Character Aesthetic Proposal: Colors, Alt. Costumes, and Accessories

[LaniusShrike]

My proposal is pretty simple: I think that when chosing your character, you should be able to change these three aspects of your character independently of each other.

You'd have a different button for each thing to cycle through them, so (1) and (2) would cycle back and forth through color, (C) would cycle costumes, and (Z) would cycle through accessory options. What are accessory options? Purely aesthetic changes such as the pokemon hats or equipment changes.

For example, say you want to play a pikachu on the red team. Well, you're noticeably tinted red... but now you want a hat! So, you cycle to the party hat, which happens to be red since that's the color you've selected. Your friend also wants to be a red pikachu but doesn't want to get confused? Good thing you can switch to the goggles (also red of course). I've had a lot of my casual friends change characters because they're worried about getting confused mid game; fair, because I've had a lot of my casual friends get confused mid game and jump off cliffs.

A great thing about accessories and alternate costumes is that they are completely fantastic and exciting unlockables and I don't see them being a difficult thing to implement.

Important note: Weapon choices would be limited by weapons of the same size as to not create confusion about hitboxes.

Example of character accessories:
Link & Toon Link: Different sword + shield combinations from his games.
Yoshi: Standard saddle, no saddle, saddle+wings
Samus: Different gun arms.
Pikachu and Jigglypuff: All those different hats of theirs.
Ness: Backpack options, including without it.
Fire Emblem characters: Different sword options.
Ganondorf: Different sword options if he's given one.
Space Animals: Different blaster and headgear options (visors etc).

Man. I would love to have those options and would be thrilled to constantly unlock such things. What do y'all think? I think almost everyone agrees that alternate options would be great. What kind of accessories would characters like Mario or Game & Watch have?

 

[Neanderthal]

Interesting idea and certainly allowed for alot of aesthetic customisation.

Unfortunately they've never given us much customisation of this kind in the past (Wario as the only exception) so I'm not sure we will be so lucky.
It's odd that they'e refused such things since the main thing Sakurai always b****es about is the difficulty of balancing characters movesets. This would satisfy many of the fans who want more character flexibility without requiring any balancing.

Having said that I'd be satisfied enough with simpler swaps like Mario/Dr Mario, Ganondorf/Demise, MewTwo/Newtwo (if possible), Twilight Zelda/Skyward Zelda/ etc

 

[LaniusShrike]

Yeah, I mean, it would be a completely different team working on the character options than those working on balancing. I mean, seriously, they put so freakin' much time and work into trophies... this would be a much better investment of their time.

It is kind of true that not all of the characters necessarily have equipment to switch around.

Most of all, though, I have to say this: If there aren't alternate costumes I will be confused and legitimately furious. MELEE should have had them. So many of the characters have even had multiple costumes in their own games. It just seems like such an obvious thing to do, sigh.

While I would be totally satisfied with just having costumes, the accessory pieces would make things just so awesome. Earning trophies is just... y'know. A thing. It's not useful at all. But being able to swap out weapon designs? There have been so many really cool shields and swords in the Zelda games... Also, with things like this it'd take off some of the pressure of things like "hmm, now, which one should we give them?"

And really, I just want to see Pikachu's hats in every color. Especially if he had some other funny alternate costumes that I could throw dumb hats on... yessss.

 

[Platsy]

I like this idea. If nametags are not in Smash 4, it could be a neat way to remember someone you played against before if they have the same setup in online, plus they could make nice throwbacks to old games.

Mario could have a hatless option or a Dr. Mario outfit that could be hard to obtain.

G&W could have a squid hat.