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Official DLC Speculation Discussion Volume II

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ryuryunonoroi

ryuryunonoroi

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Rie Sonomura said:
Although, ryuryunonoroi ryuryunonoroi

couple days ago you mentioned something about tweets being deleted and something about “her”, that “she” will get her time to shine

not to be a bother but what were you referring to?
Click to expand...
BlondeLombax said:
I must admit, I'm pretty curious as well. If it's nothing to worry about, then I'll leave it alone.
Click to expand...
Rie Sonomura said:
I guess we’ll never know what those tweets that were supposedly deleted were or who “she” is huh :c
Click to expand...
Apologies. I was taking some extra time to see if I could trudge up those tweets, but it seems as though they really were memory-holed.

No matter, though. What I have should probably still be enough. Just putting some finishing touches on the effortpost.

I'm guessing less than a week should be safe. Very well...

IT'S TIME!
 
Rie Sonomura

Rie Sonomura

fly octo fly
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ryuryunonoroi said:
Apologies. I was taking some extra time to see if I could trudge up those tweets, but it seems as though they really were memory-holed.

No matter, though. What I have should probably still be enough. Just putting some finishing touches on the effortpost.

I'm guessing less than a week should be safe. Very well...

IT'S TIME!
Click to expand...
👀👀👀 I await with bated breath
 
CannonStreak

CannonStreak

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Running from the cops in Stardust Speedway.
ryuryunonoroi said:
Apologies. I was taking some extra time to see if I could trudge up those tweets, but it seems as though they really were memory-holed.

No matter, though. What I have should probably still be enough. Just putting some finishing touches on the effortpost.

I'm guessing less than a week should be safe. Very well...

IT'S TIME!
Click to expand...
Less than a week before a character reveal, you say?
 
WeirdChillFever

WeirdChillFever

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Jun 10, 2014
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SonicSmasher1 said:
Less than a week before a character reveal, you say?
Click to expand...
Possibly, but I assume they meant their write-up (about what we now know to be Herlock Sholmes thanks to my deductive reasoning) will be done in less than a week, which they hope to have finished before the next character is revealed and the prediction becomes a bit less foresightful
 
ryuryunonoroi

ryuryunonoroi

Smash Apprentice
Joined
Aug 3, 2021
Messages
119
Location
The Spark Inside Your Soul
All in: The final DLC character will indeed be Asuka Hanzo of the Senran Kagura series.

Something that many Smash speculators seem to easily forget is that roster slots aren’t always influenced primarily by what the east wants, what the west wants, what Nintendo wants, or even what Sakurai wants. Sometimes characters can get in because their creator may specifically want them in Smash themselves. Hideo Kojima is the most well known example of this, considering he was the one who opened the doors to third-party characters in the first place when he asked Snake to be put in Melee. Does Senran Kagura creator, Kenichiro Takaki, fall under this category?

Series creator Kenichiro Takaki is actually a pretty big fighting game buff himself, being involved with Granblue Fantasy Versus, for instance, but also a big fan of series like SNK, Mortal Kombat, and most importantly, Smash.

An example from his twitter where he mentions how his daughter is able to recognize Kirby from the SSBU commercials:

Another example where he’s commenting on a certain annoying battle in the World of Light:

He did have either a retweet or an original post of a Smash styled tagline image stating “Asuka tears into the fray!” at one point, though it isn’t turning up for me as I don’t have a Twitter account, so I’m not sure if he may have pruned it. There was another by either him or series lead artist Yaegasi Nan around the tail end of 2020 stating that there was “big plans for the series 10th anniversary” (9/22, FYI) which I’m also unable to pinpoint. Both of these would signal a strong desire for Asuka to be in smash.

But even without those two tweets, there’s still quite a bit of circumstantial evidence in Asuka’s favor.

Consider the fact that of all the third parties that have IPs represented in Smash but don’t have an actual fighter, Marvelous is tied with Ubisoft for the most at three (Daemon X Machina/Sakuna/No More Heroes VS. Assassin’s Creed/Rayman/Rabbids). However, unlike Ubisoft, ALL of Marvelous’ content is post game.

Then there’s the timing of the Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin spirits, at over nine months posts release, with the only other delay for any specific game’s spirit event having the excuse of it’s release preceding SSBU’s release. Sure, this could be belated because of the game being an unexpected runaway success. But if Asuka is the final fighter, then perhaps the delay may have also been because Sakurai was considering making a spirit board for Marvelous properties in a similar vein as the SNK board, but ultimately chose not to.

And if third parties aren’t allowed to double dip, then Asuka as CP11 would explain why Travis Touchdown wasn’t a fighter but still got not just a Mii costume and a spirit event, but even a congratulatory twitter post by Sakurai himself on the release of No More Heroes 3.


And Asuka doesn't clash with most of the more concrete theories, such as M theory, crowd cheer theory (all the games have used the original Japanese voice acting exclusively), and figure theory. The only strong fan theory it doesn’t mesh well with is second chance theory, but even then everyone assumed that FP1 would be entirely third-parties until the very last reveal of the pass, Byleth, bucked that trend. The same could happen with FP2, (though one could still argue that the Smash bump is another kind of second chance).

And I know the line that comes next from the crowd: “But Smash is a game for good boys and girls!”

And my retort is: “Are you sure about that?”

First of all, Sakurai was actually being extremely tongue-in-cheek when he said that now notorious line and there was a context of mocking condescension behind it. The truth is that Sakurai has been very critical of ratings boards, CERO, in particular, growing more strict over time, even going so far as to call their priorities “juvenile”.

sourcegaming.info

CERO and Palutena’s Censorship

Source Gaming investigates the alterations made to everyone’s favorite goddess– Palutena.
sourcegaming.info sourcegaming.info

People have made jokes about horny/thirst theory but there is truth to it. It’s just more that this is a manifestation of Sakurai’s feud with CERO and he’s flexing his clout to push back against what he (correctly) views as excessive constraints on creative freedom. As well as probing with things like Pythra’s jiggle physics to see what he can and can’t get away with in a probable situation where Asuka is CP11.

Second, the factors that held back Mai as a spirit actually aren’t even an issue for either Asuka or a Senran Kagura spirit board. Asuka is actually among the most conservatively dressed of the cast of the franchise, with the only likely alteration be giving her spats under her skirt. Spats turn me on anyways I’d say that’s an improvement. You obviously wouldn’t have the full costume breaks that the series is known for, but I could see Sakurai still doing something cheeky like showing some tearing around the outer edges of her outfit at high damage and/or having a costume break on Blast KO similar to how Megaman has his own KO effect.
(Fun fact: Characters showing battle damage is something that Sakurai has wanted to implement since Brawl, but has had few opportunities to put it in practice.)
One may jump and point to the spirit board as a potential point of trouble, but this actually isn’t as much of a problem as you may assume. The series’ lead artist, Yaegasi Nan, has been willing to create new custom art in situations where the current assets may not be appropriate, such as to meet the ESRB’s stricter packaging criteria, and he could do the same for a spirit board as well. Even some of the more provocatively dressed characters wouldn’t necessarily be an issue. Katsuragi, for instance, could simply be positioned looking at the player facing backward. Several already existing spirits like Krystal already do this.

And I know what your next response is: “But Nintendo will worry about their image if they give Senran Kagura representation in Smash!”

And, once again, my retort is: “Are you sure about that?”

Nintendo is Reportedly Eager to See More Mature Games on the Switch
(This URL refuses to unfurl as a headline for some bizarre reason and I cannot get it to format properly.)

Most people don’t realize this, though our resident Nahobino nutter is eager to remind, but Nintendo has over the course of the last decade or so been slowly pivoting themselves away from being mainly focused on a family friendly image and instead towards the image of “we have something for everyone”. It makes perfect sense, as the OG gamers are getting older and Nintendo is facing down increasing competition from PC and mobile games alongside their rivals in the console wars. You wouldn’t expect a supposedly family friendly company to advertise Splatoon and Bayonetta on the Wii U in Playboy magazine with sexy women but that actually happened.

Meanwhile Sony has been going in quite literally the opposite direction and becoming much more of a stickler in terms of the kinds of content they’re allowing on their console, hoping to instead try to appeal to the lowest common denominator by heavily pushing specific titles. But this strategy isn’t exactly paying off. Nintendo is still very much in the dominant position, as the PS5 just doesn’t have the kind of must play games to make it worth the investment. Combine that with the Switch’s three year head start, the current chip shortages, and Sony having burned too many bridges, the PS5 is setting itself up to be the worst failure in Sony’s history. All they can really effectively do right now is resort to anti-competitive practices through their contracts and investments to try and choke out avenues of competition. Not long ago you had back to back sales charts in Japan where ALL of the top 30 best sellers were Switch titles, not a single Sony platform in sight. That has not happened in decades. That is a huge deal.

The time around which Sony going full pearl-clutcher unfolded has a lot of overlap with the time period where the negotiations for the first and second fighter passes for SSBU were taking place. Takaki had expressed a lot of interest in the Senran Kagura series jumping ship to the Switch before he ultimately jumped ship from Marvelous himself. But I would imagine that even outside the company he still has enough pull to push for certain things with IPs he’s worked on, one such thing being crossovers.

The only realistic worry Nintendo or Sakurai would have in the scenario of Asuka being CP11 is that certain people may find out about it early enough beforehand, and end up causing a disruption in the development process midway. Remember I brought up in previous posts how I suspected that Nintendo may have crafted the Rapper Mario “leak” themselves to help protect the true identity of CP11 if the choice was absolutely crazy in the eyes of many Smash speculators? Well, Asuka Hanzo is one such character that would fit such a scenario. And I also brought up that said “leak” made a glaring omission of a certain third-party who had already gotten more content. The company in question? Again, Marvelous. At this specific point in time I would consider it most likely to little too late for any of the screechers to have any meaningful impact in such a scenario, which is why I’ve kept my awareness of these obscure facts pocketed for almost three years the way I have.

Nintendo has never been in a stronger position in gaming than it is today. Much stronger than the Wii era. Even stronger than the NES/SNES era. As a whole, they haven’t forgotten how they nearly got screwed out of their own IPs by Sony. For decades, Sony had been eating their lunch and then some in the console wars, but not anymore. Nintendo is now decidedly the top dog once again and they’re not going to concede that position again so easily. The Switch’s library is absolutely massive with so many different genres in so many different styles for so many different tastes that is isn’t really that much ground left to cover. Aside from one area which has somewhat lagged behind, that is, due to a certain competitor’s anti-competitive behavior. What better way to roll out the crimson carpet for these sorts of games than to invite to Smash the mascot of the very series that showed the industry that there was a market for such games in the first place?

Put together Marvelous having such heavy presence in SSBU’s post-release content, Takaki being the fighting game aficionado that he is, Nintendo’s interest in reaching out to more mature audiences, Sakurai’s ongoing soft power war with CERO, and Sony awakening its inner 4kids around the same time the Fighters Pass talks were happening. What you have are all the ingredients for a perfect storm that would allow for a situation where the final DLC character may very well be Asuka Hanzo from the Senran Kagura series. Asuka is much more likely than most people understand, so much so that I earnestly consider her to be one the most likely candidates for CP11. Maybe even the single most likely candidate for CP11.

PS: One last bit of trivia, apparently Sakurai has a fetish for “the chest”.

(Edited 9/15 to clean up the formatting a bit. Just to be sure.)
 
Last edited:
Rie Sonomura

Rie Sonomura

fly octo fly
Joined
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ryuryunonoroi said:
All in: The final DLC character will indeed be Asuka Hanzo of the Senran Kagura series.

Something that many Smash speculators seem to easily forget is that roster slots aren’t always influenced primarily by what the east wants, what the west wants, what Nintendo wants, or even what Sakurai wants. Sometimes characters can get in because their creator may specifically want them in Smash themselves. Hideo Kojima is the most well known example of this, considering he was the one who opened the doors to third-party characters in the first place when he asked Snake to be put in Melee. Does Senran Kagura creator, Kenichiro Takaki, fall under this category?

Series creator Kenichiro Takaki is actually a pretty big fighting game buff himself, being involved with Granblue Fantasy Versus, for instance, but also a big fan of series like SNK, Mortal Kombat, and most importantly, Smash.

An example from his twitter where he mentions how his daughter is able to recognize Kirby from the SSBU commercials:

Another example where he’s commenting on a certain annoying battle in the World of Light:

He did have either a retweet or an original post of a Smash styled tagline image stating “Asuka tears into the fray!” at one point, though it isn’t turning up for me as I don’t have a Twitter account, so I’m not sure if he may have pruned it. There was another by either him or series lead artist Yaegasi Nan around the tail end of 2020 stating that there was “big plans for the series 10th anniversary” (9/22, FYI) which I’m also unable to pinpoint. Both of these would signal a strong desire for Asuka to be in smash.

But even without those two tweets still, there’s quite a bit of circumstantial evidence in Asuka’s favor.

Consider the fact that of all the third parties that have IPs represented in Smash but don’t have an actual fighter, Marvelous is tied with Ubisoft for the most at three (Daemon X Machina/Sakuna/No More Heroes VS. Assassin’s Creed/Rayman/Rabbids). However, unlike Ubisoft, ALL of Marvelous’ content is post game.

Then there’s the timing of the Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin spirits, at over nine months posts release, with the only other delay for any specific game’s spirit event having the excuse of it’s release preceding SSBU’s release. Sure, this could be belated because of the game being an unexpected runaway success. But if Asuka is the final fighter, then perhaps the delay may have also been because Sakurai was considering making a spirit board for Marvelous properties in a similar vein as the SNK board, but ultimately chose not to.

And if third parties aren’t allowed to double dip, then Asuka as CP11 would explain why Travis Touchdown wasn’t a fighter but still got not just a Mii costume and a spirit event, but even a congratulatory twitter post by Sakurai himself on the release of No More Heroes 3.


And Asuka doesn't clash with most of the more concrete theories, such as M theory, crowd cheer theory [ https://youtube.com/watch?v=-fbBSYaIbGA ] (all the games have used the original Japanese voice acting exclusively), and figure theory. The only strong fan theory it doesn’t mesh well with is second chance theory, but even then everyone assumed that FP1 would be entirely third-parties until the very last reveal of the pass, Byleth, bucked that trend. The same could happen with FP2, (though one could still argue that the Smash bump is another kind of second chance).

And I know the line that comes next from the crowd: “But Smash is a game for good boys and girls!”

And my retort is: “Are you sure about that?”

First of all, Sakurai was actually being extremely tongue-in-cheek when he said that now notorious line and there was a context of mocking condescension behind it. The truth is that Sakurai has been very critical of ratings boards, CERO, in particular, growing more strict over time, even going so far as to call their priorities “juvenile”.

https://sourcegaming.info/2015/09/18/cero-and-palutenas-censorship/

People have made jokes about horny/thrist theory but there is truth to it. It’s just more that this is a manifestation of Sakurai’s feud with CERO and he’s flexing his clout to push back against what he (correctly) views as excessive constrains on creative freedom. As well as probing with things like Pythra’s jiggle physics to see what he can and can’t get away with in a probable situation where Asuka is CP11.

Second, the factors that held back Mai as a spirit actually aren’t even an issue for either Asuka or a Senran Kagura spirit board. Asuka is actually among the most conservatively dressed of the cast of the franchise, with the only likely alteration be giving her spats under her skirt. Spats turn me on anyways I’d say that’s an improvement. You obviously wouldn’t have the full costume breaks that the series is known for, but I could see Sakurai still doing something cheeky like showing some tearing around the outer edges of her outfit at high damage and/or having a costume break on Blast KO similar to how Megaman has his own KO effect.
(Fun fact: Characters showing battle damage is something that Sakurai has wanted to implement since Brawl, but has had few opportunities to put it in practice.)
One may jump and point to the spirit board as a potential point of trouble, but this actually isn’t as much of a problem as you may assume. The series’ lead artist, Yaegasi Nan, has been willing to create new custom art in situations where the current assets may not be appropriate, such as to meet the ESRB’s stricter packaging criteria, and he could do the same for a spirit board as well. Even some of the more provocatively dressed characters wouldn’t necessarily be an issue. Katsuragi, for instance, could simply be positioned looking at the player facing backward. Several already existing spirits like Krystal already do this.

And I know what your next response is: “But Nintendo will worry about their image if they give Senran Kagura representation in Smash!”

And, once again, my retort is: “Are you sure about that?”

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2..._eager_to_see_more_mature_games_on_the_switch

Most people don’t realize this, though our resident Nahobino nutter is eager to remind, but Nintendo has over the course of the last decade or so been slowly pivoting themselves away from being mainly focused on a family friendly image and instead towards the image of “we have something for everyone”. It makes perfect sense, as the OG is getting older and are facing down increasing competition from PC and mobile games alongside their rivals in the console wars. You wouldn’t expect a supposedly family friendly company to advertise Splatoon and Bayonetta on the Wii U in Playboy magazine with sexy women but that actually happened.

Meanwhile Sony has been going in quite literally the opposite direction and becoming much more of a stickler in terms of the kinds of content they’re allowing on their console, hoping to instead try to appeal to the lowest common denominator by heavily pushing specific titles. But this strategy isn’t exactly paying off. Nintendo is still very much in the dominant position, as the PS5 just doesn’t have the kind of must play games to make it worth the investment. Combine that with the Switch’s three year head start, the current chip shortages, and Sony having burned too many bridges, the PS5 is setting itself up to be the worst failure in Sony’s history. All they can really effectively do right now is resort to anti-competitive practices through their contracts and investments to try and choke out avenues of competition. Not long ago you had back to back sales charts in Japan where ALL of the top 30 best sellers were Switch titles, not a single Sony platform in sight. That has not happened in decades. That is a huge deal.

The time around which Sony going full pearl-clutcher unfolded has a lot of overlap with the time period where the negotiations for the first and second fighter passes for SSBU were taking place. Takaki had expressed a lot of interest in the Senran Kagura series jumping ship to the Switch before he ultimately jumped ship from Marvelous himself. But I would imagine that even outside the company he still has enough pull to push for certain things with IPs he’s worked on, one such thing being crossovers.

The only realistic worry Nintendo or Sakurai would have in the scenario of Asuka being CP11 is that certain people may find out about it early enough beforehand, and end up causing a disruption in the development process midway. Remember I brought up in previous posts how I suspected that Nintendo may have crafted the Rapper Mario “leak” themselves to help protect the true identity of CP11 if the choice was absolutely crazy in the eyes of many Smash speculators? Well, Asuka Hanzo is one such character that would fit such a scenario. And I also brought up that said “leak” made a glaring omission of a certain third-party who had already gotten more content. The company in question? Again, Marvelous. At this specific point in time I would consider it most likely to little too late for any of the screechers to have any meaningful impact in such a scenario, which is why I’ve kept my awareness of these obscure facts pocketed for almost three years the way I have.

Nintendo has never been in a stronger position in gaming than it is today. Much stronger than the Wii era. Even stronger than the NES/SNES era. As a whole, they haven’t forgotten how they nearly got screwed out of their own IPs by Sony. For decades, Sony had been eating their lunch and then some in the console wars, but not anymore. Nintendo is now decidedly the top dog once again and they’re not going to concede that position again so easily. The Switch’s library is absolutely massive with so many different genres in so many different styles for so many different tastes that is isn’t really that much ground left to cover. Aside from one area which has somewhat lagged behind, that is, due to a certain competitor’s anti-competitive behavior. What better way to roll out the crimson carpet for these sorts of games than to invite to Smash the mascot of the very series that showed the industry that there was a market for such games in the first place?

Put together Marvelous having such heavy presence in SSBU’s post-release content, Takaki being the fighting game aficionado that he is, Nintendo’s interest in reaching out to more mature audiences, Sakurai’s ongoing soft power war with CERO, and Sony awakening its inner 4kids around the same time the Fighters Pass talks were happening. What you have are all the ingredients for a perfect storm that would allow for a situation where the final DLC character may very well be Asuka Hanzo from the Senran Kagura series. Asuka is much more likely than most people understand, so much so that I earnestly consider her to be one the most likely candidates for CP11. Maybe even the single most likely candidate for CP11.

PS: One last bit of trivia, apparently Sakurai has a fetish for “the chest”.
Click to expand...
BlondeLombax BlondeLombax is gonna be happy about this
 
WeirdChillFever

WeirdChillFever

Smash Hero
Joined
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Messages
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Somewhere Out There
I wouldn’t mind Asuka if only if I didn’t have a personal and vitriolic vendetta with a surprising amount of the series’ fans.

EDIT: that said, mad respect for the post and of course the guts to stick with a character like that, and I think you may be onto something between all the circumstantial theories
 
Last edited:
SNEKeater

SNEKeater

Smash Master
Joined
Sep 4, 2019
Messages
3,375
Willbuysmash4mw said:
This might be becoming a meme but really if we go all of September without anything Smash related and SMT V sees the massive marketing push I am predicting in September and October, then by October Nahobino will start to be widely speculated beyond just me and Papagenos.

….And if we get past October without the final fighter being revealed then this will no longer be a meme and speculation will indeed be over.
Click to expand...
OK, if we get to October without knowing the identity of the last Smash character I'll give you the reason and agree that Nahobino is indeed CP11.

But that's not going to happen because we'll get a Direct this month as usual, and we'll get the last character revealed there. It could still be Nahobino for all what we know, because I don't think it's impossible for them to reveal him 2 months before his game comes out (though it's still quite unlikely if you ask me), but we're getting CP11's identity this month for sure.
 
Arctiq

Arctiq

Smash Journeyman
Joined
Apr 23, 2015
Messages
314
ryuryunonoroi said:
All in: The final DLC character will indeed be Asuka Hanzo of the Senran Kagura series.

Something that many Smash speculators seem to easily forget is that roster slots aren’t always influenced primarily by what the east wants, what the west wants, what Nintendo wants, or even what Sakurai wants. Sometimes characters can get in because their creator may specifically want them in Smash themselves. Hideo Kojima is the most well known example of this, considering he was the one who opened the doors to third-party characters in the first place when he asked Snake to be put in Melee. Does Senran Kagura creator, Kenichiro Takaki, fall under this category?

Series creator Kenichiro Takaki is actually a pretty big fighting game buff himself, being involved with Granblue Fantasy Versus, for instance, but also a big fan of series like SNK, Mortal Kombat, and most importantly, Smash.

An example from his twitter where he mentions how his daughter is able to recognize Kirby from the SSBU commercials:

Another example where he’s commenting on a certain annoying battle in the World of Light:

He did have either a retweet or an original post of a Smash styled tagline image stating “Asuka tears into the fray!” at one point, though it isn’t turning up for me as I don’t have a Twitter account, so I’m not sure if he may have pruned it. There was another by either him or series lead artist Yaegasi Nan around the tail end of 2020 stating that there was “big plans for the series 10th anniversary” (9/22, FYI) which I’m also unable to pinpoint. Both of these would signal a strong desire for Asuka to be in smash.

But even without those two tweets still, there’s quite a bit of circumstantial evidence in Asuka’s favor.

Consider the fact that of all the third parties that have IPs represented in Smash but don’t have an actual fighter, Marvelous is tied with Ubisoft for the most at three (Daemon X Machina/Sakuna/No More Heroes VS. Assassin’s Creed/Rayman/Rabbids). However, unlike Ubisoft, ALL of Marvelous’ content is post game.

Then there’s the timing of the Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin spirits, at over nine months posts release, with the only other delay for any specific game’s spirit event having the excuse of it’s release preceding SSBU’s release. Sure, this could be belated because of the game being an unexpected runaway success. But if Asuka is the final fighter, then perhaps the delay may have also been because Sakurai was considering making a spirit board for Marvelous properties in a similar vein as the SNK board, but ultimately chose not to.

And if third parties aren’t allowed to double dip, then Asuka as CP11 would explain why Travis Touchdown wasn’t a fighter but still got not just a Mii costume and a spirit event, but even a congratulatory twitter post by Sakurai himself on the release of No More Heroes 3.


And Asuka doesn't clash with most of the more concrete theories, such as M theory, crowd cheer theory [ https://youtube.com/watch?v=-fbBSYaIbGA ] (all the games have used the original Japanese voice acting exclusively), and figure theory. The only strong fan theory it doesn’t mesh well with is second chance theory, but even then everyone assumed that FP1 would be entirely third-parties until the very last reveal of the pass, Byleth, bucked that trend. The same could happen with FP2, (though one could still argue that the Smash bump is another kind of second chance).

And I know the line that comes next from the crowd: “But Smash is a game for good boys and girls!”

And my retort is: “Are you sure about that?”

First of all, Sakurai was actually being extremely tongue-in-cheek when he said that now notorious line and there was a context of mocking condescension behind it. The truth is that Sakurai has been very critical of ratings boards, CERO, in particular, growing more strict over time, even going so far as to call their priorities “juvenile”.

https://sourcegaming.info/2015/09/18/cero-and-palutenas-censorship/

People have made jokes about horny/thrist theory but there is truth to it. It’s just more that this is a manifestation of Sakurai’s feud with CERO and he’s flexing his clout to push back against what he (correctly) views as excessive constrains on creative freedom. As well as probing with things like Pythra’s jiggle physics to see what he can and can’t get away with in a probable situation where Asuka is CP11.

Second, the factors that held back Mai as a spirit actually aren’t even an issue for either Asuka or a Senran Kagura spirit board. Asuka is actually among the most conservatively dressed of the cast of the franchise, with the only likely alteration be giving her spats under her skirt. Spats turn me on anyways I’d say that’s an improvement. You obviously wouldn’t have the full costume breaks that the series is known for, but I could see Sakurai still doing something cheeky like showing some tearing around the outer edges of her outfit at high damage and/or having a costume break on Blast KO similar to how Megaman has his own KO effect.
(Fun fact: Characters showing battle damage is something that Sakurai has wanted to implement since Brawl, but has had few opportunities to put it in practice.)
One may jump and point to the spirit board as a potential point of trouble, but this actually isn’t as much of a problem as you may assume. The series’ lead artist, Yaegasi Nan, has been willing to create new custom art in situations where the current assets may not be appropriate, such as to meet the ESRB’s stricter packaging criteria, and he could do the same for a spirit board as well. Even some of the more provocatively dressed characters wouldn’t necessarily be an issue. Katsuragi, for instance, could simply be positioned looking at the player facing backward. Several already existing spirits like Krystal already do this.

And I know what your next response is: “But Nintendo will worry about their image if they give Senran Kagura representation in Smash!”

And, once again, my retort is: “Are you sure about that?”

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2..._eager_to_see_more_mature_games_on_the_switch

Most people don’t realize this, though our resident Nahobino nutter is eager to remind, but Nintendo has over the course of the last decade or so been slowly pivoting themselves away from being mainly focused on a family friendly image and instead towards the image of “we have something for everyone”. It makes perfect sense, as the OG is getting older and are facing down increasing competition from PC and mobile games alongside their rivals in the console wars. You wouldn’t expect a supposedly family friendly company to advertise Splatoon and Bayonetta on the Wii U in Playboy magazine with sexy women but that actually happened.

Meanwhile Sony has been going in quite literally the opposite direction and becoming much more of a stickler in terms of the kinds of content they’re allowing on their console, hoping to instead try to appeal to the lowest common denominator by heavily pushing specific titles. But this strategy isn’t exactly paying off. Nintendo is still very much in the dominant position, as the PS5 just doesn’t have the kind of must play games to make it worth the investment. Combine that with the Switch’s three year head start, the current chip shortages, and Sony having burned too many bridges, the PS5 is setting itself up to be the worst failure in Sony’s history. All they can really effectively do right now is resort to anti-competitive practices through their contracts and investments to try and choke out avenues of competition. Not long ago you had back to back sales charts in Japan where ALL of the top 30 best sellers were Switch titles, not a single Sony platform in sight. That has not happened in decades. That is a huge deal.

The time around which Sony going full pearl-clutcher unfolded has a lot of overlap with the time period where the negotiations for the first and second fighter passes for SSBU were taking place. Takaki had expressed a lot of interest in the Senran Kagura series jumping ship to the Switch before he ultimately jumped ship from Marvelous himself. But I would imagine that even outside the company he still has enough pull to push for certain things with IPs he’s worked on, one such thing being crossovers.

The only realistic worry Nintendo or Sakurai would have in the scenario of Asuka being CP11 is that certain people may find out about it early enough beforehand, and end up causing a disruption in the development process midway. Remember I brought up in previous posts how I suspected that Nintendo may have crafted the Rapper Mario “leak” themselves to help protect the true identity of CP11 if the choice was absolutely crazy in the eyes of many Smash speculators? Well, Asuka Hanzo is one such character that would fit such a scenario. And I also brought up that said “leak” made a glaring omission of a certain third-party who had already gotten more content. The company in question? Again, Marvelous. At this specific point in time I would consider it most likely to little too late for any of the screechers to have any meaningful impact in such a scenario, which is why I’ve kept my awareness of these obscure facts pocketed for almost three years the way I have.

Nintendo has never been in a stronger position in gaming than it is today. Much stronger than the Wii era. Even stronger than the NES/SNES era. As a whole, they haven’t forgotten how they nearly got screwed out of their own IPs by Sony. For decades, Sony had been eating their lunch and then some in the console wars, but not anymore. Nintendo is now decidedly the top dog once again and they’re not going to concede that position again so easily. The Switch’s library is absolutely massive with so many different genres in so many different styles for so many different tastes that is isn’t really that much ground left to cover. Aside from one area which has somewhat lagged behind, that is, due to a certain competitor’s anti-competitive behavior. What better way to roll out the crimson carpet for these sorts of games than to invite to Smash the mascot of the very series that showed the industry that there was a market for such games in the first place?

Put together Marvelous having such heavy presence in SSBU’s post-release content, Takaki being the fighting game aficionado that he is, Nintendo’s interest in reaching out to more mature audiences, Sakurai’s ongoing soft power war with CERO, and Sony awakening its inner 4kids around the same time the Fighters Pass talks were happening. What you have are all the ingredients for a perfect storm that would allow for a situation where the final DLC character may very well be Asuka Hanzo from the Senran Kagura series. Asuka is much more likely than most people understand, so much so that I earnestly consider her to be one the most likely candidates for CP11. Maybe even the single most likely candidate for CP11.

PS: One last bit of trivia, apparently Sakurai has a fetish for “the chest”.
Click to expand...
Senran Kagura? That's very bold of you to suggest something like that. I love the series and its characters but them being in smash is a bit... out there.
 
GilTheGreat19

GilTheGreat19

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SMAASH! Puppy said:
Eh, Blackmage Kuja was the Wizard 101 guy. I've played it before, and it's a good game, but I've had a bad experience with KingsIsle so I can't really recommend it or Pirate 101 (which is sad because it's also really good).
Click to expand...
Ah I see

Also,
If we do really walk out of October without knowing who it is still, I'm banking on either a standalone November direct or a TGA reveal.
 
BlondeLombax

BlondeLombax

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Rie Sonomura said:
BlondeLombax BlondeLombax is gonna be happy about this
Click to expand...

My birthday is just barely a month away, and already it feels like it's come early.
WeirdChillFever said:
I wouldn’t mind Asuka if only if I didn’t have a personal and vitriolic vendetta with a surprising amount of the series’ fans.
Click to expand...
As possibly the most vocal fanboy of the series on this thread, I apologize for you having confrontations with them.
 
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SMAASH! Puppy

SMAASH! Puppy

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I don't really get the logic for Senren Kagura's likelihood, but I don't really have a problem with the post other than:

ryuryunonoroi said:
...our resident Nahobino nutter...
Click to expand...
Please don't call them a nutter. We may disagree with them, but it's still uncalled for.

ryuryunonoroi said:
PS: One last bit of trivia, apparently Sakurai has a fetish for “the chest”.
Click to expand...
No. Stop it. They're not going to add a character for this reason.

chocolatejr9 said:
Has this been shared here? It'd make a fine topic, I'd say:
Click to expand...
Yes.
 
C

chocolatejr9

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SMAASH! Puppy said:
I don't really get the logic for Senren Kagura's likelihood, but I don't really have a problem with the post other than:


Please don't call them a nutter. We may disagree with them, but it's still uncalled for.


No. Stop it. They're not going to add a character for this reason.


Yes.
Click to expand...
I think Pyra begs to differ...

Also, how am I always late on these things?
 
Theguy123

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chocolatejr9 said:
Has this been shared here? It'd make a fine topic, I'd say:

There was a problem fetching the tweet
Click to expand...
I can think off a few scenarios

what if Sephiroth’s sword wasn’t as stro as he thought it was when trying to cut Galeem in half

what if hero slipped when jumping off his horse to save link from the evil spirited characters

what if Isabelles invite got lost in the mailbox

what if the shadow assist trophy was actually the shadow android

what if shulk warned the characters about Galeem’s attack

what if shulk foresaw the future dlc characters

what if kazuya lost to Kirby.

can’t think of many more. Wonder if anyone else can add to this
 
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SMAASH! Puppy

SMAASH! Puppy

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Professor Pumpkaboo said:
Sanran kagura is absoult fetish trash so id rather not see it anyone after it was one of the last characters in Cross tag before it ****ing died
Click to expand...
It's a shame that it died before getting a "deluxe" edition. I would have considered getting it then.

Well, I considered getting it at launch, but RWBY was my reason for getting it and half of its characters were DLC.

WeirdChillFever said:
Would explain the Mimicutie enemy from Uprising
Click to expand...
13 minutes later, I finally got the joke. I R very smart.
 
Eldrake

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chocolatejr9 said:
Has this been shared here? It'd make a fine topic, I'd say:

There was a problem fetching the tweet
Click to expand...
Just some I could think of.

What if: Marth and Roy didn't end up on the international version of Melee as originally intended?
What if: Ganondorf's debut game wasn't Melee?
What if: The Rare buyout was delayed, and Banjo & Kazooie made it to Melee?
What if: Mega Man made it to Brawl?
What if: Nintendo skipped on the 3DS version of Sm4sh?
What if: The Banjo & Kazooie pack in FP1 was a different western character?
What if: James Bond was in Melee?
What if: Smash Bros never had third party content?
What if: Third party content was the focus of Smash Bros ever since 64?
 
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Shroob

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Imma keep it real with ya, chief.

I like anime
I don't 'hate' fanservice

But it's kinda a "All in moderation" thing. You gonna show a bra once or twice, big deal, not gonna bother me.


Senran Kagura just ****ing bores me to tears since it being pervy is its sole identity and not much else.



We ain't getting it in Smash, I'll die on the hill that says we ain't.
 
SMAASH! Puppy

SMAASH! Puppy

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I guess if I were to contribute to the "what if"s, I'd ask "what if Super Smash Bros. started on the NES?".

Shroob said:
Imma keep it real with ya, chief.

I like anime
I don't 'hate' fanservice

But it's kinda a "All in moderation" thing. You gonna show a bra once or twice, big deal, not gonna bother me.


Senran Kagura just ****ing bores me to tears since it being pervy is its sole identity and not much else.



We ain't getting it in Smash, I'll die on the hill that says we ain't.
Click to expand...
Hmm...I've heard it's actually one of the few series like it that actually tries to get you to care about the characters.
 
PeridotGX

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ryuryunonoroi said:
Meanwhile Sony has been going in quite literally the opposite direction and becoming much more of a stickler in terms of the kinds of content they’re allowing on their console, hoping to instead try to appeal to the lowest common denominator by heavily pushing specific titles. But this strategy isn’t exactly paying off. Nintendo is still very much in the dominant position, as the PS5 just doesn’t have the kind of must play games to make it worth the investment. Combine that with the Switch’s three year head start, the current chip shortages, and Sony having burned too many bridges, the PS5 is setting itself up to be the worst failure in Sony’s history. All they can really effectively do right now is resort to anti-competitive practices through their contracts and investments to try and choke out avenues of competition. Not long ago you had back to back sales charts in Japan where ALL of the top 30 best sellers were Switch titles, not a single Sony platform in sight. That has not happened in decades. That is a huge deal.
Click to expand...
www.digitaltrends.com

The PS5 Is Officially the Fastest-Selling PlayStation | Digital Trends

Sony revealed sales data for the PS5 and some of its in-house software, including Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and Returnal.
www.digitaltrends.com www.digitaltrends.com

are you sure about that
 
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