How Super Smash Bros.'s roster was decided

Every time a new Smash Bros. game gets announced, the Smash fanbase goes nuts with speculation, trying to figure out who will join the roster as a playable character and who will not. People try to find patterns based on the characters who got in previous games to try and deduce who will get into the next Smash game, trying to figure out why each character was chosen.

And that's... not necessary. Because, as it turns out, Sakurai has told us why each character got it, so there's no need to speculate about it. But there's not really anywhere on the internet that has all of this information all in one place. And also much of it is only available in Japanese. So I figured I'd talk about how each character got into Smash. Starting with the playable characters in the original Super Smash Bros. on Nintendo 64.

So let's go back in time. It's 1999 now, and the original Smash game just came out. There's only 12 characters in it, a far cry from the 89 that we see in the modern era. Notably, these 12 characters are in EVERY Smash game, from the original all the way until today. So that means that they must be doing something right.

But before we take a look at those... we need to talk about a game that you probably haven't heard of: Dragon King. Yeah, so... Super Smash Bros. didn't always have Nintendo characters in it. In early development, Sakurai made it as "Dragon King: The Fighting Game". It still had the other iconic parts of Smash. For instance, instead of having health bars to deplete like in most fighting games, each character has a damage meter that goes up the more they get hit. The higher the damage, the further they are knocked back when hit with an attack, and they lose a life when they get knocked off the stage. But it's not Nintendo characters, it is completely original in that regard.

Once the decision was made to add Nintendo characters to the game instead, and make it a massive crossover game, how did they decide who to add? Well, for starters, let's talk numbers. Due to this being a four-player game, adding 4 Nintendo characters is the absolute minimum. So... for the prototype, there were indeed four characters. But which four?

Well... the first one was obvious. If you need to add Nintendo characters, obviously the first one to come to mind is Mario. He's the mascot of Nintendo, so he absolutely had to be here. And at this point in development, it's probably late '96 or early '97, so both Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64 have just come out, meaning that Mario is still relevant and popular.

Donkey Kong is the next character to add. He was Mario's original rival, and both he and Donkey Kong Jr. have appeared in several Mario spinoff titles. But what really pushes him over the edge is that the Donkey Kong Country games are doing very well right now, with Donkey Kong Country 3 just recently having been released for the SNES at this time. Also, Diddy Kong Racing, a spinoff of the Donkey Kong Country series, was about to launch on the Nintendo 64 later in 1997. So that proves that the series wasn't going to fade into obscurity.

The third character added was Fox, from the Star Fox series. Interestingly, Fox wasn't too popular or relevant at this time. Yeah, people are familiar with Star Fox nowadays. It's a series about anthropomorphized animals flying around in space and shooting down their enemies. But he's not had that many games at this point in time. There was the original Star Fox on SNES, which demonstrated the effects of the Super FX chip, and there was the relatively-new Star Fox 64 on Nintendo 64... and that's it. The original Star Fox wasn't exactly a best-seller, and Star Fox 64 is honestly too new at this point to say anything about. Though, looking back on it now, we obviously know that Star Fox 64 would later go on to become popular. Perhaps Sakurai either foresaw the series really taking off, or Fox's presence in Smash inspired it to do so.

The fourth and final character in the original prototype of Smash was Samus, from the Metroid series. Her most recent game was Super Metroid on SNES, but that wasn't really recent. It was back in 1994. There was a Metroid game in development for the Nintendo 64, but it would ultimately be scrapped and unreleased. But her series still had three games, on the NES, Game Boy, and SNES. So it's not like she was totally unheard of. Indeed, the Metroid series has always been popular, even though the release timeline often leaves long gaps between entries. But there's another reason why Samus got chosen: she's human. Yeah, so is Mario, but he's more of a cartoony human. Samus actually looks like a real humanoid. This means that some assets from Dragon King: The Fighting Game could be re-purposed for Samus. Indeed, Samus's moveset in Smash is pretty simple. If you had to pick out of the original Smash roster four characters with the easiest movesets to develop... these would probably be the four that you would pick. Kirby has copy abilities and isn't even close to humanoid, Yoshi has egg-laying and also isn't close to humanoid, Pikachu is probably going to be tweaked a bunch by Game Freak, and as for Link, the new Zelda game (Ocarina of Time) is still in development, so you don't really know what Link is going to be like in that game yet. And yeah, Sakurai confirmed this as being the reason why Mario, Donkey Kong, Fox, and Samus were the first. This isn't just speculation.

After the prototype got approved, it was time to start development of the full version of the game, which doubled the roster to eight - adding Link, Kirby, Yoshi, and Pikachu.

Starting with Link, he was a must-have, being from The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo's biggest franchise other than Mario. He is basically the face of Nintendo alongside Mario. And at this point, there are two new Zelda games in development: Ocarina of Time and Link's Awakening DX, both of which are due for release in 1998. Based on Sakurai's comment that he didn't know what Link would be like in Ocarina of Time at the time that he made the prototype, and the fact that the Hyrule Castle stage in Smash 64 is based on the original beta version of Ocarina of Time, we can assume that Sakurai had access to some early build of Ocarina of Time, which makes sense. After all, he wanted Mario and Fox to be based on their appearances in their latest games rather than the classics, so logically, the same would apply for Link. But that said, some elements were taken from previous games. For example, Link's neutral special in this game is the boomerang, but Link doesn't actually use the boomerang in Ocarina of Time (only Young Link does). Indeed, this is based on A Link to the Past. Sakurai has stated that had he known that Link doesn't use a boomerang in Ocarina of Time, he likely would have given Link a different attack.

The next character to join the Smash roster was Yoshi. At first glance, Yoshi seems like an odd inclusion. Unlike everyone else so far, Yoshi isn't a main character. He's a side character in the Mario franchise. But he is a popular Mario character, along the lines of Bowser and Peach. But the thing is... though Yoshi is a side character in the Mario franchise, Sakurai didn't see it that way. He saw Yoshi as the main character in the Yoshi franchise. And given the popularity of Yoshi's Island and Yoshi's Story, it's a reasonable viewpoint to take. Sure, Yoshi began as a Mario character, but he's much more than that now. And Sakurai even said that he wanted this to be a Nintendo fighting game, not a Mario fighting game, and so filling the roster with Mario characters was something that he wanted to avoid. Because of this, it's likely that Yoshi just doesn't count as a Mario character in Sakurai's eyes. Also, in terms of relevance, Yoshi's Story was released in late '97 or early '98, depending on geographic region, so this is also probably a big reason why Yoshi was included.

Now, the original Smash was developed by Hal Laboratory, so it made sense to use a Hal character, and their most iconic character is Kirby, who also happens to be a character created by Sakurai himself. Additionally, the lead developer of Smash was Satoru Iwata, who had led the development on other Kirby games in the past. So... was this just a case of favoritism? Well... no. I mean, it probably certainly didn't hurt matters much at all, but... more than that... Kirby was a popular character, with Kirby's Dream Land 3 being released in '97 and Kirby Super Star being released in '96, both to much acclaim. He was just as popular as anyone else on the roster. And yes, Sakurai also loved his baby.

The final character added to the roster was Pikachu. Pikachu is from Pokémon, which is INCREDIBLY popular to an absolutely insane degree. But despite that... there's not many Pokémon games to pull from. With Mario, Link, Kirby all have a long history behind them. Pikachu, at this point in time, is brand new. Pokémon Red and Green were first released in '96, and they aren't gonna get localized until '98. And... yeah, that's the entirety of the Pokémon franchise at this point in history. But despite only having a single game (okay, okay, fine, two games, but only because Pokémon tries to sell you one game for the price of two), Pokémon is still a VERY big franchise, and it is, in fact, too big to just ignore. So... yeah, we need a Pokémon in this game. So why Pikachu specifically? Well... because it's the main mascot of the franchise, and the star of the anime that launched just a few months ago (at this point in history), so he's the obvious inclusion.

And so... those are the eight characters that were chosen. They were Nintendo's biggest icons, and would appeal to the most people. But... the original Smash has twelve characters, not eight. So what about the other four? Well... when you first boot up a fresh copy of Super Smash Bros., you'll only see eight characters. But as you play the game's different single-player modes, you gradually unlock others. There are four hidden characters. And because they're hidden, Sakurai felt like he was allowed to be a little more obscure here.

Now, in most Smash games, the entire playable roster is decided on before development even begins (minus a few stragglers). But that was not the case for the original Smash game. Heck, this game was still "Dragon King: The Fighting Game" for about a year before becoming a Nintendo crossover game. So these four unlockable characters weren't chosen until they were nearly done with the original eight. These four characters were primarily chosen due to their similarities to other existing characters in the game. The original eight could serve as a base to build off of.

Perhaps the most obvious case of this is with Luigi, who is obviously based on Mario. In fact, in his original game, Luigi was literally just Mario, except green. And in the original Smash... yeah, that's basically what we got. Luigi is just a Mario clone. Ironically, being a copy of Mario actually made him unique. No other character on the roster was a copy of an existing character. And yeah, that's another key thing that a character needs: uniqueness. And yeah, for the unlockable characters, being more unique is acceptable, since players would have to familiarize themselves with the game first in order to unlock them. With the original eight characters, they needed to be instantly understandable. That said... Luigi is pretty easily understood, since he's just a Mario clone. Heck, even before unlocking him, you can see him in the "How to Play" video that's included in the game's options menu. And in terms of relevance and popularity? I mean... it's Luigi. He's in nearly every Mario game, and the few that he's not in are likely just him being removed due to time constraints. He's gonna stay in the public eye for a very long time indeed. And of course, let's not forget that the game is called "Smash BROTHERS", so clearly you need to add a brother character in there. And Luigi is the most iconic brother in gaming. He's basically the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the phrase "Player 2".

The next character to be added was Jigglypuff, another character from Pokémon. Much like Pikachu, Jigglypuff was incredibly relevant in the Pokémon anime, making her a popular character. Originally, the secondary Pokémon character was going to be Mewtwo, but there were no characters that he could really easily be based on. Jigglypuff was easier to implement, due to looking very similar to Kirby. Easy way to re-use assets that you already made. The other reason that Jigglypuff was added was that a lot of fighting games at the time included a joke character. Dan from Street Fighter (released in 1995) was the most famous example of this, and Sakurai wanted to follow suit. And yeah, Jigglypuff in Smash is weird. Its entire moveset revolves around going to sleep and putting others to sleep. It's definitely a unique gameplay mechanic.

Next up is Captain Falcon, from F-Zero. But these days, he's honestly more well-known for appearing in Smash than in his own home series. Part of that is because he hasn't had a new game since 2004 (okay, in the time since I wrote this, Nintendo released a new F-Zero game in 2023, so forget what I just said), and part of that is that he just looks and acts and sounds so silly in Smash, saying and doing a ton of things that just become hilarious memes almost instantly. So... how did he get into Smash if he wasn't iconic before that? After all, we never even SEE him in F-Zero itself. We just see (and drive) his car. His actual human appearance is just seen in F-Zero artwork. And Captain Falcon never had a 3D model of his human self made for any game, ever - unlike literally the rest of the Smash roster up to this point. Players of F-Zero games never saw him, only his car. So something new would have to be made just for Smash. So why go through that effort? Well, two reasons. For one, F-Zero X is about to be released at this time, so hopefully the character will gain relevance. And two... looking at what Captain Falcon looks like... in his artwork... he is eerily similar to the characters used in the original "Dragon King: The Fighting Game". And what little he DOESN'T have in common with them... he has a lot in common with Samus's build. So... yeah... easy to implement. In fact, in the original Smash, Captain Falcon and Samus use the same up tilt, down smash, and getting-up animation.

The final character to be added to the original Smash was Ness. He's a weird inclusion. Not only did he not have a game on Nintendo 64, but he was never even planned to (unlike Samus, who had one and then it was cancelled, Ness never was going to leave the SNES). And his franchise, EarthBound, wasn't even that popular outside of Japan. He's the least relevant character on the roster, sticking out like a sore thumb. Now, some people may point to the later-cancelled EarthBound 64, which was in development at this time. And to that I say... Ness isn't in that game. But that's actually still not a good reason to exclude Ness from Smash. Indeed, adding Ness in Smash would keep EarthBound relevant, and may get people to check out EarthBound 64 when it releases (assuming that they still thought that this would happen). And sure, that probably was a factor. But the biggest factor getting Ness into the game was favoritism. Both Hal Laboratory and Satoru Iwata himself worked on EarthBound, and so were already familiar with the character. Also, Ness's body type is very similar to Mario's, so he could be easily overlaid atop an already-existing model.

And while that covers all of the characters from the original Smash game... there's still more that we need to talk about. Namely, the characters that DIDN'T get put in the game. We want to see why each character got in Smash, so that also includes talking about the characters that didn't quite make the cut. After all, knowing what doesn't work is just as important as knowing what does.

Now, we probably will never know every single character that was ever considered. Not only is Nintendo often secretive about that type of thing, but Sakurai probably thought of so many characters at some point or another that there's probably a functionally-infinite amount. But we do know some, that Sakurai has talked about, so we're just going to talk about the ones that he's mentioned at various points.

The first is... team Star Fox. In addition to Fox, he considered Falco, Slippy, and Peppy as being added to Smash 64. Not as their own characters, but rather, as alternate costumes for Fox. Yes, in Smash 64. Having completely different characters as alternate costumes isn't going to happen for real until Smash 4. But this was considered from the start. After all, it makes sense. In the Star Fox games up until this point, the majority of gameplay takes place while flying an Arwing, so Fox's moveset is based heavily on that. And since that's a vehicle that all of them can pilot, it makes sense to add Falco, Slippy, and Peppy as well. On top of that, they all have similar body types and proportions, and this could easily work. And Star Fox 64 is popular. The only reason why Fox was chosen over the other three is because he's the one that you play as in these games. So... why were they cut? Well, as alternate costumes, they would have to match Fox's Smash gameplay EXACTLY. And Fox is known for being incredibly agile. This would work fine on Falco or (to a lesser extent) Peppy, but not really on Slippy. Could they have had Falco and Peppy without Slippy? Sure, but that would have looked weird to just be missing one of them for a not-very-obvious reason.

A character that Sakurai considered for more than just a single moment was Marth, from Fire Emblem. It is often joked about nowadays that Smash has too many swordfighters, but... in Smash 64, Link is the only one. So Marth would have actually been a decent option. So why was he cut? Simple: time constraints. They barely finished the original eight characters in time, and the four hidden characters were chosen because they could re-use content from the original eight. Marth would have required a new build, which they didn't have time to create. But... out of all possible swordsmen from Nintendo... why Marth? Well, Sakurai felt that Fire Emblem was a big enough franchise that they deserved to have a representative in Smash. At this point in history, they have four games, with another one on the way, due for release in '99. If that surprises you to learn, since you thought that Fire Emblem didn't exist until 2003, allow me to blow your mind: there are six Fire Emblem games that pre-date Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade (the supposedly "original" Fire Emblem game), they were just never released outside of Japan. Well, okay. Not "never". Because the first Fire Emblem game, originally released in 1990, was actually officially localized in English in 2020. Better late than never. Though it was a limited-time release, and the game was made impossible to purchase four months later, though you could still play it if you previously purchased it from back when it was available. Anyways, we're getting off-topic. The point is, Sakurai thought that Fire Emblem had multiple popular games and deserved to be included in Smash.

But both Team Star Fox and Marth were just ideas. They never had any actual planning done on them, and were discarded pretty quickly. Let's look at a character that actually WAS worked on: Mewtwo. We don't actually know how far along he got. But Sakurai only wanted one additional Pokémon, and Jigglypuff was easier to implement, due to being able to steal a lot from Kirby. So Jigglypuff was able to steal Mewtwo's spot.

But there were two characters that has a lot more work done on them. And those characters are... Bowser and King Dedede, the main villains of Mario and Kirby, respectively. Both of these characters are not only major characters in their respective franchises, but are also pretty big names for the companies that own them. Bowser is basically THE iconic villain for Nintendo, and Dedede is similar for Hal Laboratory. So why were they cut? Well, once again, it was time constraints. In fact, Bowser in particular was mentioned off-hand by Miyamoto at one point as being in Smash 64, while the game was still in development, perhaps hinting that he was so far along that they were hopeful that he would make it. Or maybe Miyamoto was just mistaken.

Now, I should mention some more characters that were allegedly cut from Smash 64. These are Sigurd from Fire Emblem, Meowth from Pokémon, Pit from Kid Icarus, and Peach from Mario. These are often brought up on internet discussion boards as being allegedly intended to be playable characters in Smash 64. However, as far as I can tell, this is just a playground rumor that spread way too far, and Sakurai has never confirmed any of these as being intended for Smash 64 at any point. Meowth in particular is a very common presumption.

So now it's time for the next Smash game... Smash 2.

Yeah, not Melee. Smash 2. So... what is this? Is it a cancelled Smash game or something?

No.

It's a hypothetical Smash game that never was made and never was planned to be made.

But Sakurai did ask some fans who they would want in Smash 2 if such a game were to exist. And so... he got a lot of data as people emailed him in their requests. This was before the first Smash game was even released outside of Japan, by the way.

Note that if a person wrote in with an entire list of characters instead of just one, then only the first character mentioned was counted, and the rest of the list was discarded. He also combined some characters together if they were the same character with multiple names (such as Ganondorf and Ganon). And he discarded any characters that had only a single vote each. Lastly, Sakurai himself refused to vote. When all was said and done, 927 votes remained.

Starting with the Super Mario series (yeah, Sakurai split it up by series), here's what we had. Coming in at #10, Baby Mario has 3 votes. This is... unusual. At this point, Baby Mario only appears in Yoshi's Island (though he is playable in Mario Golf, which is coming out very soon at this point in history), so I guess now Sakurai considers that to be a Mario game. I don't really know what Baby Mario would do in Smash. At #8 (tied), Mallow and Geno each have 5 votes. They're both exclusive to Super Mario RPG, and yeah... Geno is a common request even to this day. And at this time, that's the only Mario series RPG. At #7, Goomba has 7 votes. Yeah... they're iconic to the Mario franchise and are the first enemy ever seen in a Mario game, but I have no idea how they'd fight. Whatever. At #6, we have Kamek with 8 votes. Though he's more of a Yoshi character than a Mario character. At #5, we have Koopa Troopa with 9 votes. Now, I think this works better than Goomba. Heck, at this point, Koopa Troopa HAS actually been playable in a video game, namely Super Mario Kart (though he was not in Mario Kart 64, the latest Mario Kart game at the time), which is more than could be said for Goomba. That said, it's still just a generic enemy. At #4, we have Toad with 27 votes. And yeah, he's good. He's still commonly requested to this day. The #3 choice is Wario at 65 votes. Unlike the other characters mentioned so far, Wario was finally added to Smash eventually, so there's that. I should also note that he kind of was in Smash 64, as Mario has an alternate costume where he wears Wario's outfit. The #2 choice is Peach at 66 votes, and the #1 choice was Bowser at 169 votes. Obviously, both of these have since been added to Smash as well.

The next-biggest franchise is Pokémon. Now, I should mention that Gen 1 is still all that exists at this point in time, though some Gen 2 Pokémon had been previewed in the anime. For example... in the #8 spot, with 5 votes, we have a three-way tie of Marill, Bulbasaur, and Togepi. Yeah, two of those are Gen 2 Pokémon. The #7 spot is Raichu at 7 votes. Yeah... we already have Pikachu. Is Raichu really too different? Anyways, the #6 spot is Meowth at 8 votes. Now, Meowth was actually in Smash 64, as an assist character from the Poké Ball item. But he has yet to make it onto the roster as a fully playable character in his own right. The #5 spot is Lugia at 11 votes. Which... is very strange. Not only is Lugia a Gen 2 Pokémon, but the movie that Lugia debuted in... isn't even out yet. All people had are trailers, and from that alone... they apparently wanted Lugia in Smash!? I don't get it. But in any case... congrats to the marketing team for this movie. You're doing your job correctly. Anyways, the #4 spot goes to "anyone from the Pokémon franchise". Yeah, that's a thing that 12 people wrote. Nicely done. The #3 spot goes to Red or Ash or Pokémon Trainer or The Protagonist or any other name for that character. I think you all know who I am referring to. He got 18 votes. And, of course, he later made it into Smash, kind of. Anyways, the #2 spot is Mew, with 24 votes. And much like Meowth, Mew was already in Smash 64 as an assist character. Though despite its high placing, Mew has never been a playable character in Smash. And the #1 spot, with 35 votes, is Mewtwo. And, of course, he was later added to Smash.

Now, don't worry if that seemed to last a while, because the rest of the franchises have far fewer characters. The next one to look at is The Legend of Zelda. At #5, we have Darunia, with 2 votes. I am surprised that Darunia was popular enough to get that, but hey, good job for him. The #2 spot was a tie of 8 votes each, between Zelda, Sheik, and Young Link. And #1 was Ganondorf or Ganon at 36 votes. And yeah, all four of these would later get added to Smash.

The Kirby series has Waddle Dee in the #5 spot at 3 votes. Yes, this was before the hype for Bandana Waddle Dee existed, as Bandana Waddle Dee could barely even be called a character at this point in history. At #4, with 10 votes, we have "someone from the Kirby franchise". Yeah... okay. At #3, with 11 votes, we have Meta Knight, who would later get added to Smash. At #2, we have Gooey at 17 votes. And at #1, unsurprisingly, is King Dedede at 46 votes. I should note that King Dedede technically does appear in Smash 64, as you can see him flying around in the background on the Dream Land stage. But yeah, he's not a playable character in Smash, but would later become one.

The next franchise is EarthBound. Yeah... not Donkey Kong or Metroid or Star Fox or anything sensible. EarthBound. A fairly unpopular game compared to most franchises here somehow got more votes than anything not previously mentioned. At #5, we have a tie between Jeff and the Starman at 3 votes. At #3, we have a tie between Paula and "anyone from EarthBound" at 4 votes. At #2, we have Poo at 6 votes. Now... one thing you will notice is that all of these characters come from EarthBound itself and not from either its first game (EarthBound Beginnings) or its sequel (Mother 3). So why is that? Well, EarthBound Beginnings sucked and Mother 3 wasn't out yet. So... yeah. And that applies to the #1 choice as well, who is also from EarthBound. That character is... Mr. Saturn, with 18 votes. Yes, really. I'm not making this up. Characters like Porky, Giygas, Buzz Buzz, and so forth... totally ignored in favor of Mr. Saturn. I don't get it. I would say that this is clearly internet culture just being memetic, but... I don't think that was much of a thing in 1999 Japanese emails. Just... why Mr. Saturn? I legitimately cannot explain this.

Let's just move on to the next franchise, Star Fox. At #4, we have Peppy at 2 votes. At #2, we have Slippy at 5 votes. And at #1, we have Falco at 7 votes. All the Team Star Fox characters, who, if you'll recall, were all considered for Smash 64 at one point. Among them, only Falco would later make it onto the Smash roster. But... wait. What about #3? Well, that went to not a Team Star Fox character, but to Wolf, leader of Team Star Wolf, with 4 votes. He also would later get added to Smash.

The next most common franchise to get votes was... Fire Emblem!? Yeah. Even though Fire Emblem did not get any representation at all in Smash 64, enough people wanted it that... well, here we are. It got more votes than Metroid, Donkey Kong, F-Zero... I... I can't even. And this is in 1999! I get that Nintendo over-promotes Fire Emblem compared to their other franchises nowadays, to the point where now everyone hates the franchise. But... in 1999? People wanted a Fire Emblem character in Smash? Well... yeah, I guess. Apparently, people were disappointed that one wasn't in Smash 64. At #5, we have a tie between Sigurd and Leif at 2 votes. At #4, we have Seliph at 4 votes. At #3, we have Ogma at 8 votes. I'm... very surprised to see Ogma this high up. Like, seriously, even amongst Fire Emblem fans... I don't think I've ever heard Ogma brought up in Smash speculation discussion before. At #2, we have "someone from Fire Emblem" at 18 votes. I think it's safe to say that these people got their wish, as now Fire Emblem has more characters in Smash than they have any right to, as they are considered to be way too over-represented and the Smash dev team has gone overboard with them... even though they all play very similarly. Anyways, at #1, we have Marth at 21 votes, who, of course, would later make it into Smash himself. Makes sense that the Hero King himself would lead the pack.

The next franchise is... okay, a bit of a curve-ball. So, this is the "RareWare" category. For those not in the know, RareWare was a company that was a subsidiary of Nintendo. They made several popular games in the SNES and Nintendo 64 eras, including breathing new life into Donkey Kong after he was mostly forgotten about and left to the old arcade days. And all of the RareWare games are very much beloved. But... there is one very huge complication. You see, in 2001... Microsoft bought RareWare from Nintendo, and all the RareWare characters and franchises sorta... dropped off the face of the earth. The few that survived were greatly re-tooled and not nearly as good. And so, kinda because of that, none of these characters would have ever been seriously considered until Smash started adding guest characters from other companies, because by the time the next Smash game were to come out, they would no longer be Nintendo characters. Anyways, at #4, we have a tie with 2 votes between Blast Corps Robot and 006 Alec. Okay, I get Blast Corps, but... 006 Alec? What's going on there? Isn't that a James Bond character? Yes it is. If you don't know, one of the very popular games made by RareWare was GoldenEye 007, based on the James Bond film series. In fact, to this day, it's an INCREDIBLY popular video game, and has been called one of the greatest gaming experiences ever, even to this day. The game has been re-released on both Xbox and Nintendo Switch in 2023, so yeah... it's fair to say that this is still going strong, and a lot of people still view this as a legitimate game to pull content from for Smash. And this isn't as silly of an idea as it sounds. In Smash, there's the Motion-Sensor Bomb item that can be placed on the stage and you wait for someone to set it off. In modern Smash games, it has a unique design original to Smash, but in Smash 64, it was actually based on its design from GoldenEye, so... I guess that's fair. At #3, we have Diddy Kong at 15 votes, and he would later go on to be a character in Smash in the future. At #2, with 18 votes, we have Banjo-Kazooie, who would also later eventually join Smash. I'm actually kinda surprised. Not that Banjo and Kazooie were requested, as they have been VERY heavily requested for basically as long as I can remember (they wouldn't join Smash until Ultimate, which is the latest Smash game, and even there, only as DLC). But... I just always thought that they were only popular in the western world, not in Japan. Guess I may have been wrong about that. And the #1 choice is... 007 James Bond at 35 points. Yeah... very surprised that King K. Rool didn't even make it onto the poll. Also... um... no comment on this being another James Bond character.

The next franchise is... special guests. These are non-Nintendo characters that people still wanted in despite them not being from Nintendo. Guest characters are a thing nowadays, but it's interesting that people wanted it from the beginning. Anyways, at #5, we have a tie between Sonic the Hedgehog and Mega Man at 3 votes. Both of these characters would make it into Smash as guest characters, eventually. At #4, we have Crash Bandicoot at 4 votes. He's commonly requested, but has yet to actually make it into Smash. At #3, we have Bomberman with 5 votes. At #2, we have Doraemon with 7 votes. I don't get it. He's not even a video game character, he's from an anime/manga. I mean, sure, there's video game tie-ins, but come on. And at #1, we have Chocobo at 9 votes. I get wanting Final Fantasy in Smash, but Chocobo over Cloud and Terra? Strange.

The final category is "miscellaneous", which is just all the rest of the Nintendo franchises. At #9, we have Samurai Goroh (from F-Zero), Ice Climbers (from Ice Climber), and Balloon Fighter (from Balloon Fight) all tied at 4 votes each. Of them, only Ice Climbers has successfully made it to Smash. At #5, we have Pit (from Kid Icarus), Donbe & Hikari (from Shin Onigashima), and the trio of protagonists - Max, Dion, and Jack - from Marvelous (as a single character). They each got 5 votes, though only Pit would eventually join the Smash roster. At #6, we have Metroid (including votes for the Baby Metroid specifically) and Foreman Spike (from Wrecking Crew), at 6 votes. At #3, we have Prince Sable and Prince Richard, at 8 votes. Yeah, for some reason, these were combined into one entry even though I think of them as different characters. No idea why Sakurai seems to think they're the same, maybe he just thought that they had to be implemented in Smash together? They're from Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru, by the way. I'm guessing if one of them does get added to Smash, we'll get the other as an alternate costume, but either way... it hasn't happened yet. At #2, we have Lip from Panel de Pon, with 9 votes. And the #1 spot is... Sukapon from Joy Mech Fight at 15 votes. Not bad.

So overall, the top 20 would be: Lugia, Meta Knight, "anyone from Pokémon", Sukapon, Diddy Kong, Gooey, Mr. Saturn, Pokémon Trainer, "anyone from Fire Emblem", Marth, Mew, Toad, Banjo-Kazooie, Mewtwo, James Bond, Ganondorf, King Dedede, Wario, Peach, and Bowser.

It's important to keep this poll in mind when we look at the characters from future Smash games, because Sakurai will use it to try and figure out who to add in the future.

So now we can finally move on to the second Smash game, Super Smash Bros. Melee on Nintendo GameCube. At this point, it's 1999 and the original Smash has just released. Sakurai has no intention of making a sequel or making this a series, but Nintendo wants a new Smash game for their upcoming console, the GameCube, scheduled to be released in 2001. So a few months later, Sakurai is tasked with making it.

With Smash 64, Sakurai spent a large chunk of time with it as "Dragon King: The Fighting Game", and as such, relatively little time was spent with it as a Smash title. This means that the game wasn't quite as good as it theoretically could have been. With Melee, Sakurai wanted to rectify that and make this the definitive Smash Bros. experience, with it being the idea for Smash that he had in his head when developing Smash 64.

In an interview with Shigesato Itoi (creator of EarthBound), Sakurai said that Smash 64 was only about 60% of what he had envisioned, though he doesn't specify if the limitations were time, technology, budget, some unknown fourth factor, or some combination of these.

But regardless, this was not the case for Melee. With Melee, he could add everything that he wished he had added in Smash 64, and that includes characters.

So, the first obvious inclusion is Bowser. He's Nintendo's biggest villain, an all-star character, has an easy-to-visualize moveset, and was by far the vast runaway winner of the Smash 2 poll. He's also both relevant and popular.

Next up is Marth. Sakurai thought of Fire Emblem as a major Nintendo series, and Marth was its most popular character, and this also let Sakurai have a variety of sword-wielding characters on the roster, which is something that he wanted in Smash 64.

After that, we come to Mewtwo. Mewtwo won the Smash 2 poll amongst Pokémon characters, and Mewtwo is also an important character in the Pokémon games, serving as the postgame true final boss. He also has a very important role in the Pokémon anime. While Pokémon The First Movie is over a year old at this point, Mewtwo is still very popular. But is Pokémon big enough to warrant more representation in Smash, or will it just be a passing fad? Well, luckily, we have an answer here. Pokémon has recently released Pokémon Stadium, and the Pokémon Trading Card Game, so they are clearly going all-in on branding and making sure that this will still remain a thing for many years to come. So yes, Pokémon is big (of course, looking back on this in 2023, it seems silly that there was ever any doubt). Pokémon absolutely deserves to get another Smash character.

That's it for characters that were almost in Smash 64, but had to wait until Melee. But there's still more characters on the Melee roster to discuss. First up, Peach. She absolutely makes sense to be here, being Nintendo's primary female character. She's not much of a fighter in the Mario games, usually delegated to the "damsel in distress" role, but she was playable in Super Mario Bros. 2, and her appearance in that game greatly contributed to her Smash moveset. She also was the runner-up of the Smash 2 poll. She definitely is a major Nintendo character and was inevitably going to end up in Smash.

After that, we start to look towards Nintendo's other major princess character: Zelda. She's the title character of The Legend of Zelda. But despite that, getting her into Smash would be... challenging. Unlike Peach, Zelda has never been playable in a The Legend of Zelda video game before. In fact, even to this day, if you exclude spinoffs and non-canon material, the ONLY time Zelda has ever been playable in an official The Legend of Zelda video game was in Spirit Tracks in 2009. But I digress. The point is... how do you make a moveset for her? She's never really done anything. Well, let's look at the most recent version of Zelda at the time, the one from Ocarina of Time. In this game, she has a major role in the storyline beyond just being a damsel in distress. And her unique role in that game actually let her have something new in her moveset that hadn't been seen before. Major spoiler alert for a 25-year-old game, but... in Ocarina of Time, Zelda was Link's childhood friend, who he visits and talks to many times, and she's the one who sends him on his quest to stop Ganondorf in the first place. But at the climax of the story, Ganondorf tricks Link and seals him inside the Temple of Time, where his spirit remains dormant for seven years. Emerging from the Temple of Time, Link finds a world in ruin, as Ganondorf has now been able to enforce his evil unopposed. Additionally, Link is unable to find the whereabouts of Zelda, who went into hiding shortly after Link's disappearance. Link's new ally that he befriends and gets advice from for the bulk of the rest of the game is a warrior named Sheik. Just before the game's final dungeon, Link learns the truth: Sheik was actually just Zelda in disguise all along. And this was a unique idea that no other character on the Smash roster offered: the idea of transformation. Zelda and Sheik could both be added to the Smash roster, with a move that allows you to transform from one to the other. The idea would be that Zelda would be slow but powerful, while Sheik would be much faster but weaker. And so that's how Zelda got into Smash.

Wait... what about Sheik? Shouldn't we talk about her? Well, yeah. She was relevant at the time of Melee's development, since Ocarina of Time was the big Zelda game at the time, she never appeared in any other The Legend of Zelda video game before nor since. So surely she's not big enough to get into Smash. Well, sure, but as previously discussed, she was able to tag along with Zelda due to the unique transformation mechanic. Additionally, she was quite popular on the Smash 2 poll, coming in joint second place for The Legend of Zelda franchise, along with Zelda herself. So yeah, as long as you can bring something new to the table, transformation in this case, you can apparently get onto the Smash roster without being an all-star character.

Case in point: Ice Climbers. They allow for a unique gameplay experience. And, in terms of relevance, they were anything but. They had a single NES game from 1984 that remains their ONLY game to the present day. And yet, they got onto the Smash roster. Why? Because of their unique gameplay mechanic of controlling two characters at once. Sakurai did want a character from the NES/Famicom era, to represent that era as a whole, as a retro character. There were several considerations, which we will talk about when we get to the "cut characters" section for this game, but Ice Climbers ended up winning out, due to their unique gameplay. Like, the video game Ice Climber is all about simultaneous two-player play. Which is pretty common nowadays, but was a rarity in 1984 in console games (it was admittedly still a common thing in arcade games). So yeah, that's how Ice Climbers managed to sneak their way into Smash despite not having any new games recently nor any on the horizon. Probably also helping was that they did come in ninth place in the "miscellaneous" category of the Smash 2 poll.

And we're still not done with mechanically-unique characters, as there's also Mr. Game & Watch. He seems to break every rule of what it takes to get onto the Smash roster, so let's talk about him. For starters, he's VERY old. He's the oldest character on the Smash roster, having debuted in 1980, even a year before Mario and Donkey Kong made their first appearance in the arcades. But also... he's not really a character, is he? The Game & Watches were a series of LCD handhelds made by Nintendo, and Mr. Game & Watch was sort of an amalgamation of all of the games that were made. In fact... these things are so old that it's hard to even find them anymore - ignoring the fake promotional ones made in 2020-2021. And this was even the case at the time. So how did Mr. Game & Watch get into Smash? Well, for one, he's just such a unique character. He has such a unique moveset compared to everyone else. And he is an important part of Nintendo's history, being part of the movement that got Nintendo to focus on video games over their wide menagerie of products that they had in their first century as a company. And plus... it's not like Mr. Game & Watch is COMPLETELY obscure. True, it was difficult to find Game & Watches, but you could buy the Game & Watch Gallery series of games on Game Boy, which were compilations of various Game & Watch games that you could play. Indeed, Game & Watch Gallery 3 is right around the corner at this point in history, and Sakurai even admitted that this helped get Mr. Game & Watch into Smash. But even if people know of him, he's hardly an all-star character. Calling him that... is, frankly, absurd. But he is still a character reminiscent of Nintendo's past, and they cherish this history.

And sure enough... that's all the characters that were planned to be included in Melee. Adding on the original twelve, we now have a total of twenty. A nice step up. But... Melee did have six more characters, for a total of twenty-six. These last six were added mid-development, due to their ability to easily re-use a moveset of an existing character. Only the main properties and attributes of the character would need to be altered, and their models created (okay, you also need a Break the Targets stage and a trophy and other such content, but still - relatively easy compared to creating a whole new character from scratch, since that would require all that and more). We don't know when the decision was made to add these "clone" characters, but Sakurai said that it was late enough that adding even just one more non-clone character would have been impossible. Yeah, even if all six clones were cut, there STILL wouldn't have been enough time and resources to make a new character. People often bring up that there are too many clones in this game, but I honestly don't mind, as it gets more characters onto the roster. I think people are under the misconception that if we didn't have clones, we'd have unique characters instead - even if fewer of them - but as Sakurai just stated, this is not the case. It was either we get these clones or we get nothing at all.

The first clone character to be decided was Dr. Mario. This came from a fan email. A fan asked Sakurai if in a hypothetical second Smash game, Mario could have a costume based on Dr. Mario. After all, Dr. Mario is just Mario, right? Well, sure. But it's not that simple. For example, in Smash, Mario's neutral special is a fireball, a projectile that Dr. Mario never used in his own game. Dr. Mario instead had the very similar pills that he threw. So you would need to change the fireball to a pill. This change meant that Dr. Mario couldn't be an alternate costume, but instead had to be a separate character. But why Dr. Mario? Well, favoritism. Sakurai himself was a big fan of Dr. Mario - especially the game's music - and was kinda looking for an excuse to add it to Smash.

At this point, Sakurai was looking at the game's balance and noticed that the game lacked a character for the "joke character" role. Jigglypuff filled this role in Smash 64, but she was greatly improved in the transition to Melee, so a new joke character would need to be added. And looking at the Pokémon in particular, we have Pikachu, Jigglypuff, and Mewtwo - all Gen 1 Pokémon. This is for a very simple reason: Gen 2 wasn't out yet, at the time that Melee began development. But by this point, it was about to come out. So could we add a Gen 2 Pokémon as a joke character? Well, there's a very obvious choice here: Pichu. He'd just be a worse version of Pikachu, being an inexperienced baby Pokémon. It's a hilarious joke, right? Jigglypuff was terrible in Smash 64, but could still be devastating in the right hands. But Pichu in Melee was designed, from day one, to be bad. Why would anyone use Pichu when Pikachu was an option? And Pichu not only fit well as a clone of Pikachu, but was also somewhat relevant thanks to the anime having the "Pikachu and Pichu" short debut around this time. This could push Pichu into the public eye like the first movie did for Mewtwo.

Next up is Falco, a cut character from Smash 64. Star Fox 64 was popular enough to warrant a second character. And Falco not only won the Star Fox portion of the Smash 2 poll, but his body type is most similar to Fox's, out of the three other characters from Team Star Fox. So making him a Fox clone made the most sense.

Speaking of the Smash 2 poll... let's take a look at the The Legend of Zelda section. Young Link also tied with both Zelda and Sheik, and he obviously would work as a clone of Link. Sure, he's still just Link, but hey, Dr. Mario is still just Mario, so why not? After all, Mario and Link are the two faces of Nintendo, so it stands to reason that they could get multiple incarnations of themselves in Smash. On top of that, Miyamoto himself saw Young Link as the main version of Link at that time. At the end of Ocarina of Time, Link gets sent back in time, to before he was sealed away, so he can reclaim the childhood that he never had, due to being forcibly aged-up seven years. This act of time travel effectively meant that everything that happened as adult Link never actually happened, since it was all undone by the time travel. Nowadays, we have many more Zelda games, so we actually know that Ocarina of Time's time travel resulted in a branched timeline. But that wasn't the case back then. At this point in time, there is just one Zelda timeline. The experiences of adult Link were just a side story more than anything. After all, the direct sequel to Ocarina of Time, namely Majora's Mask, picks up from where child Link left off, having gone back in time. And from there, the rest of the Zelda series (which Ocarina of Time was a prequel to) would follow. Nowadays, the Zelda timeline is heavily debated, but at the time, pretty much everyone agreed that it was just a single timeline going in the order of Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, A Link to the Past, Link's Awakening, The Legend of Zelda, and The Adventure of Link. On top of that... if you look at how old Link is in each of these six games that existed at the time, it could be argued that Young Link is the main version of Link. Adult Link only appears in Ocarina of Time and The Adventure of Link, while Young Link appears in all of them except The Adventure of Link. And as if that weren't enough reason to add Young Link to Smash, there's also one more factor. You see, while Smash 64 had generally favorable reviews, one common complaint was that Link felt too slow. So how do you address this criticism? The obvious answer is to make Link faster, but then everyone who played Link in Smash 64 would need to learn a whole new gameplay style, messing with their muscle memory. Indeed, because a lot of people did play Link in Smash 64, you couldn't change him too drastically. Adding a second version of Link lets you keep the original intact, while still offering an alternative faster version for those who would prefer it. Now, everyone is happy.

The next character to be added was Roy, who debuted in Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, a game from early 2002. This is in contrast to Super Smash Bros. Melee, which was released in... um... let me check my notes here... late 2001!? Yeah. Roy's actual first ever video game appearance was in Smash Bros. That's um... certainly a choice. Now, let me say that this was never the intention. Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade was supposed to come out first, but due to struggles with that game's development, they ended up pushing their intended release date back a bit. But Sakurai didn't necessarily want Roy, he just wanted a Fire Emblem character that could clone Marth. He didn't have one in particular in mind. This can even be seen by looking at the data on the game disc of Super Smash Bros. Melee itself. All of Roy's files simply name him "emblem", because they weren't sure which Fire Emblem character to use. But Sakurai did want a Fire Emblem character, as he considered the character to be one of Nintendo's main franchises. Heck, Fire Emblem got enough votes in the Smash 2 poll that it got its own section, while franchises like Metroid and Donkey Kong did not. So Sakurai went to Intelligent Systems, who were developing Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, and he asked who the next main Fire Emblem hero would be, and if he was similar enough to Marth. And sure enough, they showed him concept art for Roy. Sadly, Sakurai does regret implementing Roy in this way. According to him, the concept art made Roy look like a more "wild" character than he ended up being in the final version of the game, so the version that we got in Smash was not entirely accurate to the main Fire Emblem series.

The final character to be added to Melee was Ganondorf, the main villain of The Legend of Zelda. He won the Smash 2 poll in the Zelda category as well. So we got a ton of relevance and popularity. Why was he added so late? Well... because the only reason he got into Smash was because of his body type being similar enough to Captain Falcon that he could easily be cloned. But this was a last-minute decision. There's not even enough time to make a model of Ganondorf, and it's not like they can use a pre-existing model. After all, Ocarina of Time was on the Nintendo 64 and this was the GameCube, it's not compatible. Well, luckily, the GameCube had a Zelda-themed tech demo at Space World 2000, and in it, a model for Ganondorf appeared. So they could just use this. All the stars had to align in order to get Ganondorf into this game, but they all did. This model for Ganondorf was just used as-is, without any alterations, hence why he has a sword in one of his victory poses, despite not using a sword in Ocarina of Time. It's also why his cape is a different color than it was in Ocarina of Time. Both of these came from the Space World 2000 tech demo. As such, Ganondorf is more so a representative from this obscure tech demo than from Ocarina of Time, funnily enough.

And that's all twenty-six characters that were in Melee. But we still need to look at all the characters that didn't quite make it in.

First of all, let's talk about the non-Nintendo guest characters. Yeah, we had guest characters considered as early as Melee, but ultimately rejected. These were requests from the game developers of their original games. Those characters were Snake from Metal Gear and Sonic from Sonic the Hedgehog. Obviously, game developers requesting characters be added to Smash wasn't a thing in Smash 64, since Smash didn't exist yet, but now it did, and the requests are here. Unfortunately, both requests came too late into Melee's development for this to be even remotely feasible. Hideo Kojima personally phoned Sakurai and "practically begged" him to put Snake in the game. But it was still just too late. A similar story for Yuji Naka getting in the request for Sonic too late.

Another thing to talk about is the Famicom/NES era representative. In the final game, it was Ice Climbers, but several were considered for this slot. First was Mach Rider, who Sakurai did express public support for, as a joke. It was a joke, sure, but he still thought about it. The next thought was Takamaru from The Mysterious Murasame Castle, who is one of my personal most-wanted characters to be added to Smash. But Sakurai honestly didn't consider him for very long. The next one was Ayumi Tachibana from Famicom Detective Club. I can't really see what she'd do in Smash, and that did play a factor, but ultimately, the character was just not at all recognizable in any country other than Japan, so Sakurai rejected her. Interestingly, the game got a remake in 2021, and was localized into English for the first time, so perhaps she's not off the table for future Smash games. But wait... if Japan-only characters aren't allowed in Smash, how did Marth get in? Fire Emblem is Japan-only at this point, isn't it? And yes, but that's why there's the other reason she was rejected: unlike Marth, she's not a fighter, she's an investigator. If she were trading blows with Mario, it wouldn't feel right to Famicom Detective Club fans. Our next Famicom/NES character up for consideration was Bubbles from Clu Clu Land. And she was cut for not having any real good moveset. Then we have Urban Champion, an actual fighting game character. But again, not really a moveset option here. Like... he can punch... and that's about it. Then we have Balloon Fighter, and yeah, he'd be cool. He'd bring the balloon mechanic to Smash, since his worth is tied to the number of balloons he has on his back. But... that's just about all he'd be able to bring to Smash. Once his balloons are popped, there'd be nothing for him to do. Lastly, we have Excitebiker. The problem with Excitebiker is that it would look weird to jump while on a bike. Sure, he can jump in the Excitebike game itself, but only with the help of ramps. Adding this mechanic to Smash would mean adding ramps to every stage... which would be quite a lot, and ultimately not even worth doing.

The next two characters up for consideration were Banjo & Kazooie, and James Bond. Both of them were in the overall top 10 on the Smash 2 poll, with them being the first place and second place spots in the RareWare category. For James Bond, there are several issues. For one, he'd need to have crouch-walking to emulate the actual game, which is not a mechanic in Smash. And then on top of that... he uses realistic-looking guns, which would probably boost up the game's age rating. And he's also based on a real-life human actor's likeness, which has complicated legal matters. Also... just... being from a movie in general means that getting the rights to use him is INSANELY complicated. And finally, there's the fact that Microsoft bought RareWare at this time, so that was a major issue. This blocked him from getting into Smash in so many different ways that it was never really an option. What about Banjo & Kazooie? Well, much like James Bond, they are also owned by RareWare. Yeah, the rest of the problems don't exist, but still. A problem is a problem. This is a legal issue and a financial issue that is... not easily solved. Now, some people will be quick to point out that, at the time of Melee's development, Banjo & Kazooie were owned by Nintendo, not by RareWare. And you're right about that. However, shortly thereafter, Nintendo traded the rights to RareWare's original characters to them in exchange for the rights to the extended Donkey Kong characters. Yeah, this deal hadn't gone through yet, but it's likely that it was at least drafted up and was on Nintendo's minds. Putting a RareWare character in Smash would have flown right in the face of that.

The next character, who is the first one that was actually planned, was Wario. Sakurai has even said that if he had had time to add just one more character to Melee, it would have been Wario. But in the end, there wasn't enough time. By this point, only clones could be added. Could Wario have been a Mario clone? Ehhh, maybe. But I think Wario fans can agree that Wario deserves better than this. And as previously mentioned, even if every single clone was cut, Wario wouldn't have made it in. Even getting rid of characters from Smash 64, such as Luigi and Jigglypuff, still wouldn't have given Wario a chance to get in, since at least with the Smash 64 cast, their movesets are already known. In order for Wario to get into Melee, they probably would have had to cut a non-clone newcomer, which would probably mean either Marth (along with his own clone, Roy) or Mewtwo.

The other character that was pretty much a shoe-in that didn't make it was... Lucas, from Mother 3. In fact, he was not just going to get into the game, but he was going to replace Ness as the EarthBound representative. But then Mother 3 got delayed, so no one would have known who Lucas was, so they just went back to Ness. It seems crazy to me to think that Ness was close to being removed from Smash, as no character from Smash 64 has ever been removed from a future installment, but yeah, it almost happened.

The final character considered for Melee was Sukapon from Joy Mech Fight. Unlike everyone else mentioned, Sukapon actually survived for quite a while and even had some work done on them. And no, this isn't as an NES/Famicom representative, because they still persisted even after Ice Climbers were added. This was likely a reference to Joy Mech Fight as being the first fighting game that Nintendo ever made. Heck, Sukapon even won the "miscellaneous" category of the Smash 2 poll. So what happened? Well... first up was time. Melee had a shorter development time than any other Smash game, so that was an issue. So the next plan was to add Sukapon as an item that players could ride like a vehicle. Why didn't this get implemented? After all, Ditto from Pokémon is in Melee as an assist character that was cut so late in the game that data is still on the disc that lets you summon it via hacking. It was meant to copy an opponent's character and join your team as an ally, but they couldn't get it working in time, so if hacked in, it just does nothing. Anyways, back to Sukapon, and there's a funny story about this...

Joy Mech Fight was pitched to Nintendo by programmers Koichi Hayashida and Koichiro Eto, as a Nintendo-owned game that is similar to Street Fighter. It was released in 1993 as a Japan-only title. Now, when this occurred, the creators signed over the rights to Nintendo in exchange for getting Nintendo to develop it. Which is pretty standard industry practice. Or at least... in theory that was what was supposed to happen. In reality, someone messed up. A contract was drawn up... but it was never stamped. Everyone assumed it was, and so everyone thought that Nintendo owned Joy Mech Fight, but they actually didn't. And so when Nintendo's legal team was looking over everything that was going to be put into Melee, they discovered that they actually didn't own the copyright on Joy Mech Fight and so Sukapon needed to be removed. This could have been avoided if they just... you know... stamped the contract. But the problem? No one could FIND the contract. Yeah, they had no idea where it was. Because of this, using Sukapon meant that they would have to pay the original creators to do so. So the character was scrapped, and this is also why Joy Mech Fight never got a sequel, remake, re-release, or so on. At least... until 2008 when Koichiro Eto actually found the contract at his home. They finally stamped the contract and gave the copyright to Nintendo, allowing Joy Mech Fight to be put on the Wii U Virtual Console, and for Sukapon to make cameos in future Smash games. A happy ending for the character.

Now, on to the next game: Super Smash Bros. Brawl, for the Wii. Unlike Melee, which was released fairly early into the GameCube's lifespan, Brawl was released a couple of years into the Wii's lifespan. So, as a result, we've now got a lot more content to pull from. At this point, Sakurai has left Hal Laboratory and gone independent. But he was brought back for a new Smash game by his close friend, Satoru Iwata, who, by this time, had become president of Nintendo. For the character roster, Sakurai wanted to please as many fans as possible, so he was valuing character popularity above all else. But that's not to say that this was the sole factor. Let's take a look at each character.

The first character added was King Dedede, the main villain of the Kirby franchise. The Kirby franchise was Sakurai's original creation, so he clearly loved it, and yet, it got no new characters in Melee. King Dedede was also the only character that we know of that was planned to be in Smash 64, but never made it in to either that game or to Melee. So they added Dedede to Brawl. In fact, it worked as Dedede was still relevant to the Kirby series, appearing in every Kirby game so far except for Kirby and the Amazing Mirror. And on top of that, he had his first appearance as a playable character in Kirby: Canvas Curse. So adding him to Smash was pretty much a no-brainer.

After that, we have Lucas. The story of Mother 3's development is... a rough one. Constant delays, a cancellation, a revival, moving to a whole new console, and much much more. In fact, out of all Nintendo games that we know the development story for, I think it can be argued that this one was the worst. And this got Lucas cut from Melee. But the game was finally ready to be released in 2006. Of course, the roster for Brawl was decided before that, but Mother 3 was probably far enough along that Sakurai had faith that it would actually finish in time. So... Lucas was added to Brawl, and not only that, but he was going to replace Ness. So then... how did Ness stick around? Well, around this time, they announced that Mother 3 would NOT be localized into English, a fact that many are still bitter about to this day. This meant that western players would not know who Lucas was, or why he played similarly to Ness. So in order to solve this issue, Sakurai decided to put both Ness and Lucas in the game, so that both regions would have an EarthBound character that they could use. This did make Lucas unique on the Smash roster. Usually, with clone characters, the clone is unlockable, so you have some experience with the original first. That was not the case here, as Lucas is available from the start while Ness has to be unlocked. So um... I guess the moral of the story is... for all the millions of people demanding that Nintendo localize Mother 3, know that if this request were granted, we'd lose Ness in Smash. Just letting you all know.

As previously mentioned, Sakurai said that if he could have added one more character to Melee, it would have been Wario. So, naturally, Wario was a high priority for Brawl. And in the time since Melee, Wario started a whole new side series, WarioWare, that was incredibly popular and gave Smash a ton to work with. So that's an easy one to include.

Brawl was also the first game to feature guest characters. Last time in Melee, both Konami's Snake and Sega's Sonic were requested by their original owners, but the requests came too late. This time, they were both able to get in. While they were able to easily negotiate and hammer out a deal with Konami to use Snake... Sonic wasn't so lucky.

Sega initially rejected Nintendo's offer, and wouldn't change their mind until 2007, making Sonic a very late addition to the game. In fact, he was the last non-clone newcomer character to be added to the game. In fact, development had proceeded with the assumption that Sonic would not be in Brawl. And Sakurai really likes sticking with plans. He made this sole exception just because he knew that it would make most fans happy, and because he really wanted Sonic in the game himself. Now, it is worth noting that Sonic was announced to be in the game on the same day that it was also announced that Brawl would receive a delay. Because these announcements happened on the same day, many fans assumed that they were connected, but that is not the case. The game was not delayed to make room for Sonic. The reason was because there was a lot of development still needed to get done - not just Sonic. Another thing that people bring up is Sonic's moveset in Smash being overly simplistic, with several of his moves being very similar to each other, and cite this as a reason why: Sonic was a last-minute addition. But this is not the case. You see, the Sonic the Hedgehog series has gone through many changes over the years. If you play the original Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic '06, Shadow the Hedgehog, and Sonic: The Fighters, you've basically gotten four completely different gameplay experiences. And of them... Sakurai thought that the best one was the original Sonic the Hedgehog. Creating a moveset for Sonic based on his original game is definitely gonna require some amount of redundancy, given that, you know... the original game on Sega Genesis only used one button. By the way, note that Sonic's extremely small role in The Subspace Emissary story mode is due to him being a last-minute addition to the game.

The next character to look at is Captain Olimar, from Pikmin. Pikmin came out on the exact same day as Melee, so it's the newest franchise in Brawl by far (the runner-up for that is Pokémon). And even so... it came out in 2001, while Brawl was a 2008 game, so there's kinda a huge gap on both sides of it. But I digress. I should note that Sakurai did have a fleeting thought at one point about putting Olimar in Melee, but he discarded the idea immediately after having it, not even considering it worthy of giving a second thought to, since he would have been too new at the time. But with Brawl... adding Olimar makes so much sense. If they didn't add Olimar, then they basically admit that there's been no new franchises that have good characters since Pokémon, and that's just not true. I should note that we're not just looking at any franchises, but specifically character-driven franchises.

Anyways, we don't actually know the order of the characters that were chosen to be in the game from here on, so I'm just gonna go in the order that they were announced (skipping those that were already covered). So, we start with Meta Knight, from the Kirby series. He's another character created by Sakurai himself, in Kirby's Adventure, serving as Kirby's rival. He's easily the third-most important character in the Kirby franchise, after Kirby and King Dedede, so if Kirby was going to get a third character, it would certainly be him. Adding to this was the fact that the latest Kirby game at the time was Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, which features Meta Knight in a starring role. But does Kirby deserve three characters? Well, Sakurai thought so. It is his baby after all.

The next character is Pit, from Kid Icarus, serving as the retro character of this game, just like Ice Climbers did in Melee. The last Kid Icarus game was Of Myths and Monsters, released in 1991. And it never came out in Japan, so for all intents and purposes, the true last Kid Icarus game was the original Kid Icarus in 1986. Though Pit wasn't obscure, because the original Kid Icarus was re-released on Game Boy Advance (only in Japan) in 2004. Also... he's from an action game, so unlike most retro characters, a moveset is easy to visualize for Pit. That said... the Kid Icarus series is often seen as sort of a sibling to The Legend of Zelda, given that they both came out at the same time and featured similar stories. But placing Pit next to Link is strange, since Link has a more modern design. To rectify this, the Smash developers gave Pit a modern design as well, imagining what he may have looked like if the Kid Icarus series had continued through to the modern day.

The biggest new mechanic that Brawl introduced to the Smash series was the Final Smash. Once a character grabs a Smash Ball, they can use a one-time ultra-powerful move called a Final Smash. Naturally, it would be nice if one character tied into this mechanic. The obvious answer is to have a transformation caused by a Final Smash. Then they can just do what they did in Melee with Zelda and Sheik: a strong slow character and a fast weak character. But who could be the transforming character? Well... the answer came about from trying to solve a different problem. At this point in time, the Metroid series is getting quite huge, with massively successful titles on both the GameCube and Game Boy Advance (Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion, respectively). It was clear that Metroid was now big enough to get another character on the Smash roster. They already had Samus, so the next-best candidate was... um... hmmm... yeah, okay, we have a problem here. All the other main characters of Metroid are giant boss monsters. They're too big to work as playable characters in Smash. Sure, you could pick one of the bounty hunters from Metroid Prime Hunters, but they're just a one-off character not seen in any other game. As such, everything seemed to point to letting Samus ditch her power suit and become Zero Suit Samus. It just made so much sense. It's one of the most iconic moments in all of gaming - seeing Samus take off her power suit for the first time at the end of Metroid and revealing a bikini-clad woman underneath it all, especially since everyone assumed she was male prior to this. To make things even better, the latest Metroid game at this point is Metroid: Zero Mission, a game where you can play as Zero Suit Samus. Literally everything about this was perfect.

Now... as previously stated, Sakurai considers the Fire Emblem series to be an important one for Nintendo, at the time of Smash 64 and Melee. And he was proven correct, as Marth and Roy's presence in Melee is what finally got Nintendo to localize the Fire Emblem franchise into English, starting with Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade. Well, that, and the fact that Advance Wars (a game with similar gameplay) was successful. After that was Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, and then Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. If we also tack on the Japan-only Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade that came out before all this, then there has been a new Fire Emblem game every year for four years now. That shows that it's big enough to get another new character. But who to include? Well, that's a difficult question. With so many games, there's just too many options. So Sakurai went to Intelligent Systems, the developers of Fire Emblem, and asked them for their input. They said that Ike was the latest main character, being the main character in Path of Radiance. Additionally, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn was forthcoming, and it features Ike as a main character in that game as well. So, with that, Ike was added to Smash.

Of course, Fire Emblem wasn't the only franchise Nintendo had that had gotten to be ridiculously huge and unstoppable. There was also Pokémon. In fact, Pokémon's tenth anniversary was right around the corner at the time. So it seemed obvious that they should get a new character. Well... who could it be? In previous Smash games, we had Pikachu, Jigglypuff, Mewtwo, and Pichu. Notice a consistent pattern there? They're all Pokémon. Another important part of the Pokémon series is not just the Pokémon, but also the trainers. And the trainers had no representation on the Smash roster at all. And in the Pokémon games, they're the ones who you play as. You don't actually play as the Pokémon. You play as a trainer directing the Pokémon in what to do. But... the Pokémon are the ones that actually fight. Not to mention that they were the main mascots of the series. So it's just so much easier to include them in Smash. But a Pokémon Trainer was a popular request in the Smash 2 poll. And Sakurai had an idea on how to include one in a way that was unique. The trainer wouldn't actually fight in Smash. He would send out a Pokémon to fight for him, while he just stood in the background directing the Pokémon, just like in the Pokémon games. And then he would have a move to switch out the Pokémon for a different one. But which Pokémon to include? In the end, the final decision that was made was to include Squirtle, Ivysaur, and Charizard. This allowed the trainer to reference so many aspects of the Pokémon series, such as starters, evolution, and even type matchups. Yes, type matchups. It's an incredibly small thing that not many people are aware of, but in Brawl (not any future Smash games), Squirtle, Ivysaur, and Charizard are classified as Water, Grass, and Fire respectively. And if they get hit by an attack of a type that they are weak to, they will take slightly more damage, but if they get hit by an attack of a type that they are resistant to, they will take slightly less damage. It was a dumb gameplay mechanic, so it never came back after this game. The reason it was dumb is because many characters have fire-based attacks, but other than Pokémon Trainer (and Kirby copying him), the only water-type attack in the game is Mario's F.L.U.D.D. attack, and there are no other grass-type attacks at all (again, excluding Pokémon Trainer and Kirby copying Pokémon Trainer). So it's really only noticeable if both sides are playing as Pokémon Trainer. So yeah, that's why they chose Squirtle, Ivysaur, and Charizard: they captured so many aspects of the Pokémon series. As for the trainer himself, they used Red, as he appeared in the Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen versions of the game. Why? Well, for one, those were pretty recent games at the time. Secondly, Red is the original trainer. Thirdly, the Generation 1 starters are the ones being used. Fourthly, he was the most popular. So, yeah, it all made sense. Hey wait a minute. Why Squirtle, Ivysaur, and Charizard? You could have used Bulbsaur, Venusaur, Charmander, Charmeleon, Wartortle, or Blastoise instead. As long as you chose a Pokémon of every evolution stage and every evolution line from this set of nine, it would still work. There's loads of combinations. Why this one specifically? Well, of these nine Pokémon, the most popular of them by a significant margin is Charizard. So Charizard gets in right away. That means that the other two are either Bulbasaur and Wartortle or are Squirtle and Ivysaur. Squirtle is more popular than Bulbasaur, so that was the deciding factor. And then Ivysaur is what's left to fill the last slot, via process of elimination.

Now, let's talk about the Donkey Kong franchise. It's in a weird spot at this point. There hasn't been a new game since Donkey Kong 64. I mean, okay, sure, there were spin-offs, but not a main game. And that's because the series was developed by RareWare, which Nintendo lost control over. But hey, there have been a lot of spin-offs. Look at Donkey Konga, that rhythm game trilogy on GameCube that required you to use those silly-looking Bongo Controllers. On top of that, the original Donkey Kong Country trilogy on SNES was recently remade on Game Boy Advance. And the Game Boy Advance also got that weird DK: King of Swing game. But... yeah... this is not really a big franchise anymore, so it could be argued that they didn't need another representative in Smash. The thing is... Donkey Kong is so big and important that it really doesn't matter if they haven't done anything recently. They needed more than just Donkey Kong as their sole Smash character. And Diddy Kong made the most sense. Not only is he the Player 2 character, but he's also the main character of Donkey Kong Country 2, which was the most popular of the Donkey Kong Country trilogy, and on top of that, he was also the star of the popular spin-off game, Diddy Kong Racing. The original plan was to have Dixie Kong, Diddy's partner character in Donkey Kong Country 2, be paired up with Diddy Kong, in a style similar to the Ice Climbers, along with a weird fusion mechanic that they couldn't quite get to work properly. And so, with it not working, they just eliminated Dixie Kong entirely and left Diddy Kong on his own, since he was the more important of the two.

The next character to discuss would be Lucario. He was the most popular new Pokémon at the time. But does Pokémon need yet another new character? Of course! It's Pokémon. It will never NOT be popular and relevant. Now, at this point in time, the Generation 4 games are still in development, but a few Generation 4 Pokémon appeared early on in the anime and in spin-off games (Munchlax was revealed to the public in 2004, Lucario, Weavile, Mime Jr., and Bonsly were revealed in 2005, Manaphy, Mantyke, Chatot, and Buizel were revealed in early 2006, and then proper previews leading up to the full generation started in mid-2006). Most of these are just baby Pokémon. But then there's Lucario. It was revealed pretty early on, being only the second Generation 4 Pokémon to ever be revealed, and it even got a starring role in the movie Pokémon: Lucario and The Mystery of Mew. And also... he's a Fighting-type, which is great, cause... you know... Smash is a fighting game. So Lucario was a clear choice for a Pokémon from Generation 4 to represent the newest games. However, Lucario was one of the last characters worked on in Brawl, and was actually very close to being cut from the game, but the programmers worked hard to get him done in time.

Every Smash game introduces a surprise character that no one expected (a tricky feat, given that virtually every character under the sun gets requested by the fandom). In Melee, it was Mr. Game & Watch. Was there anyone from Nintendo's history who was equally obscure? Well... actually yes. R.O.B. If you're unfamiliar with R.O.B., he was a toy robot that came out alongside the NES, and could connect to the NES to help you play compatible games. In theory. In practice, it didn't work very well. And there were only two games that were compatible. But he was an important part of Nintendo's history. After the video game crash of 1983, it was virtually impossible to market video games in North America and Europe, so Nintendo made R.O.B. in order to be able to market the NES as a toy rather than as a video game device, and then the wild success of the NES basically saved the video game industry as a whole. But... how would he work in Smash? He only has two games and neither one are well-regarded. But he's still an important part of Nintendo's history, so he had to be included. In fact, he did make cameo appearances in games like Kirby's Dream Land 3 and F-Zero GX. Funnily enough, at the time the Smash roster was being decided, the developers of Mario Kart DS actually decided independently to make R.O.B. a playable character in that game, bringing him back into relevance around the time that Brawl was scheduled to launch. However, this was all just a coincidence, and Sakurai has stated that he had no idea that Mario Kart DS was planning on doing that at the time that he decided to add R.O.B. to Smash.

And that's all the characters that were chosen to be in Smash during development. However, like in Melee, they had a bit of extra time to add some more characters at the end. Not as many as they did in Melee, but still a couple. The first one that they added was Wolf, from Star Fox. Wolf actually was such a last-minute addition that they barely had any time to finish him, and thought that he was going to get cut. And indeed, in Brawl, not only is his moveset heavily based on Fox and Falco, but if you look at the few moves that he has that aren't from that, they are clearly taken from other characters instead.

The other character that was added at this point was Toon Link. You see, all of the The Legend of Zelda characters were given redesigns in this game, taken from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the latest Zelda game at the time. For Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf, this was easy, as they actually appear in Twilight Princess. For Sheik, she doesn't, so they had to make a design that was original to Smash, showing off what Sheik would have looked like if she was in Twilight Princess, and based on a similar style to the other characters. That left Young Link, who also is not in Twilight Princess. He was just going to get cut, but then they had another idea. At the time, and carrying on until today, the design of Young Link has been very different than it was in Ocarina of Time and Melee. He uses the cartoony style that debuted in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and is known as Toon Link. The first thought that they had was to see if Toon Link could be an alternate costume for Young Link, but the size of his legs and his head were too different, so he had to be his own character, and has been seen as one ever since.

I should also note that Jigglypuff was also a last-minute inclusion. They were going to remove her from Smash, but due to having extra time, they were able to develop her and include her in the game after all (she is indeed a simple character, as all Smash 64 characters are, really). Indeed, note that Toon Link, Jigglypuff, and Wolf all have no storyline roles in The Subspace Emissary's story mode. However, not all Melee characters were so lucky. Indeed, there were five characters from Melee who did not survive the transition into Brawl: Young Link, Pichu, Dr. Mario, Mewtwo, and Roy.

However, these may have been cut during development. Both Roy and Mewtwo have victory fanfares programmed into the game, with Mewtwo also having a Wii Remote sound file (though the file is silent, suggesting that it hadn't been worked on yet). And that brings us into talking about the characters who didn't make it into Brawl. Note that we know more about Brawl's cut characters than any other Smash game, so this is going to be a long one.

They're not the only ones who have remnants of data left on the disc. Dr. Mario has a file named "dr_mario" on the disc, though it's just a name and nothing is actually there. But curiously, there's another file that gives the name "mariod". It was assumed that the "d" just meant "debug" and this was a dummy character slot used for debug purposes, but in future Smash games with Dr. Mario, the files refer to Dr. Mario as "mariod", so that may hint that this is actually meant to be Dr. Mario.

As for Young Link, he has no files in the game at all, which makes sense, given that he was replaced with Toon Link.

And the final character to get cut was Pichu. So what happened here? Well, Pichu has no data at all, hinting that he was a true cut. Except... that's not entirely true. Just like Young Link being replaced with Toon Link, Pichu also got replaced. It's just that his replacement got cut during development. So... the files on the disc reference a character named "Pra Mai", which is strange. A character with two names? And there is no Nintendo character with that name. So who could this be? Well, there are several theories, but I'm just gonna go ahead and debunk all but one of them. The reason why there are two names is because this is actually two characters. Given that, they shortened their names for the file to get it to fit. The characters' full names are Prasle and Mainun, or, as the English-speaking world knows them... Plusle and Minun. They're the electric mouse Pokémon of Generation 3. It made sense to update Pichu to Plusle and Minun, given that they were more recent and you want to keep up with the trends, especially since no Generation 3 Pokémon is on the Smash roster. But... why not use Pachirisu, the Generation 4 version? Well, because the body shape isn't quite right. Plusle and Minun are similar to Pichu and could easily replace him, just as Toon Link replaced Young Link. And this makes sense, given that Pichu is the only character from Melee to have been removed with seemingly no reason for his removal. Now, let's get to debunking the competing theories of this. So... some people argue that "Pra Mai" is an abbreviation for "Prayer Mai", which would translate to "Every Player". Because of this, some people believe that Pra Mai is the Random button, which is on the character select screen and just... chooses a random character for you. Still others argue that this could be referencing Miis, the player avatars of the Wii, which could be customized to be whoever you want, hence... "Every Player". But there's a problem with these interpretations. First off, as for Random, it never gets a character slot in the game's files in any other Smash game, past or future, and whenever it is referred to elsewhere in the code, it uses the name "Omake", which means "Leave It To Me", which is more fitting than "Every Player" for "choose a character at random". And also... the word "Player" is mentioned in several other places in the game's code, and it's never been shortened to "Pra", so why would that be the case here? That last one also applies to the argument against Miis. The other case against Miis is that... Miis did get into future Smash games, and those games don't call them "Pra Mai". Also... we know more about Miis in Brawl than this, which I will get to later. Needless to say, I think it's obvious that this is meant to be Plusle and Minun, and any other opinion is just people trying to be contrarian. Now... one other thing that people will bring up is... how would Plusle and Minun work in Smash? Would they be two characters at once, like Ice Climbers? Well, no. We can look at the game's files and see that despite being one character, Popo and Nana, the two Ice Climbers, are listed separately here. This was either something completely new, or it was just an alternate costume, with them swapping between each other.

The next character is Dixie Kong. As mentioned earlier, she was originally part of Diddy Kong's moveset, likely using the partner mechanic from Donkey Kong Country 2. But when they couldn't get this to work, they were separated into two separate characters. While Diddy survived this, Dixie, unfortunately, didn't get completed in time for development and so was cut.

After that, we have Toon Zelda. Yeah, after adding Toon Link, they tried to add Toon Zelda. It was a nice idea that is, in theory, easy to implement. You just have to take Toon Link's model and tweak it a bit to be Toon Zelda instead, and then just put Zelda's moveset over it. But the problem is that Zelda transforms into Sheik. So we'd need a Toon Sheik, which is a character that does not exist and would need to be made from scratch. And there is data for it, showing a Toon Zelda and a Toon Sheik. But likely because they didn't have time to create a new character, or possibly because they didn't want to have a Smash-original character as a playable character, Toon Zelda and Toon Sheik were cut. Some people speculate that Toon Sheik may have been Tetra, as that is Toon Zelda's alternate form in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. Oh yeah... um... spoilers for a twenty-year-old game by the way. In any case, I doubt that it's Tetra, as if it were, I think that it would just be called Tetra, rather than Toon Sheik. I mean, they already made a model for Sheik as though she was from Twilight Princess, so making another one as though she were from The Wind Waker wouldn't be too farfetched.

These seven characters: Dr. Mario, Mewtwo, Roy, Pra Mai, Dixie Kong, Toon Zelda, and Toon Sheik - are commonly known as "The Forbidden Seven", as they all have data on the game's disc. They're by far the most famous of the cut characters from Brawl, but they're not the only ones.

The next one is Krystal from Star Fox. She was a common request. And they did seriously consider her. But by the time they got around to adding more characters, they needed quick and easy ones, and Wolf was just a lot easier than Krystal, as he could re-use moves from Fox and Falco. Krystal would not work as a clone. That said, Sakurai has gone on record saying that in an ideal world, it would have been Krystal instead of Wolf. But it just wasn't meant to be.

Then, there's Pokémon Trainer. Sakurai considered that he could use either Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Squirtle; or use Venusaur, Charizard, and Blastoise; before finally settling on Squirtle, Ivysaur, and Charizard. First of all, it's no surprise that Ivysaur, Charmeleon, and Wartortle weren't even considered, as the middle stage Pokémon are often forgotten and ignored. However, Charizard was the most important one to include, so that meant Charmander was cut. And then Squirtle worked out better than Blastoise, so he got added, and that left Ivysaur as the final one, to complete the pattern. The neat thing about this is that it let the Pokémon have varying attributes and strength levels to make for a unique gameplay experience, while keeping them at the same stage of evolution likely would have been trickier to balance.

The next character that was considered was... well... various Fire Emblem characters. We don't know who they were, but Sakurai did mention that he considered a few Fire Emblem characters before settling on Ike, at Intelligent Systems's request.

Now then, let's talk about Nintendogs. This is a pretty new franchise that was really popular with its audience. Because of this, Sakurai did consider putting a Nintendog - specifically a Shiba Inu - into Smash. But the idea was discarded quickly when he realized that there wasn't really a good moveset option for it.

The Villager from Animal Crossing was also in a similar boat. Animal Crossing was popular and deserved a spot on the roster, but Sakurai discarded the Villager as an idea, due to the lack of moveset potential. Of course, this is ironic, as the Villager would join the Smash roster eventually - and in fact, is the first newcomer revealed for the next Smash game. And he has a perfectly good moveset there. But this was just because Sakurai changed his mind. At the time of Brawl, he saw Villager as an impossibility.

The next character that was considered but ultimately rejected was Miis. He discarded the idea due to a lack of moveset ideas, and he thought that Miis would be boring additions to the roster. And on top of that, he was worried that people would create specific Miis that would bully people online, and just didn't want to deal with that. And then there's the customization, which requires policing, and so he was just against the idea. This is why Miis can't possibly be "Pra Mai", since Sakurai was explicitly against the inclusion of Miis.

The next character up for consideration is Pac-Man, as a third guest character. Shigeru Miyamoto actually asked Sakurai if he thought Pac-Man would work in Smash, and Sakurai said no. After all, Pac-Man is just "a pizza missing a slice", and Sakurai just could not imagine a possible moveset. And on top of that, the request for Pac-Man came too late into Brawl's development to make it feasible anyways.

Next up, we have one of Metroid's most iconic villains, Ridley. Other than Sonic, Ridley was THE most-wanted character to join Smash at the time in the fandom. And Brawl was about pleasing as many fans as possible. So what went wrong? Well, Sakurai felt that Ridley was too big to be added to Smash.

The other big fan request, which is probably the single biggest request for Smash that has yet to achieve success, is Geno. And Sakurai even said that he wanted Geno in Brawl as a character. The fact that he has a gun for a hand is really unique. But ultimately, it didn't happen. We don't actually know why this didn't happen, but common speculation is that there were legal issues, since Geno is owned by Square-Enix, not Nintendo. Or maybe they just couldn't program it. Or it could have been something else. Regardless, Geno in Smash is a very common fan request that has so far gone unanswered, even to this day. Whatever held him back... it seems to STILL be holding him back. So it's most likely legal issues.

So that covers Brawl. Onwards, to the next Smash game. Or should I say... Smash games, with a plural. Because at this point, Nintendo released two games simultaneously, something that they have not done before nor since: Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. The titles are uninspired, and that was done intentionally, to make it clear to consumers which platform each was for. And while they do have many aspects in common, they are separate games. It's just that one of the things that they happen to have in common is the character roster. So because of that, we'll be looking at these as though they were one game, which I will simply be calling Super Smash Bros. 4.

We're going in the order that the characters were revealed, so we start with Villager, from Animal Crossing. By this time, Animal Crossing had grown to be one of Nintendo's biggest franchises. After an acceptable debut on GameCube, it had a massively successful game on the DS, another on the Wii, and there's one forthcoming on 3DS, which... spoiler alert... will ALSO be massively successful. It was by far the biggest franchise to have no representation in Brawl, so Villager just had to be added to Smash 4.

The next character reveal was one of the guest characters, which I'm gonna save for later. For now, we move on to the next Nintendo character reveal, and that will be Wii Fit Trainer. She's the coach in a fitness game, so her inclusion in a Smash game is... strange. Most people did not expect her. But Sakurai liked her. All of her moves are yoga poses, adapted for fighting. And he also loved how unexpected she was. But that said, she also was from the Wii Fit series of games, which were pretty high-selling, so people knew who she was. It worked.

Rosalina, from the Mario series, is an interesting pick. She's a minor character in the main Mario games, though she is prominently featured in the spin-offs. Her debut title was Super Mario Galaxy, which was a best-seller on the Wii. And on top of that, she had a unique mechanic that she could bring to Smash. She's a "puppet fighter", as she fights alongside Luma, using a move to be able to send Luma out or call it back. It's an interesting archetype that hadn't been explored in Smash until now. So that's what got her in.

Next up, Little Mac. He's a retro character, akin to Ice Climbers and Pit. Sakurai has said that he likes bringing back retro characters. But why Little Mac and not, say, Takamaru? Well, Takamaru is a Japan-only character, while Little Mac has global appeal, so there's that. Little Mac was also a popular request. He even appeared in Brawl as an assist character, showing that his fighting style would indeed work in Smash. On top of that, Punch-Out!!, the series that Little Mac is from, did recently get a new installment on Wii in 2009 (their first game since 1994). While it's true that the future of the series beyond that was unknown (and indeed, nothing came of it), it did mean that people would recognize Little Mac regardless of whether they were old fans or new fans.

And now let's talk about Pokémon. It gets a new character because... well because of course it does. Pokémon is so absolutely massive and huge that it WILL get a new character with every Smash game, just as a given. So let's just grab a Pokémon from the latest generation, which, at this point, is Generation 6. But which Pokémon should we choose? Well... there's not a good candidate, really. Unlike Lucario, who got a whole movie... none of the Gen 6 Pokémon have anything even close to that. And, at this point, Gen 6 is still in development. So Sakurai just left a generic slot open for "Gen 6 Pokémon". Once Game Freak finished designing all of the Gen 6 Pokémon, he asked to see all of their designs. And then he chose Greninja, because the design looked the most interesting. And it paid off, as coincidentally, Greninja was super-popular, and even gained a huge role in the anime.

Now... let's talk about Miis. Yeah, they were rejected in Brawl, but in Smash 4... there was a lot of customization in the game. And Miis represent customization perfectly, so they finally got a chance to be included.

Now, Palutena. So, the Kid Icarus series in Brawl was a retro game series that hadn't had a new game since 1986. But Pit's appearance in Brawl was enough to spark a ton of interest in this old series, to the point where they even made a brand new game, Kid Icarus Uprising on 3DS in 2012, reviving the series after a twenty-five year hiatus. And who directed Kid Icarus Uprising? Why, none other than Masahiro Sakurai himself. So of course he wanted to put another Kid Icarus character into the game. It's his passion project. But why Palutena over other Kid Icarus characters? Well, in Japanese, the name of the Kid Icarus series is called Hikari Shinwa: Parutena no Kagami, or "A Mythology of Light: The Mirror of Palutena". Her name is in the title. She was akin to Zelda, and so made perfect sense as the second character to add from this franchise.

After that, the next reveal was another guest character, which I will get back to later. So... moving on... we have Fire Emblem. With Fire Emblem Awakening being very popular and successful at this time, it makes sense to have a character from that game. So... why not take the game's main character, Chrom? Well, because there's not really much that he can do that Marth and Ike can't. He would not be unique at all, and would pretty much just be a clone, and we're not at the clone stage of development yet. So there needs to be another candidate. And Sakurai found one in the form of Robin. He was a tactical sword-wielding mage, giving him a ton of moveset options. And Robin, while not the MAIN main character is still at least ONE of the main characters of Fire Emblem Awakening. So it stuck, while Chrom was pushed out.

Looking at another RPG main character, we have Shulk. This seems to be a strange choice, as the game that he is from, Xenoblade Chronicles, wasn't a runaway success, and only JUST came out in America in 2012 (despite being available in Japan in 2010). On top of that, Shulk is yet another swordsman, and Smash had plenty of those. Though, at least aesthetically, he looks futuristic, rather than the medieval look that all the other sword-users have. However, Shulk was highly-requested among Japanese players, and Sakurai also liked Xenoblade Chronicles. On top of that, Shulk had an easy-to-visualize moveset. So due to popularity, he got in.

Next up is Bowser Jr., the secondary antagonist of the Mario series. This makes him quite well-known. At this point, New Super Mario Bros. U had just launched. In this game, Bowser Jr. and each of the seven Koopalings (Lemmy, Morton, Larry, Wendy, Iggy, Roy, and Ludwig) pilots a clown car. The clown car is iconic in the Mario series. And piloting a mech is unique enough that no other character in the Smash series has done it, so that creates a unique character. On top of that, this is the Mario series, so it's very long-lasting, and there's a lot of material to pull from. And as if that weren't enough, each of the Koopalings is roughly the same size and shape as Bowser Jr. himself, meaning that it's easily possible to overlay them atop one another. And in Smash 4, there is now an 8-player mode, necessitating that all characters get a total of 8 costumes to use. So having the Koopalings be Bowser Jr.'s alternate costumes was perfect, as this was the correct number. That gives you EIGHT characters on the Smash roster for the price of one. All while promoting the 8-player mode. That's insane. Everything just worked out so perfectly.

While we're on the topic, let's talk about Alph. He is the main character of Pikmin 3, the latest Pikmin game at the time. Because of recency, he was going to replace Olimar in this game. But now that alternate character costumes are on the table... he instead became a costume for Olimar (their body proportions are identical). That way, no one had to be replaced, and everyone could be happy.

And there were a few other characters who could easily work as alternate costumes, which Sakurai wanted to put in the game: Dr. Mario (for Mario), Lucina (for Marth), and Dark Pit (for Pit). Why these three? For Dark Pit, well, again, Sakurai was the one who brought back Kid Icarus and even created the Dark Pit character. But it was also super-easy, since, in-universe, Dark Pit is an evil clone of Pit, being a literal color-swap, making him super easy to implement. Regarding Lucina, well, Fire Emblem Awakening was really popular, and Lucina is the most popular character of that game, being prominently featured in its marketing. And in the storyline, she dons a mask and pretends to be Marth and even is mistaken for him, so this works, as they look similar enough and even have similar fighting styles. And as for Dr. Mario, well, he's literally just Mario. So that's an easy choice. Heck, Dr. Mario was even already previously a playable character on his own, in Melee, before being removed in Brawl. This would please the fans who missed him and wanted him back. But then Sakurai realized the problem: people may be upset that Dr. Mario, originally a unique character in Smash, had been essentially "demoted" to just being an alternate costume. And not to mention, his reason for being a unique character in Melee, needing to use pills instead of fireballs, was still perfectly valid. So Sakurai decided to upgrade Dr. Mario to be a full character, which he is in the final game. But then the dominoes started to fall, as Sakurai thought about the others. What if someone was a fan of Lucina, Dark Pit, Alph, or the Koopalings? Should they get their own slots on the roster as well? Would fans of these characters be saddened by the fact that their fighter of choice is just a costume for someone else? Well... if we go down that rabbit hole and make these all separate characters, we run into an immediate issue right away that is incredibly obvious: the Koopalings would take up way too many character slots. Sure, separating Mario and Dr. Mario means that you now have a clone. But Bowser Jr. would have SEVEN clones. That's... not good. One clone is acceptable, but anything more than that just looks bad. So that one was decided to remain as a costume. What about the other three? Indeed, they're good to go for upgrades. With Lucina, she's less experienced than Marth, and that actually is shown in gameplay, as her attributes are tweaked to make her easier to use. Marth's sword does more damage if the point it hits the opponent is the tip, necessitating learning how to plan your attacks, but Lucina does consistent damage for her whole sword, eliminating the need for players to learn how to do this. And just like that, Lucina and Marth were separated. Next was Dark Pit. He already felt kinda weird as a costume for Pit, and Sakurai always kinda hated it. While the two characters look the same, they don't act the same. Pit's highly energetic, which just looked strange on Dark Pit. On top of that, Pit's Final Smash has him use the Three Sacred Treasures, which, in the storyline, Dark Pit isn't supposed to have access to. So it definitely works better to separate them. Lastly, we have Alph. And yeah, he had reasons to be his own character too. But unfortunately, due to time constraints, it didn't end up happening. So unlike all the other clones, Alph remained as an alternate costume rather than a clone character. We'll talk more about this when we get to the "planned characters that didn't make it in" section for Smash 4.

Anyways, back to actually unique characters: the final one is Duck Hunt. They were the "surprise" character (like Mr. Game & Watch and R.O.B. before them), referencing the old NES Zapper light gun games. While they themselves only had one game to their name, they pull from the entire collection of light gun games, so they were able to come up with a moveset. But... if you want a character from the light gun games, why Duck Hunt? Why not... say... Mr. Stevenson from Gumshoe? Well... has anyone ever HEARD of Mr. Stevenson from Gumshoe? Yeah, I didn't think so. Duck Hunt was by far the most iconic of these characters, and so worked as a surprise character. Especially in America, Duck Hunt sold VERY well for the NES players. And Sakurai also mused that a lot of franchises that were previously forgotten about did later gain relevance through Smash, so there was a small but nonzero chance that maybe the same could happen for Duck Hunt (coming to you from 2023, I can say that so far... it has not).

Anyways, that's all the Nintendo characters in this game, so let's look at the two new guest characters for this game. The first was Mega Man. Mega Man was the most-requested guest character for Brawl, other than Sonic. And Mega Man is also pretty iconic for Nintendo, since most of his games came out on Nintendo hardware, especially in the NES and SNES eras. And on top of that, Capcom is very close with Nintendo, so using the character that is essentially the mascot of Capcom just made sense.

As for the other guest character, well, Bandai Namco was developing Smash 4, so it made sense to let them have one of their characters in the game as well. Several options were considered, but ultimately, Pac-Man was the most iconic, so he ended up taking the slot.

Those are all the characters that are available in the game upon your purchase of either version of Smash 4. But... these aren't all the characters... because Smash 4 was the first Smash game to add DLC characters. So let's explore how they got chosen.

So, to start off, when the jump from Melee to Brawl happened, five characters were lost. Four of the five were clones, so they weren't a big loss, because you could just play as the characters that they were copies of. Yeah, it wouldn't be exact, but it would be close. But the last cut was Mewtwo, and that one stung a bit. A lot of fans of Mewtwo wanted him back. He was by far the biggest request to bring back in Smash 4. And yet, only Dr. Mario came back, out of the characters that were cut from Melee to Brawl. So, to appease these fans, Mewtwo was the first DLC character added to Smash 4, bringing back the character.

But then there are the characters that were cut from Brawl to Smash 4. Snake was a guest character, so... for legal reasons, they couldn't include him. Ice Climbers and Pokémon Trainer had unique mechanics that would have worked fine on the Wii U, but not on the 3DS, and since the two games shared the same roster, they had to get cut. And then there was Wolf and Lucas, who were cut because they are kinda redundant with Fox/Falco and Ness, respectively. But still, fans wanted them back. Given that Wolf had two characters that were similar while Lucas only had one, Lucas was the winner, and so was the second character to add back in as Smash 4 DLC.

With all Brawl veterans exhausted, we next look at the other Melee veterans. Young Link already had a replacement in the form of Toon Link. And Pichu was a terribly bad character in Melee, who had next-to-no fans asking for his return. That left Roy, who was a clone. But with a few tweaks, Sakurai made an effort to try and de-clone him, and he made it into Smash 4 via DLC.

Well, that's it for veteran options. Anyone else who was to be added had to be a fully-new character. At this point, Sakurai made the decision to focus on guest characters. The base game would have a lot of content for Nintendo fans, but the DLC would be able to satisfy the people who wanted more from beyond Nintendo. Additionally, with DLC, you need to remember that each character is sold individually. You need to convince people to buy just that character - not the same as trying to convince them to buy the full game package. In that regard, having a main character like Ryu from Street Fighter or Cloud from Final Fantasy is GOING to sell more copies than a secondary or tertiary Nintendo character like King K. Rool from Donkey Kong or Bandana Waddle Dee from Kirby. And that's key to getting DLC to work: the character needs to be as well-known as possible. So... a character like Donbe from Shin Onigashima? Forget it. Nobody would know him outside of Japan. And this is in addition to considering moveset potential and such. Since these characters are being sold individually, the character needs to stand out and play uniquely. If you try to emulate the gameplay style of another character in the base game, no one would buy it, since you could just play the base game at that point.

And as a result, the next DLC character chosen was Ryu from Street Fighter. Ryu is basically THE mascot of fighting games in general, and has appeared in more crossovers than probably any other video game character. Sakurai was torn overall between using Ryu from Street Fighter or Heihachi from Tekken, but ultimately chose Ryu, due to him being more popular. And to make him unique, he was given a unique control scheme based on Street Fighter's command inputs. Some people believe that Ryu being owned by Capcom made negotiations easy, since they already previously negotiated with Capcom for Mega Man, but I think this is baseless, especially since the copyright for the two franchises are owned by entirely different divisions within Capcom.

The next character was Cloud from Final Fantasy. He's basically perfect. He's not only a big gaming icon, but he has a unique game mechanic in the form of his limit breaks. He's pretty much the first name that people think of when they think of RPGs, and he fits well in Smash. Sakurai did say that he would have preferred if he could have represented the Final Fantasy series as a whole, rather than just one game from it, but Cloud was by far the most popular and most well-known Final Fantasy character, so he was chosen despite only being in Final Fantasy VII. But there was one other potential problem. Final Fantasy VII was released on the Sony PlayStation, being the first Final Fantasy not to be on a Nintendo platform. Sure, guest characters in Smash was a thing, but they always at least had appeared on a Nintendo platform. Cloud didn't (though Final Fantasy VII would later go on to be remade on Nintendo Switch years later, this hasn't happened at this point in history). But Sakurai found a way around this problem, by pointing out that though Cloud's main adventure was on PlayStation, Cloud still made a cameo appearance in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories on Game Boy Advance and in Final Fantasy Explorers on Nintendo 3DS, satisfying the requirement. Yeah, these are just cameos and no sane person would count these, but it does still technically qualify.

The last two DLC characters are Corrin from Fire Emblem (the only DLC newcomer to not be a guest character) and Bayonetta from Bayonetta. And their inclusion was complicated and controversial. So, by this point, Nintendo made the "Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot", which allowed anyone in the world to request a character to be added to the game, and they would take these requests under advisement. Well, the winner of the ballot was Sora from Kingdom Hearts, who is jointly owned by Tetsuya Nomura, the Square-Enix company, and, most damning of all, the Walt Disney corporation. Getting the rights to use Sora would be a logistical nightmare. Square-Enix did provide Cloud, sure, but that alone was a nightmare, as evidenced by how very little from Final Fantasy Square-Enix even let Nintendo use in Smash. And on top of that... Disney? Yeah... if you're navigating ANY sort of legal battle ever, the number one rule is: do not mess with Disney. So this was off the table. The number one choice amongst characters that were actually realizable was Bayonetta. So that was why Bayonetta was added, right? Wrong. If you look at the game's code from various versions of the game, you can see that Bayonetta's data started getting referenced in version 1.0.6, which was two weeks before the ballot even began. So what's going on here? Well, that's the patch that added in all the preliminary DLC files, with one exception: Corrin, who was added later. Well, sort of. So, this was the patch that added Mewtwo. But then there were files for Lucas (who had already been announced), Roy, Ryu, and two dummy files which temporarily had data of Ike and Zero Suit Samus, suggesting characters who were modeled similarly to these. Indeed, Cloud and Bayonetta fit perfectly there. So in other words, Bayonetta was planned to be in the game whether she won the ballot or not. So was Nintendo just misdirecting people and making them think that the ballot mattered when it really didn't? No. We don't know for sure that this isn't what happened, but I doubt it. That's just not Nintendo's style. So what happened? Well, Sakurai said that they were originally going to do six DLC characters, but then had more time to work on it than they originally thought, and so they were actually able to do seven. And this is backed up in the data files, which start out with six DLC slots and then suddenly jump up to seven. And the timing of when this occurs tracks with the ballot closing and then having six months of development time. It fits with everything. I believe that the six original planned DLC characters were Mewtwo, Lucas, Roy, Ryu, Cloud, and Bayonetta. Then when a seventh slot became available, they were going to give it to the winner of the ballot. But then... Bayonetta ended up winning the ballot anyways, and she was already planned. This gave them a free slot, so they just threw Corrin in. But... did Bayonetta really win? Nintendo did not publish the official results. Due to the fact that Sora won (which we only know due to Sakurai mentioning it when Sora was later added to a future Smash game), and Nintendo didn't add Sora to the game, they feared that fans might assume that Disney was holding up the process and then fans would harass Disney about this, which Nintendo didn't want to be a part of, so they withheld the results from the public. So we don't actually know if Bayonetta was truly the winner amongst realizable characters, or if Nintendo is lying. After all, Ryu and Cloud are both bigger than Bayonetta, so why not one of them? Well, Ryu was already listed in the game's data, so he was leaked to already be coming, meaning that there'd be no reason to vote for him. As for Cloud, the fact that he wasn't on a Nintendo platform just made him seem like an impossibility, so that likely discouraged votes. If a Final Fantasy character was chosen, fans would have expected Terra or Cecil, so those would have probably split the vote with Cloud. But as for Bayonetta, it was a big game on the Wii U, along with its sequel. And although she is owned by Sega, Bayonetta 2 was exclusive to Wii U at the time (it has since also come out on Switch, but nonetheless, it is still exclusive to Nintendo platforms). She's basically being treated like a Nintendo character even when she isn't. So she got a bunch of votes, and so yes... I do believe Nintendo when they said that she won the ballot out of realizable characters.

Anyways, let's talk about Corrin next. Yeah, I went out of order there, as he actually released before Bayonetta. He's from Fire Emblem Fates, a game that had recently launched in Japan at the time of his inclusion. Yeah, the game he's from wasn't even out yet in most of the world. So everyone assumed that he was included purely as an advertisement for his upcoming game. And while I am sure that this did not hurt (after all, Smash has been good at advertising other series - I doubt that Fire Emblem, Xenoblade Chronicles, EarthBound, F-Zero, or Kid Icarus would be as well-known as they are if Smash had never existed), I don't think that that's the entirety of the story. To make matters worse, Smash 4 added Robin and Lucina to the game, along with bringing back Roy as DLC, in addition to having both Marth and Ike return from Brawl, so Corrin was the SIXTH Fire Emblem character added to this game. Which felt like a bit much, so a lot of people were upset over the decision to include Corrin. Because of this, Sakurai has gone to great lengths to justify Corrin's inclusion. Smash 4 had characters from 1980 (Mr. Game & Watch and Pac-Man) all the way to 2013 (Greninja). Why stop at 2013? Well, because Smash 4 itself was released in 2014, duh. But with DLC, Smash had an opportunity to bring a newer character that even came after Smash 4 itself was released. So Corrin was added as a 2015 character. And this wasn't the only thing that got added to Smash 4 that came after Smash 4. There were the Mii Costumes based on the Inklings from Splatoon, as well as the Super Mario Maker stage, for example. On top of that, Corrin is part-dragon, so he'd at least be pretty unique as a fighter.

Now we move on to the cut characters of Smash 4. And the most famous of them was Ice Climbers. They were in Melee and Brawl, and were fan favorites, with a unique gimmick. But they were unable to return for Smash 4. This is because the 3DS couldn't handle them. In development, they did consider just keeping them on the Wii U version of the game, but decided that they wanted both versions of the game to have the same roster, and since the Ice Climbers couldn't work on the 3DS version, they had to be removed from the Wii U version as well.

And they weren't the only ones to suffer for this. Having two characters coexist was not possible on the 3DS, so the transformation mechanic also had to be lost, meaning that Zelda and Sheik became separate characters, as did Samus and Zero Suit Samus. Even worse was Pokémon Trainer, who was three characters, not just two. In the end, Charizard just became a separate character on his own, while Squirtle and Ivysaur were removed from the game completely. Why did they get cut? Why not just make them their own characters too? Well, there were already five Pokémon characters in the game, three of which were from Gen 1. Adding two more likely would have just filled the roster with too many of them. That said, Mewtwo was added in DLC, so they must have changed their mind on this later.

On the topic of bringing back characters from Melee that were dropped from Brawl, while Dr. Mario was in the base game, and Mewtwo and Roy were added in via DLC, that still leaves Young Link and Pichu still absent from the roster. So why didn't they come back? Well, because Toon Link and Pikachu are already in the game and offer a similar enough gameplay experience. That one's easy.

As for characters from Brawl to get cut that didn't have 3DS technical limitations, we had Wolf and Lucas. Wolf was cut because you already had Fox and Falco offering a similar gameplay experience, and same with Lucas being similar to Ness. But Lucas did come back as DLC. He was chosen over Wolf to give variety, as Fox already had a semi-clone in the form of Falco, while Ness was by his lonesome.

The final cut character from Brawl was Snake, a guest character. For starters, at the time, there was a ton of legal drama between Konami and Hideo Kojima over who exactly owned the rights to the character, so that was a problem. Or was it? Yeah, that's commonly reported, but it's not actually true. In reality, Sakurai never even tried to talk to them to get Snake into the game. Why? Because Sakurai wanted new guest characters for this installment. Wait. If that's the case, why did Sonic get to stay? Well, he was easier to develop, had a simpler moveset, was more popular, and fit in with Smash's world a lot better. Snake had... issues with fitting in. For example, his grab is a choke-hold. And a lot of creators of characters who did make it into the Smash roster were uncomfortable seeing their creations being choke-holded. They had to get consent from everyone, and it was a difficult process.

That's it for the Smash veterans, so on to newcomers who were considered. We start with Takamaru. He was considered yet again, but ultimately discarded due to western countries being unfamiliar with him. Things did go a bit better for Takamaru this time around, as his game was referenced in Nintendo Land on Wii U, but ultimately, he was still rejected.

Next up was Ridley, who was yet again considered, but much like in Brawl, he was rejected for being too big. Sakurai said that if he shrunk down Ridley, he just wouldn't feel like Ridley anymore.

After that, we have Geno. Despite having a ton of fan requests, he was rejected for not just legal reasons, but also for being an old obscure character nowadays. However, the legal issues were eventually partially resolved, and so he was able to be added to the game as a Mii Costume.

Next up is Heihachi from Tekken. He was considered as the Namco guest character, but ultimately, Pac-Man was chosen instead. Why? Because Sakurai felt that implementing Tekken's movements into the game would be difficult. Which is ironic nowadays, since Kazuya would later make it into Smash, but at the time, this was the reasoning.

Next up is... Final Fantasy. While Cloud was added as a DLC character, others were considered. Terra and Bartz were also up for consideration. However, out of all Final Fantasy votes in the Smash Ballot, Cloud took between a quarter and a third of them, so he was ultimately chosen. Sakurai also mentioned Strago and Fusoya as considerations, but this was just a joke. Still, jokingly considered characters count as considered characters!

After that was... a weird one. Reggie Fils-Aime, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Satoru Iwata joining Smash as playable characters themselves. I'm not kidding, Sakurai considered putting Nintendo executives into the game. But ultimately, he decided that the audience who would enjoy this was incredibly niche.

Then we have Sora from Kingdom Hearts. Sora won the Smash Ballot, so he was considered. However, negotiating legal stuff with The Walt Disney Company was a goliath of a task that no one at Nintendo felt like doing. It would have taken a miracle to get Sora into the game, so Sora got rejected in favor of Bayonetta who was the winner amongst realizable characters. We don't actually know if there was anyone who placed between Sora and Bayonetta. However, Sakurai did mention that Banjo & Kazooie placed highly, so they could have been the #2 spot, as they also would have seemed difficult, due to being owned by Microsoft. The other character that seemed to score highly on the Smash Ballot, based on asking voters and not any hard data from Nintendo, was King K. Rool. Perhaps he also beat Bayonetta, but failed to meet some other criteria that Nintendo had, such as relevance or ability to easily market and sell the pack. Or maybe Bayonetta really did have more votes. At least he got a Mii Costume as a consolation prize.

The next character up for consideration is Alph, who did make it onto the roster, but only as an alternate costume for Olimar. But they did want to make him a unique character, albeit as a clone of Olimar. In fact, he's not alone in this, as Dr. Mario, Lucina, and Dark Pit were all costumes initially before being upgraded to full characters. So why didn't Alph get upgraded? Well, the main thing that was going to differentiate Alph from Olimar is that Alph would use Rock Pikmin. And there just wasn't enough time to get that to work. And even if there was, it wouldn't have been much to differentiate him from Olimar. He would definitely have still been the most similar to Olimar compared to any of the other costume-upgraded characters. And bear in mind that making him a full playable character would also mean creating trophies for him and making an amiibo. So, there's a lot that goes into this, and time just wasn't on Alph's side here.

Another character considered for the game was... well... someone from Pokémon. Yeah, that's it. Just "someone from Pokémon". At the time development began, Pokémon X and Y were still unfinished, so Sakurai just left a slot open for "someone from Pokémon" and then waited until all of the designs for the new Pokémon were finalized before settling on Greninja. But other Pokémon were considered. We don't know who else was considered exactly, but probably the other two final evolutions of the Gen 6 starters, Chesnaught and Delphox, at the very least.

The next character up for consideration was Chrom from Fire Emblem Awakening. He was rejected for being too similar to the other Fire Emblem characters already in the game, and Robin was added in his stead, being more unique. Chrom even had a full moveset completely developed, and it was still discarded, because it was essentially just a combination of Marth and Ike. Not helping matters was the fact that visually, Marth, Ike, and Chrom are all blue-haired swordsmen, so it didn't even look that distinct. Robin, by contrast, offered the sword and sorcery gimmick, which was unique.

The final character considered for Smash 4 were the Chorus Kids from Rhythm Heaven. It's unclear why they were cut, as Rhythm Heaven is one of the biggest franchises owned by Nintendo that doesn't yet have any representation on the Smash roster at all, even to this day. It could be that they didn't work on the 3DS, it could be that their moveset had some gimmick that they couldn't get to work, or perhaps they were just cut due to time constraints. We may never know. On the plus side, a Rhythm Heaven enemy at least appears as an enemy in the 3DS version's Smash Run mode. So Rhythm Heaven fans at least have that going for them.

And now... we move on to the latest Smash game at the time of writing, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, for Nintendo Switch. Let's start with the veterans from previous Smash games. Of course, in Brawl and Smash 4, certain characters from previous installments didn't make it in. So we can expect the same from Ultimate. The full list of characters from previous Smash games that didn't return for Ultimate is:

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Yeah... none of them. Absolutely every single character who has ever appeared in a previous Smash game is in Ultimate, even if they haven't been seen since Melee, and even if they were originally just DLC. That's a total of 65 characters off of this alone, and that's in addition to having 11 new characters on top of that, plus another 13 new characters as DLC. This was, of course, highly marketable, and the tag line used to promote Smash Ultimate was "EVERYONE IS HERE!". 89 characters from a total of 40 different game series makes this the biggest crossover in video gaming history, and possibly the biggest in all media history. (Amusingly, at the time that this was happening, Marvel's "Avengers: Infinity War" movie was being marketed as "the biggest crossover in history", and it doesn't hold a candle to Smash Ultimate, so their slogan was mocked as soon as we saw what this iteration of Smash had in it.) But why? Why bring back everyone? Well, because Sakurai realized that every character has its fans and those fans are disappointed when characters get cut. No matter how many new characters get added, people still focus on the few that were cut, and are disappointed. As a result, all characters from Smash 4 return, and they only needed a few more on top of that: Ice Climbers, Pichu, Young Link, Snake, Wolf, and Pokémon Trainer with Squirtle and Ivysaur. Looking at why they were cut, Ice Climbers and Pokémon Trainer were removed due to technical limitations on the 3DS, which is no longer an issue. Pichu, Young Link, and Wolf were cut due to being redundant, which is a minor issue in the scheme of pleasing everyone, and besides, they could have tweaks to make them stand out a bit more. And Snake just had a legal negotiation to take care of and that was that. So yeah... getting every character back was not as monumental of a task as it seemed. However, the downside of bringing everyone back was that there wasn't much room for new characters. Only 11 new characters were in the base game, which is such a small number. Even Smash 64 had 12 characters.

The first newcomer revealed was Inkling from Splatoon. This was an obvious choice. Splatoon is a new game from Nintendo that came out since Smash 4 and it was INCREDIBLY popular and they had an easy-to-visualize moveset. Just about perfect. In fact, Inklings were revealed to be in Smash Ultimate before the name of the game was revealed. The downside was that their ink mechanic would be weird. Sakurai had to figure out how it would interact with every other character, every stage, and what happens when someone or something gets inked. But, you know, because this is an A-tier franchise now, it was well worth it. But why Inklings? Splatoon gets representation, sure, but why Inklings specifically? Well, because they're the main protagonists, duh. Sure, they don't have a consistent look because they're highly customizable, but that wasn't a problem for Villager from Animal Crossing, so it would work here as well.

Next up was Ridley, who has been requested by the Smash community for a very very long time. He scored quite highly on the Smash ballot. But he's always been rejected due to his size. He's just too big to work as a playable character. That's an important part of what makes Ridley Ridley. And while they did have to scale him down to make him fit, he's still the biggest character on the Smash roster. The other thing about Ridley is that he is pure evil. Yeah, there's a lot of villains on the Smash roster, but unlike Bowser and King Dedede, Ridley has zero comical elements. And his animations definitely show him off in such a manner.

Next up is a guest character, Simon from Castlevania. The entire Castlevania series as a whole scored pretty highly in the Smash ballot, and was also popular amongst the developer team making the game, so they had quite a lot of reason to add a Castlevania character. But which character? Well, that's a problem. Each Castlevania game features different heroes. So players will be familiar with whoever starred in the specific Castlevania game that they grew up with. But the Belmonts were the most common recurring characters, so someone of the Belmont clan would be the choice. And since the original one was Simon, and Simon most iconically appeared on the NES, he was associated with Nintendo. So Simon ended up getting the edge over other Castlevania characters.

After that, we get another Smash ballot pick: King K. Rool. He was SO highly requested that he got a Mii Costume in Smash 4. But now he's a full character on the roster. And unlike most heavyweights, he focuses on projectiles and counterattacks, so he plays quite uniquely. Further, his counter is actually unique, as it will eventually break from overuse.

Then we have Isabelle from Animal Crossing. She's a secretary, but went on to become a Nintendo icon, being very prominently featured in several places when marketing the Nintendo brand as a whole, during the 3DS era. Heck, she even has multiple amiibo before even getting added to Smash. And on top of that, Animal Crossing has really taken off and become such a massive game series. So we got a hugely popular character from a hugely popular series. What's the problem here? Well... she's not really much of a fighter, instead just being cute more than anything. But a lot of the mechanics that they made for Villager could also work for Isabelle, such as the pocket mechanic, so they were able to re-use a lot of the work that they had already previously done, making it easier to fit Isabelle in Smash.

The final unique character added to Ultimate was not even planned per se. Like always, they left a slot open for whoever the hot new Pokémon from Generation 7 was going to be. Yeah, Pokémon is big enough that they just... get that slot for free now. Sakurai ended up choosing Incineroar, due to his wrestling persona. The wrestling fighting-style hadn't really been seen in Smash up until that point, and it let Incineroar be quite funny. He's a heel that loves to pose for the audience as he fights. It's great.

And... those were all the original characters added to Ultimate. From here, we move on to clones. The reason why they were chosen was, of course, just because it was easy to add them since they could easily copy other characters. In order to clearly mark them, they were now explicitly labeled in the game as "echo fighters", with Lucina and Dark Pit also retroactively gaining this label (echoing Marth and Pit, respectively). The first new echo fighter to be added was Ken from Street Fighter, echoing Ryu. Other than Luigi, Ken is perhaps the most iconic "Player 2" character in all of gaming. In the original Street Fighter, he was, in fact, copied directly from Ryu with no changes (he got new uniqueness from Street Fighter II onwards), just so players wouldn't have two Ryus fighting each other. In Smash, Ken is basically just Ryu but with fire-based attacks. His standard moves are also different to make him more like himself. Of all echo fighters, Ken is indisputably the one that is most different than the character he is echoing, which makes sense, given that he was the first, so they had time to flesh him out a bit more compared to the others. After that was Richter from Castlevania, echoing Simon. While Simon was chosen due to his legacy, Richter was the more popular Belmont, and was seen in Castlevania: Rondo of Blood and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, both of which were incredibly popular. But what really pushed him over the edge was Simon's moveset. They originally wanted to base him on the original NES games, but this was quite limiting. So when they ran out of things to pull from for those games, they decided to base a few of his moves on Richter. This meant that Simon already had some of Richter's moves anyways, so it made sense to just let Richter use those moves too. That means that more Castlevania fans get pleased as they get more representation from a wider era of games. After that, we have Daisy (echoing Peach) and Dark Samus (echoing Samus). They were both from incredibly popular series, and they both scored highly on the Smash ballot. It also allowed for more female characters. And, on top of that, Daisy is from the Mario franchise, so she's well-known even among more casual gamers. She also fits the "echo fighter" concept perfectly. She was originally introduced as a replacement for Peach, and then became the Luigi to Peach's Mario. Pretty much all that needed to be done was to change the animations a little to make her spunkier. As for Dark Samus, she was literally made as a clone of Samus in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. And the character was popular enough to appear in Smash 4 as an assist character, so this was easy enough to work into the game. The final character added was Chrom from Fire Emblem, echoing Roy. He previously appeared as part of Robin's Final Smash in Smash 4. But unlike Dark Samus, who had her assist removed when she became a fighter, Chrom remains a part of Robin's Final Smash in Ultimate, entirely due to the fact that Chrom was a last-minute addition. But... this actually helped Chrom make it into the game. They already had a model for him ready to go, from that Final Smash, so they may as well use it. They basically just copied Roy completely, except for his up special, which is taken from Ike, since Chrom is known to use Aether, just as Ike does. What also helped was... when Robin was added to Smash 4, he was chosen over Chrom due to his uniqueness, but a lot of Chrom fans were disappointed, especially since the reveal trailer for Robin featured Chrom quite heavily. The only reason Chrom didn't make it into Smash 4 was due to him being too similar to Marth and Ike. But now that echo fighters existed, that's no longer a concern.

And that's all the characters that were in the game at launch, but there is one more that we need to discuss here: Piranha Plant. He was going to be in the game at launch, but due to time constraints, they just didn't finish him in time, and so he was instead added in a post-launch update, as a purchase bonus for those who bought the game early (and then available as a separate DLC purchase after that if you wanted to pay money for him). Incidentally, the Rex Mii Costume was also originally planned to be in the base game, but was held back to be DLC, so that they could include it as a purchase bonus with the other DLC characters. Now, Piranha Plant is the strange and weird inclusion. Unlike other characters, who are either the main protagonists or main antagonists of their games, Piranha Plant is just a generic enemy from Mario. However, he was not meant a surprise character per se. At this point, Sakurai realized that while adding characters like Mr. Game & Watch, R.O.B., and Duck Hunt were great surprises at first, the surprise quickly faded and people just accepted them as a Smash character before too long, so he chose not to really go for surprise characters anymore. Instead, the reason why Piranha Plant was added was because Sakurai thought he would be interesting as a character. Also, being from the Mario series, he was more recognizable to the general public than about half the characters on the roster, despite being just a generic enemy.

And now we move on to the DLC characters that were actually intended to be DLC. So, Ultimate's DLC was divided into two parts: the Fighters Pass, and the Fighters Pass Volume 2. The former had five characters and the latter had six (with one of those six being a transforming character, so essentially getting two characters). These were sold as bundles, called "Challenger Packs", with each character also coming with a stage and a bunch of music. Of the eleven challenger packs, eight of them featured guest characters, showing that there was a preference for leaning in that direction. Oh, and, it should be obvious from the fact that every character from previous Smash installments returned in Ultimate, but... unlike Smash 4, every character here is new and not just bringing back an old favorite. But why lean towards guest characters? There's a lot of Nintendo characters that could have been added. Well, because the guest characters would have been the main characters of their franchises, and were popular enough to reach a wide audience. So they would sell more DLC that way. By contrast, with Nintendo characters, all of the big-name franchises already have their main characters in Smash, so we'd just see lesser-known characters if one of those franchises were chosen, unless it was a franchise with a rotating set of characters. And indeed, two of the three Nintendo characters added via DLC do come from franchises with rotating sets of characters. On top of that, negotiating with other companies helps grow Nintendo's relationships with those companies. Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa even said that the Smash series is a good advertising vehicle for the games it features, and that adding guest characters helps with their relationships, as it helps Nintendo work with other companies.

We begin with Joker, the protagonist from Persona 5. This was shocking, as the main Persona games have always been exclusive to Sony consoles, with them finally bucking that trend only very recently in 2022. Joker's only appearance on a Nintendo platform was in the spinoff game Persona Q2 on 3DS. But that said, Persona 5 was incredibly popular, and even Sakurai himself had a pretty loud love for that game. But more than that, Persona is owned by Atlus, a subsidiary of Sega. And it's true that Sega already had representation in Smash in the form of Sonic and Bayonetta, but nothing from Atlus specifically, so this was a great way to build relations. So it worked out.

After that was Hero from Dragon Quest. In western countries, Dragon Quest never reached widespread acclaim, but in Japan, Dragon Quest was absolutely huge. It got to the point where they had to stop releasing the games on school days because kids would skip school to play the games. It's THAT big (this was for Dragon Quest III in particular). In fact, Sakurai himself said that he wanted Hero as a DLC character above all other DLC characters. But which hero? Well, at the time, Dragon Quest XI was getting an enhanced port, making it the most relevant, so the hero of Dragon Quest XI was the default, with the hero of Dragon Quest III being an alternate costume. Then they added the hero from Dragon Quest VIII as another option, due to that being the most popular game in western countries. And then the hero from Dragon Quest IV, due to having a similar fighting style to the other three. Among western fans, Hero joining Smash was seen as no big deal, but it was an absolutely stellar reaction coming from eastern fans. They were going nuts over this, making it a good inclusion overall.

So to kinda smooth things over, they had to announce the next character later on the same day as Hero, so that this one would work out well for western fans. And that character is... Banjo & Kazooie. They were a gaming icon in the Nintendo 64 era, which were unceremoniously taken away from Nintendo when Microsoft bought RareWare. And therein lies the problem: they're owned by Microsoft, who is Nintendo's rival platform holder. So it was just an impossibility. If they were still owned by Nintendo, then I imagine they would have made it into Smash in Brawl or Smash 4, even if just as an assist character (though probably as a full character). But Microsoft was actually willing to negotiate. The fact that Banjo & Kazooie were most well-known for their Nintendo appearances probably helped a lot. But have you noticed the problem? Microsoft is an AMERICAN company. Nintendo is a JAPANESE company. It's logistically difficult for them to even get together to do negotiations in the first place. But somehow they managed it (Sakurai insists on doing it in-person). But it was worth it in this case, as Banjo & Kazooie placed #2 on the Smash Ballot, so people really wanted them.

The next character added was Terry from Fatal Fury. SNK had yet to have a character in Smash, and while they aren't exactly known for too many games that come out on consoles, they are a VERY big company in terms of arcade games, so giving them a slot on the roster is not unreasonable. And Terry is essentially the Ryu of SNK, so if anyone from SNK was to be added, it would be him. That's just a no-brainer. And it helps Nintendo further their relationships with SNK. In fact, King of Fighters, a fighting game by SNK, was the first crossover fighting game, and was what inspired Sakurai to make Smash in the first place. Heck, if you include crossover appearances, Terry probably makes more video game appearances than any other fighting game character, except for Ryu. Cause Terry is in just about every SNK title ever. It got to the point where he appeared in SNK Heroines, which was for girls only - because they genderbent him just to get him into this game. When a character goes THAT far, I think it's clear that they belong on the Smash roster. So Terry got to join.

Then we come to our first of three Nintendo characters in the DLC: Byleth from Fire Emblem: Three Houses. He was the most hated character added via the DLC by a considerable margin, with just about everyone disliking his inclusion. He's the EIGHTH Fire Emblem character added to Smash, and Fire Emblem just isn't as popular as the numbers on the Smash roster may make you believe. And on top of that, most of the Fire Emblem characters all play very similarly. It isn't like Mario or Pokémon who have a lot of characters, but are mostly unique. People disliked adding yet another Fire Emblem character to the game. And this isn't new - the same thing happened when Corrin was added via DLC to Smash 4. The outcry was pretty bad, and it seemed that Nintendo hadn't learned anything from that moment. Well... yeah. But on the other hand, Fire Emblem: Three Houses was the game that was coming out at around this time and it was being heavily promoted by Nintendo, so this was a good way to advertise. And while most Nintendo fans do hate the series due to how much marketing Nintendo puts behind it to the neglect of other franchises, those who are fans of the Fire Emblem series get a new character to play as. Fire Emblem rotates its cast of characters regularly, and so getting Byleth meant getting someone new. Plus, with Byleth able to rotate between using a sword, axe, lance, and bow... it at least made him play a little bit differently than characters like Marth and Roy. The sword is still the default, though it is at least a different type of sword, being a chain sword, almost like a whip (not like Corrin, who has a chainsaw sword).

After that, we have another Nintendo character: Min Min from ARMS. ARMS was the new big game for the Switch, though it never really made as big of an impact as Splatoon did for the Wii U. And on top of that, the characters are literally made for fighting. But still... given that it was a big game promoted for the new console by Nintendo and the characters were fighters, it made sense that one would join the Smash roster, most likely Spring Man. Everyone expected an ARMS character to be basically guaranteed to be in Ultimate. However, Sakurai confirmed that ARMS just came out too late for it to get a character in Smash, as the development of Smash was already well under way by that time. So all that could be included was an assist character and a couple of Mii Costumes. Not enough was known about ARMS in 2015, when the Smash roster was being decided, for an ARMS character to have any hope of joining. But now with DLC, that could be rectified, and fans of ARMS could get a character to play as. And also it helps Nintendo's marketing. Why Min Min though? Well, because Spring Man is already in the game as an assist character, so they wanted someone new. Sakurai looked over the ARMS characters, and narrowed it down to a couple of choices, before presenting them to Kosuke Yabuki, the producer of ARMS. And Min Min was his favorite. On top of that, Min Min also won an ARMS popularity tournament, so that helped. So Min Min got added.

The next character was Steve, along with his alternate costumes, of Alex, Zombie, and Enderman, all from Minecraft. Their reveal was so massive that it caused Twitter to go offline temporarily due to everyone wanting to talk about it and overloading their servers. Minecraft is an absolutely massive global sensation. The problem? It's owned by Microsoft. But as previously shown with Banjo-Kazooie, that's not a death sentence necessarily. Indeed, it was just a mild bump in the road. The far bigger problem was getting it to get programmed in the first place. In fact, negotiations with Microsoft for the use of Minecraft content in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate began all the way back in 2015. But they had to redesign every single stage in the game to allow Steve to mine, craft, place blocks, and so forth. It was a monumental task, given that there were over 100 stages in the game. And on top of that, remember how each DLC character comes with a stage? Well, Steve's stage had six different layouts, chosen randomly at the start of a match, to reflect Minecraft's random world generator. This effectively added six stages to the game, making it even more difficult. They actually built the stages in Minecraft first, and then were planning on importing them into Smash Ultimate, along with adding a feature that allows players to do the same, and design their own Smash stages in Minecraft. However, this idea didn't end up working out, due to technical limitations, so the idea was scrapped. Given the absolutely MASSIVE audience that Minecraft has, it absolutely needed to be in Smash Ultimate, and it needed to be done right. In fact, based on the time period of when negotiations happened, it is likely that Steve was going to be added to the base game, but they just couldn't finish programming him in time, and so he was added as DLC instead.

After that, we have Sephiroth, the main villain from Final Fantasy VII. It seems strange to add another Square-Enix character to the DLC after Hero was added previously. But Sephiroth was not only hugely popular, just like Cloud, but... he's one of the biggest villains in all of gaming. The only ones that hold a candle to him are villains like Bowser and Ganondorf, who are already on the Smash roster. Sephiroth is just so iconic. In Smash, it feels like you're playing as a boss when you play as Sephiroth. But there's one more reason to add another Final Fantasy character to Smash. At launch, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate had the bare minimum from Final Fantasy in the game. Cloud was back, as was his stage, Midgar, but he only had two songs, and the only spirits in the game were of Cloud himself, and even then, they were just his Smash Ultimate artworks. When Sephiroth was added to the game, not only did they get a lot more music, but also a new stage, a ton of spirits, updates to Cloud's spirits to feature Final Fantasy VII artwork, and even giving Cloud a new Final Smash when using his Advent Children costume. Sephiroth basically brought the Final Fantasy series up to standard. So... why? Well, they HAD to include Cloud in the base game, so that they could say "Everyone Is Here!". But Square-Enix wasn't playing nice. They weren't going to let Nintendo use a bunch of Final Fantasy content, without Nintendo giving them something more. So Nintendo chose to leave a DLC slot open for Sephiroth and give Square-Enix even MORE, in exchange for being allowed to have Cloud in the base game.

The next character... or I guess characters... are our final Nintendo characters - Pyra and Mythra - from Xenoblade Chronicles 2. During the time of Ultimate's base game, people expected to see a character from Xenoblade Chronicles 2 in the game - either Rex or Pyra. They were highly requested, but it ultimately didn't happen. And that's because Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was too early in development at the time. But now with DLC, that doesn't matter. So why Pyra and Mythra? Well, it was actually originally going to be Rex and Pyra. But getting them to work turned out to be a nightmare. They were going to be similar to Ice Climbers - where you control two characters at once. But the difference? Rex and Pyra would be doing different things. So they had to cut down to either Rex alone or Pyra alone. Pyra was more popular, and also Rex would have probably played too similarly to Shulk, so in the end, Pyra was chosen. And since Pyra and Mythra could be swapped at will in Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the same could happen in Smash, bringing back the transformation mechanic that Zelda and Sheik used to have in Melee and Brawl. Because of this, Mythra got to join the Smash roster as well.

Next up is Kazuya Mishima, from Tekken. He's the second Namco character, after Pac-Man. You may remember when Pac-Man was added that Sakurai did consider Tekken to be the next Namco franchise that he wanted to pull from. He specifically wanted Heihachi, Kazuya's father. But wait... why give Namco another franchise in the first place? Well, Ultimate was developed by Bandai Namco, so that's why. And yeah, Tekken is the obvious place to go here, especially given its popularity in the fighting game community, which is also where Smash Bros. sits. Maybe you could argue that Tales of Symphonia deserves a representative, but honestly? There's a lot of RPGs that got representation in Smash already. Less so for fighting games. Now, why Kazuya? Why not Heihachi or Jin? Well... Sakurai wanted someone with both the devil gene and the Mishima fighting style, as both are important to Tekken. Heihachi lacks the former and Jin lacks the latter. Kazuya was the only character that had both. Now yes, Jin did used to use the Mishima fighting style, but he later abandoned it, so that's no good. Especially when Kazuya is an option to have both. It just works out better.

Just one character left. So... Bayonetta may have won the Smash Ballot amongst realizable characters. But the true winner was Sora from Kingdom Hearts. He's owned by Tetsuya Nomura, who already gave his blessing for Cloud and Sephiroth. Sora is also owned by Square-Enix, but again, they also had stocks in Cloud and Sephiroth (as well as Hero). But the complicated legal matter for Sora is the third party that owns a share: Disney. Plus, some elements of Sora's design, such as his keyblade's chain, feature a Mickey Mouse emblem. So yeah... if Sora were to be allowed to join Smash, Nintendo would need to work around Disney. They would need Disney's permission. And... well... if there's one truism to navigating legal waters, it is this: don't mess with Disney. So yeah... Nintendo and Sakurai discarded the idea immediately for Smash 4, despite them wanting to put the ballot winner - whoever it may be - in Smash 4. And even in Ultimate, it was still seen as an impossible task, so the idea was similarly discarded. But then... Tokyo Game Show happened. There, Sakurai won an award for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. While there, he had a chance encounter with an executive from Disney. Sakurai knew that Sora was highly requested, so he did informally ask if Sora's inclusion were possible. He fully expected this to go nowhere, but surprisingly, the executive from Disney was actually quite interested. That got the ball rolling and eventually led to Nintendo making a formal request for the ability to use Sora. Originally, it was planned that both Fighters Pass and Fighters Pass Volume 2 would each have five characters (six if you include Mythra), but with negotiations with Disney going far better than anyone expected, an extra slot was added onto Fighters Pass Volume 2, and Sora became the final character added to the Super Smash Bros. series.

And now... just one bit left to talk about: the cut characters from Ultimate. I should note that this will be shorter than previous entries. We just don't know that many, which makes sense, since Ultimate is new.

First of all, let's talk about the characters from previous installments that aren't in Ultimate. Well, there aren't any. Except... there are. Sort of. So, the first is Charizard. Yes, he's back in Ultimate, but only as a part of Pokémon Trainer. In Smash 4, he was his own separate character. And you could argue that a standalone Charizard would be a different character. After all, he had a new special move to replace the switching out mechanic that Pokémon Trainer has, and a different Final Smash to show off what makes him unique. The other character that is arguably not in the game anymore is Link. In Brawl and Smash 4, he was based on his design from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, but in Ultimate, he got updated to be his newer self from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This update had some gameplay implications, as he now fires two arrows from his bow instead of one, he now uses remote bombs instead of regular bombs, he no longer uses the Gale Boomerang (instead opting for a standard boomerang), he lacks his Clawshot, he has a new Final Smash, and some of his standard attacks are different. Arguably, Twilight Princess Link should have been added to Smash Ultimate as an echo of Breath of the Wild Link. Everyone would have understood why. But instead, Twilight Princess Link was simply removed. Still, I think it's a bit unfair to complain about this, especially when not only Link, but also Young Link and Toon Link, exist in the game.

Now we move on to new characters that were actually considered for Ultimate, before being rejected for one reason or another. First up, from Castlevania, there were five characters in the running for the slot on the roster: Simon, Richter, Trevor, Leon, and Juste. In the end, Simon won out, with Richter also getting in as an echo.

Sticking to Castlevania, there was another character up for consideration even earlier, namely Alucard. He was the most popular of the Castlevania characters. Since Alucard appeared in the most Castlevania games (though not always as a playable character), he would have been more recognizable. But the story of Castlevania is ultimately the story of the Belmont clan, so having a Belmont just made more sense. As a result, Alucard was discarded pretty early on. Though, as a consolation prize, Alucard does appear in Smash Ultimate as an assist character.

The next character to look at is Decidueye from Pokémon. He is the most popular Generation 7 Pokémon, and its pre-evolution, Rowlet, appears prominently in the anime. However, Incineroar ended up winning out, because its wrestling fighting style made it more unique. And once Incineroar filled the Generation 7 Pokémon slot, it meant Decidueye had to miss out. Decidueye just wasn't that unique. Yeah, he's an archer, but so are all three versions of Link, both versions of Pit, and Kirby copying any of those five. And even ignoring fighting style... Decidueye is a bird, and we already have Falco. Incineroar, by contrast, is a cat. That's new and unique. Other Generation 7 Pokémon were also considered, though we don't know which ones. Primarina, the third of the fully-evolved starters, seems likely, but that's just speculation.

Next up is ARMS and Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Both of them were going to get representatives in the base game, but ultimately, due to time not working out, neither ended up happening. But they did get added in via DLC, so it all worked out in the end.

And for DLC, ARMS was going to get Ninjara, but Kosuke Yabuki did prefer Min Min, so Ninjara was eliminated. Similarly, for Xenoblade Chronicles 2, they wanted Rex and Pyra, but it just wasn't technically feasible. Adding Rex alone was also briefly considered, but he would have been too similar to Shulk. So in the end, Pyra took this slot, bringing along Mythra as a tag-along.

Now, let's talk about Dragon Quest. Adding Hero was always the dream, and many eastern fans, including Sakurai himself, really really wanted it and they were gunning for it. But the legal rights surrounding the character were complicated. So much so that Sakurai knew that he needed a backup in case Hero didn't work out. So he chose the Slime as a backup. But luckily, it ended up not being necessary, as Yuji Horii was on board with letting Dragon Quest heroes join the Smash roster.

Speaking of Hero, Sakurai originally considered having their eight costumes be eight different heroes. However, not all of them share the same build. The hero from Dragon Quest V and the hero from Dragon Quest VII were too small. So they chose to just use the heroes from Dragon Quest III and Dragon Quest XI. The one from Dragon Quest III was originally the default, though they later swapped them to promote the remaster of Dragon Quest XI coming out on Switch at around this time. Then they decided to up the count to four heroes. The one from Dragon Quest V was rejected as they primarily use a staff rather than a sword and shield. The one from Dragon Quest I was rejected because they lack a singular unified design. The heroes of Dragon Quest II and Dragon Quest VI were never even considered. And as for Dragon Quest X, the hero of that game features so many variations that it never had a chance. So we just got Dragon Quest VIII and Dragon Quest IV as our last two.

Next up is Tekken. I already talked about how Heihachi and Jin were rejected, but I'll bring it up again. Sakurai wanted a character with the devil gene and the Mishima fighting style. Heihachi lacks the devil gene and Jin lacks the Mishima fighting style. Jin does technically use the Mishima fighting style in older games, but he abandons it in Tekken 4 and hasn't used it since. On top of that, Jin also doesn't have full control over his devil gene, while Kazuya does. So ultimately, Kazuya won out.

Lastly, we have Kasumi from Persona 5 Royal. She was going to be an alternate costume for Joker. However, not only were the proportions not quite right, but also... Persona 5 Royal wasn't yet ready to reveal her existence at the time that Joker's DLC was scheduled to be released, so Atlus requested her removal.

So, we've now learned how every character in Smash got into the roster. And we also know what causes it to not work out. So, with that in mind, what are the primary factors for getting a character into Smash? Well, that would be iconicness/recognizability, popularity, moveset viability, ease of implementation, and relevance. These are the factors that came up over and over again. So we now know that when speculating about who the next Smash character will be, these are the traits to look for.

I hope you enjoyed this look at all the characters in Smash's history, and thanks for reading.