Super Smash Bros.

I think another guaranteed mainstay would be Pac-Man. As long as Bandai Namco helps make Smash Bros games, he's probably going to stay.

The ones that are definitely very hard to see returning are the Square Enix cast.

Agreed.

Honestly, the only non-clone/echo characters I think are in danger of being cut are joke characters like Piranha Plant, retros like Ice Climbers and Duck Hunt, and extremely niche characters like Wii Fit Trainer and (in Japan) Little Mac.

Some third-party characters may be cut too, but I don't share y'all's pessimism about Banjo. Banjo in Smash is the definition of a mutually beneficial arrangement and everyone involved seems really into it. Even Konami and Square-Enix, which seemed like lost causes, not only gave us Snake and Cloud back, but gave us even more characters for Ultimate.

I really just rather focus on Ultimate rather than a sequel.

It's pretty much a fact that a sequel won't live up to Ultimate.

Piranha Plant isn't a Joke Character, though. It's a very underused thing by Sakurai, as literally only Jigglypuff and Pichu were actual ones(Jigglypuff never kept its intended status by Sakurai, as it was pretty much always good in some way, having some unique trait. The first game where it actually kind of bad was in Brawl, and not much better in 4). It's a Surprise Character, in the same way that Wii Fit Trainer and Duck Hunt are. Those you just wouldn't see coming easily. Maybe a small set of fans at most(and Duck Hunt got some slight talk enough to have an actual support thread on Smashboards, though that was just for the Dog himself).

I could still see it cut among various characters. Pichu too. Dr. Mario is probably one of the easier ones to return since he takes far less work, same as other echoes(of which he's almost entirely one, with really the core difference not being labeled one. Though I could see why being a Melee veteran is enough to not have the status, as the only two clones from earlier games were the new ones in Smash 4, and they are more similar than Dr. Mario is to Mario in 4/Ultimate, respectively).

That said, SE seemed to work pretty easily with Hero, giving a lot of content. It's only Cloud that had a poor amount. It is possible we might only get one back... which would be what is easiest to license(though seeing as Cloud is overall more popular worldwide, they'd gun for him first probably?), just like any 3rd party. If Sega no longer wants to cooperate, legacy won't matter. Same with Microsoft, Square-Enix, Capcom Co LTD, Capcom USA, Konami, and SNK. Besides other ones who provided non-playable characters too. I mean, licensing is pretty clearly part of why Snake wasn't in 4, though we don't know much about those details to begin with. If his comments on the ballot mean much, it seems like he at least asked during the time the ballot was over(so for DLC at some point), but may or may not have for base. Konami had issues during that time, but there can be unrelated stuff we otherwise don't know. At least we got a plethora of Konami stuff in Ultimate~

Edited by Irene on Sep 24th 2019 at 5:01:38 AM

Fire Emblem and Pokemon would definitely need to be trimmed down.

expecting a high grossing multimedia franchise to be trimmed down is hilarious, doubly so when practically all of them play quite differently

Pikachu and Pichu say hi.

Playing Pichu like Pikachu is a bold move. Also as of Ultimate they're practically differentiated by a lot.

Edited by Ookamikun on Sep 24th 2019 at 8:42:52 PM

Having the same moveset =/= playing the same...as far as smash is concerned.

Any amount of weight, speed (air speed), and strength can make the biggest difference to how a character plays.

Secondary attributes or different attack properties only increase those differences.

Or something.

Edited by randomness4 on Sep 24th 2019 at 5:57:22 AM

Oh, wow, a lot of stuff suddenly makes sense now.

Who will stay and who will go?

I predict the original 12 will remain. They've been there since the beginning, they're the core cast.

I also predict Bowser, Marth, and Mr. Game & Watch are safe, and I don't see the Ice Climbers being cut again. Maybe if the next game is 3D and they can't figure out how to make it work, but these people managed to make a playable character out of Piranha Plant, so they can make the Ice Climbers work.

Sonic is in no danger of leaving. Sega are a competent company who collaborate with Nintendo on the regular. Don't forget, they jointly make a Mario and Sonic game every two years; all Nintendo has to do is call up Sega and say "Hey, we're making a new Smash Bros game, can we use Sonic?" and Sega will say "Sure, go ahead, let us know if you want to change the licensing terms".

BK's chances are at least better than even. Microsoft doesn't care about consoles, they want XBox to be a software platform. Having BK in Smash is free money.

The list of characters I don’t think would ever be cut is quite small:

• Mario
• Donkey Kong
• Link
• Samus
• Yoshi
• Kirby
• Fox
• Pikachu
• Luigi
• Ness
• Captain Falcon
• Jigglypuff
• Peach
• Bowser
• Zelda
• Falco
• Marth
• Ganondorf
• Diddy Kong
• Olimar
• Villager
• Inkling

Whatever happens in the next Smash, I feel like it has to really bring it in side content, customization, and features, since I'm willing to bet that more than half the roster will be gone.

That'll be unfortunate, especially if they nickle and dime some of the characters cut back into the game as is the paradigm in fighters nowadays, but I think we can have things like a reasonable dedicated story mode if there's only 30-40 characters to account for.

Size of the roster is not why story mode got cut.

And I don’t think it will be well over half the roster getting cut. Before DLC, For Wii U had 48 characters. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

We’ll never approach 80 again, but I could see the next one hovering between 50 and 60.

At this point I think Wario is also going to be a relatively safe spot even if they decide to change their minds about whether they want his moves to be more Classic vs 'Ware.

I feel like the next game will have at least two Kirby reps.

Mewtwo, Squirtle, and Ivysaur were given the axe before.

The Pokemon Company gives no shits outside of Pikachu and maybe Lucario. To them, it's always the flavor of the month.

I'm still surprised they only kept Charizard around instead of finding a way to include Squirtle and Ivysaur but with new Down+B moves to make up for it. I don't think absolute character space was necessarily an issue at the time, just onscreen ones like Ice Climbers. Really demonstrates how underbaked SSB 4 was in hindsight.

Given the sheer scale of Ultimate and the sense of finality present in even its very name, I'm not sure what a Smash 6 with a smaller roster could do to avoid being considered a reviled, inferior reboot of the franchise.

I don't have a business degree, but the best solution is, in my opinion, to significantly lengthen the development time between games so that each game realistically can be a direct improvement upon the last in terms of scale, even if it means skipping a console or releasing at the tailend of its lifespan. In the interim, outsource the Smash Bros. franchise and some of its easier-to-acquire constituents to spin-off developers. Expand out into other genres as stop-gap games between main title releases.

Nah, Dream Match Game is a trope for a reason. Plenty of other series have done games where the full roster was present, and then gone back to typical roster sizes after (The King of Fighters ‘98, the Tekken Tag Tournament games, Mortal Kombat Trilogy and Armageddon, etc.).

Most likely they'd either just Smash Ultimate with an ever-increasing roster to future consoles and any proper "sequel" would be a spinoff with a major mechanical overhaul, likely either to become more of a traditional fighting game or an arena fighter.

Edited by AlleyOop on Sep 24th 2019 at 3:17:46 PM

Smash is an once in a generation game. I doubt we'll be hearing about the next one until a good while after the Switch's successor got a good amount of time in the market.

While Ultimate does imply finality, Special does not, and Special is the subtitle used in Japan. Nintendo, Namco, and Sora are Japanese companies, and those involved think of the game as Super Smash Bros Special - that's even how Sakurai and Koizumi refer to it on YouTube.

Unrelated, apparently it's even called Ultimate in Korean. Weird how NoK seems to translate from English rather that directly from Japanese.

Every Smash is a dream match game. There's no overarching plot or anything to prevent characters from being in it.

Uh no. Brawl left out a bunch of characters, and 4 left out Iceclimbers.