You misunderstand me.
First off, it is currently the 24th of September, and Ultimate comes out on the 7th of December. Apparently this gives us 73 days until it's release. I'm telling you that I disagree that there isn't enough time to announce more than three characters, but in fact the opposite: we can easily have two more Smash Directs before the release of Ultimate, and we definitely will have at least one. Anyone who thinks there isn't enough time to announce that many characters really seems to forget how far all of this is planned in advance and how the closer something the public wants comes to being released the more the producer of said public desire tends to shove information in their faces.
In regards to the box theory, I never said I thought you believed it, but rather that everyone was on that hype train and was thinking we still had like 4-6 more characters to be announced in the very least until that stupid image popped up and people went to town with a Doomsday theory. It's not happening, and we are likely to get more than the three characters everyone is clamoring about.
Depends on how you’re looking at characters. Looking at Echoes + Unique... maybe. Just unique? Absolutely not. After the Smash Direct I predicted we’d get 6 more overall, 3 more Echo fighters and 3 more unique with one unique announced in the inevitable September Direct. So 5 more by my logic, and that was the general tune to which most people sung. People were excited, but not THAT optimistic either given Sakurai’s comments.
The reason so many of us were hurt by Isabelle stems from her being unique and taking the limited spots for a unique newcomer. Unique newcomers get a ton of fanfare and prime positioning, so it’s generally only during Directs that we see them and they usually bookend those. And honestly, there isn’t much reason to expect two Directs unless Sakurai spends a painstaking amount of time on details of certain things.
Spirits and Online will likely have big sections, but there is no reason to think they couldn’t fit in a 40 minute Smash Direct like what we’ve gotten in the past. Smaller things like All-Star returning (if it does), Event Matches, Stadium Events, and so on don’t generally require that much time and can be announced in a modes section. At best we get unique characters to bookend that Direct, and another Echo fighter section that announces the rest. And I think we get such a Direct at the beginning of November.
The idea of having two more Smash Directs is a beautiful idea for fans, and especially for those holding out hope for more characters, but I just don’t think there is any reason to believe they’d give a Direct on Smash and immediately do another one a couple of weeks later. And what we have left doesn’t necessitate two different Directs. I’m sorry, but that sounds just way too optimistic and we have zero indication that we’d get two.
At best we could get a Pokémon general direct next month that would reveal a Pokémon and keep the out of the main Direct... or a newcomer trailer that just airs like Robin and Lucina. And if we’re extremely lucky, both. But that’s not a scenario I see as super likely to be honest. It’s the most reasonable optimism in my mind at this point to see an October reveal and then the main Direct come November.
And with them choosing to generally space out major character announcements, that’s probably the best we can do. They aren’t just going to dump a ton of characters on us in one trailer because they’ve not done that with the past two Smash games, and I don’t see a second Nintendo Direct for Smash in the next two months. I’d love to be wrong mind you, but that’s a pretty down to earth analysis of the situation in my mind.
