lot more selective about third parties than first parties. I'm honestly just curious why they took so long to reveal his AT. Just as they can no longer tell me Waddle Dee doesn't belong because he's "just an enemy."

What is with Smash fans' obsession with cutting characters? Why does it always come to this sort of whining with some people? And while I get thinking Dr. Mario and Dark Pit are redundant, how is Marth, the original Fire Emblem hero "unneeded baggage"? Oh brother.