Have you guys forgot how much longer a transformation takes from Melee to Brawl? If anything, transformations are out because of the HD models on the Wii U, not because of the 3DS.
the reason why it was much longer to transform in brawl than melee is because how struckture and big Brawl is!
in melee, Zelda and Shiek gets load at the same time when you select a stage. making it much faster to shift between those 2
however, in Brawl. only their "Modules" gets read while loaded. once one of their modules get called on when stage begins or a attack trigger that, it starting to call the models, animations and attacks.
to add forward on it, when brawl will transforms a character, it need to load both Module Memory, Instance Memory AND attack/PSA memory. if one of them are too big, you will not be able to transform and freeze the game before even the stage gets loaded!
as a experiented hacker at that area, I know what I am talking about, even made it possible to transform between jigglypuff and Ganondorf/Marth which never was possible before:
but the transformation removal in SSB4 is only good, since that aims more to the competive people! its really rare to see any transformations in competive play. so they took that off and added a new attack to give those who mains one transformation some new tricks in their sleaves so you dont have to worry to "accentental transforming" into a character you are not used with
and on that subject, Ice climbers falls under this too, since Nana is a half part Character, Half part Article (like Marios Fireball or Pikmins), Nana needs to be called too by Module Memory, Instance memory and Attack/Psa memory. its almost like calling the same file twice! therefore it has problems on the 3DS version
Agreed on it making next to no sense, though. Repetitive unlock requirements like "beat Classic 10 times with <character>" just isn't good design.
