Granted. Min Min has a well-designed moveset in Smash. In fact, it's too well designed. So well designed that nearly all of the development time went toward making her moveset perfect, absolutely flawless. Every single frame, every texture, every single value associated with Min Min is flawless, a true masterclass in design, never seen before in video game history, and likely never replicated.
It's only on the day before release that the issues sink in. No other character in the game has, as of yet, been designed. Masahiro Sakurai has gone missing under mysterious circumstances, and the members of HAL are overworked to the point of delirium. Even the help of Bandai-Namco hasn't been much use, given the sheer amount of development into Min Min's moveset has taken so many manhours that all Namco games for the next three years will have to be delayed. Concerns have been risen about the extent to how much the workers have been punished - some haven't seen their family in close to two years.
The rest of the game, rushed and unpolished, is released with Spring Man, Ninjara and Spring Man (from Mega Man 7) as echo fighters, but they're rushed. Every aspect of the game is a buggy, near-unplayable mess. The music is missing, characters will clip through the stage, and the game is critically panned, even ridiculed for being a horrible experience. Min Min's flawless, wonderful masterclass in design is never even noticed by the reviewers, and goes forgotten.
Super Smash Bros., as an IP, has taken a hit so huge that it'll never recover... and it never does. Nintendo outright refuses any form of crossover in the future - characters like Donkey Kong and Yoshi are removed from Mario Kart titles, Mario Hoops 3-on-3 is taken off the shelves in disgrace... and other companies take note. Square, horrified at the desecration of their beloved IPs, choose never to make a Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, or Kingdom Hearts game again. Capcom lay off every single one of their employees. Konami finally becomes an exclusive pachinko developer.
Of course... this affects other games too. Nintendo, horrified at the desecration of their IP, go nuclear on every upload of their content, every fan game, and completely nuke all non-official Nintendo content from the Internet. Games like Rivals of Aether, Nickelodeon All Stars Brawl and the upcoming MultiVersus cease development, realising that fighting games have forever been tarnished by this legacy. Companies like Arc System Works and SNK completely go out of business overnight.
10 years pass. Nintendo's draconian practices have finally forced it out of business. The video game market as a whole has been in freefall since the fateful day of Min Min's launch, and with Sony and Microsoft having pulled out years ago, the death of Nintendo marks an end to consoles. Indie developers have all but vanished - gaming as a whole has regressed to a state almost as niche as radio. Characters like Mario are still remembered, but not as icons... but as remnants of a lost era. Copyright law has, in the past decade, decended into chaos. Sites like YouTube have been all but obliterated by companies like Nintendo in their panic to save themselves... but all for nothing. The internet as a whole is a shell of its former self - social media sites crawling with bots and advertisements, a paradise for companies... but not for users. It's quiet, except for the hum of thousands of servers, holding sites without users. Crazes like NFTs, like Cryptocurrency... don't happen anymore. The internet is quieter than it was even in the early 1990s, only used by the occasional nerd to tinker with over the weekend.
Min Min is perfectly designed. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people laboured for years on every single frame, every pixel, every single remotely-related aspect of her design. She's flawless, perfect... beautiful. In 100 years time, people will look back and see Min Min as a masterclass of not only design, but of the limits of human ingenuity... but was it worth it?
15 years after Min Min's release, a young boy comes across a website on his father's computer. An old, aged forum full of characters and names he... doesn't recognise. The site is clearly disused - not a single user online. Discussion on this forum ended... years ago. It's almost as though it itself is the last remnant of something that was once great, something that people adored... yet now, the child was confused. He clicks away from the browser, not knowing that he would be the last user of the forum. By chance, it was on that day when the domain name expired, being sold on to an unnamed company working from Shanghai. History had just been made, and ended, all in one fell swoop... Oh, and the website's name?... the name, was SmashBoards.
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I wish I had a comfier chair to sit on
