So a little tangent: I've been reflecting on Kazuya's inclusion over the past few days and something occurred to me on a walk earlier, a trend that he continues mirrored by nearly every other character in FP2 thus far that goes hand in hand with the widely accepted perspective that the community "can't guess anything".
The funny thing is the community actually HAS guessed most of these characters, or at least their series, accurately at some point in time. But for some reason or another, discussion about them fell off and new opportunities presented themselves. Let's go over each character thus far and their respective stints as a community talking point.
- ARMS was one of the most commonly discussed series to get a character in base game, up until Sakurai notoriously stated that ARMS came a little bit too late to be fully realized. This didn't stop discussion about a certain other tardy Switch game for DLC, but ARMS fell off likely in part to Spring Man (the perceived posterboy / protagonist) being billed as an Assist Trophy.
- Everyone remembers the notorious Banjo vs Steve wars, grounded in the assumption that there can be only one Microsoft character. At the time it was (rightfully, apparently) down to these two in particular, but once Banjo was revealed the momentum for Steve just kind of died. Weirder still is how the Microsoft character to gain traction early in FP2 wasn't a rise to prominence from Steve... it was an emergence of Master Chief.
- Alright this one actually blindsided everyone, lmao. He doesn't qualify for this.
-Similarly to ARMS, talk of a Xenoblade 2 character was consistent during base game speculation and shot down by Sakurai's admitting that both games came too late. Unlike ARMS, discussion of Xenoblade 2 (particularly involving Rex) continued moderately onward through both FP1 and FP2. I'd say out of the characters here Pyra was the one who you could say the "community" actually got right.... kinda.
And then for Kazuya it was obviously Heihachi's costume that nipped Tekken in the bud, which absolutely made sense given what we thought we knew about this process. Why wouldn't they just hold off Tekken content for the Tekken pack? This was foolproof logic up until now, but retrospectively was just another silly and false assumption we made, no matter how logical or sound it was. Prior to this Tekken was arguably seen as THE frontrunner for Namco, a company that many assumed was likely to receive content on the basis of only having one character.
So what am I trying to say through all of this??
Let's just stop assuming things.
The collective community's problem is a short attention span. Your guess during FP1 is apparently no more or less valid than your guess during FP2, and what informs your perspective on what's unlikely now, be it a costume or a spirit event, may not matter at all. Is a single Mii costume enough to stop a series from getting content within the very same pass? Apparently not. Who's to say something like a spirit event holds any more weight than that? Or even a base game Assist Trophy (sacrilege I know)? I really can't judge you for taking those risks at this point - I may disagree with you on some, but my point stands. Go for it, honestly.
Let your ideas live a little longer against the odds, because it's a lot of those movements that came and went that were rewarded in the end. Thanks for reading the whole thing, lmao.
