EricTheGamerman
Smash Master
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2014
- Messages
- 3,197
Why do I still see this notion that Sakurai is trying to lead people off the sent by putting in actual content so they don't suspect the reveal later on? This hasn't panned out one time in the history of Smash. Not a single Spirit got upgraded in Fighter's Pass 1 despite people making several different claims that he could have totally added certain Spirits just to throw people off the scent (Geno, Shantae, etc.). People made the same argument with Rex's Mii costume that it was thrown to fans as an apology to "tide fans over" and/or "throw them off the scent" and that didn't pan out. None of the base game fighters showed up before their reveals, and this was true of all of Smash 4's base and DLC roster reveals too.
In fact absence has only ever been the thing to actually lead to something. No Chrom or Dark Samus alts? Chrom and Dark Samus are Echo fighters. No sign of Three Houses Spirits? Byleth is playable with tons of Three Houses content. And even that stuff is hit or miss at best, but never once in the history of Smash have we seen Sakurai actively develop content to throw fans off the scent. And if you think about it, it's crazy to even suggest that's the case because why would you pour resources into the development of something like that? The minority of Smash players going crazy about literally everything that is or isn't in the game being bamboozled isn't worth your development time no matter how easy the Spirits are to make (and I mean, they aren't terribly difficult to make, but they still take time and resources). Certainly not in regards to a Pokemon where people expect to be disappointed by it at some point (because the same fan base that mostly hates Fire Emblem characters tends to hate a good deal of the Pokemon roster as well).
And people did make that connection. For literally months people noted the absence of Three Houses Spirits. So the fact that Pokemon Sword/Shield got Spirits only a couple of months removed from Three Houses more than anything hurts the argument that Pokemon is going to get a playable character. Especially when they picked literally the most important Pokemon in Sword/Shield to represent as is (Corviknight is important from a lore perspective and is your transportation, the legendaries and starters speak for themselves, and Morpeko is this generation's Pikachu that is also one of Marnie's main Pokemon as your other rival).
It's not impossible for us to get a Pokemon rep, but it's literally the exact same argument people have used in regards to the "Spirits Disconfirm" for the base Fighter's Pass, there's not really a good reason to implement content like Spirits into the game if you're just going to have more substantial and important content from that same title later on as a full on DLC pack. Maybe Urshifu from the DLC since that was developed after the initial Sword/Shield, but I think Sword/Shield's base roster went down with Spirits like Astral Chain, Resident Evil, and Kunio all have. The timing for their Spirit events is just bad when combined with the timing of the next wave of DLC being picked (and then you can also naturally drive your logic to imply that they've included Resident Evil and Astral Chain Spirits to throw people off since people were expecting characters from those franchises as well). I just don't think it's a productive way to approach things as "Sakurai trying to throw us off the scent."
