See, this is the **** that conflicts me.
I see you post something that makes sense, like calling out people hating on Sora because Disney would somehow taint Nintendo or some stupid **** like that.
Then you make posts like this that make sense for a couple of minutes and then I realize that you are focusing on the FUN aspect of that statement rather than the part that matter, which is the part in which Sakurai says that being recognizable is not as major of a factor and proceed to argue that being recognizable is a factor.
It's like the whole statement went over your head, so you grabbed it and bent and folded it into a shape that somewhat resembles what was said but it's like the movie Us and there is clearly something wrong with it and I have to stare and find out what it is. So, let me destroy this real quick.
As I've mentioned before, anything can be fun, and therefore whether or not you had fun should have nothing to do with reviewing anything as you are delivering information about something, not opinion pieces. In Sakurai's case, a character idea needs to be fun overall, from looks to playstyle. Since he's creating something rather than reviewing something, this makes sense: of course focusing on making the game more fun is the best goal to strive towards. When something is 'fun' it means people enjoy it and people spend money on things they enjoy.
However, what you failed to point out is how being recognizable really doesn't factor into any of what you mentioned, but rather it was just that many people liked a certain thing because they enjoyed it...because it was fun.
For the sake of stopping this from being just stupidly condescending, the fact is that there is a different between being recognizable because of any number of reasons and being recognizable because hordes of people enjoyed something. For games, Anthem and Fallout76 are recognizable for being trash-tier games and God of War and Final Fantasy 7 are recognizable for being great games that were enjoyable to the masses...and thus were fun.
Thus, I would argue that a character like Cloud or Hero getting in is less about 'This character is popular' approach, but more of a 'People find this character fun and I can make them play fun' approach. Besides, most of the characters that have gotten into Smash in the past couple years have been the opposite of recognizable but the epitome of fun. In fact, being fun in terms of people loving the character and being fun to play I think is a great thing to focus on, because look at Resident Evil in Ultimate.
They got nothing but spirits, but if you think about it, all they would have offered was a person carrying a bunch of weapons and swapping through them. Master Chief would be the same thing, and it's why I believe we will never get more than a single FPS/TPS character, and I'm convinced it's Doomguy. Sakurai likely seeing that these kind of characters are very limited and have a lot of similarities as well as probably not be fun visually as they come from a dark and drab series and likely not fun to play as it would just be Weapons McGee the character.
Sakurai could have made a fun Resident Evil moveset if he wanted to. Or any other FPS character could be easily implemented into Smash if Sakurai had the willpower to make it happen. Hell, it's not even hard as fans come up with proofs of concept all the time and we've seen characters from more obscure and difficult origins make their way into Smash. There's no reason those characters can't be fun
and recognizable options (if you've played something like Halo, you should know their are so many great weapons and ways to make Chief for example unique and fun for example). I just don't think Sakurai is interested in FPS titles because they largely don't play well in the Japanese market, and even Resident Evil tends to be much bigger in the West as well, hence his decision to implement the series as Spirits.
But recognition does play a role, and I think it's foolish to dismiss it outright. Like, again, you could potentially have super fun options with terribly ****ing obscure characters, but then your not really doing you job as a video game crossover when you start veering into absurdly niche territory. Like, part of Smash
has got to be including recognizable characters, otherwise it doesn't work. It's walking a fine balance between fun, recognition, promotion, and satisfaction in any character choices for Smash. There's different ways to approach each option mind you, but I think it's just factually incorrect to pretend like recognition doesn't at least play some role in the processes at hand. Recognition can mean very different things to different people, but I think it's absurd to not pretend like the crossover doesn't consider the popularity and recognition of the things being included in it to some degree. And as I said before, not the primary one or even a major one that steers the process, but looking at things like Cloud and Terry shows a conscious effort to choose characters from the franchise that are more popular and recognizable... they can absolutely be fun in their own right, but there's no sense in denying that those things played
some role in their inclusions.
Like, I don't think anything that I'm saying should be particularly controversial here. Yes, fun is still the primary motivator, but pretending like popularity and recognition don't play
any roles makes zero sense when Sakurai held a literal popularity contest in the Ballot and Smash exists as a successful franchise specifically because it crossed over hugely popular series like Zelda, Pokemon, and Mario. And I'm mostly really just saying if Sakurai wants to, I have no doubt he'll make any character fun because he's genuinely got that imagination and passion, he just has to want to do it.
I've just seen people try to beat others over the head with this little snippet, and it just comes off as naive. Like, a character needs to be fun to be in Smash, but there's also a lot of characters that can not only be fun,
but also recognizable. Popularity and recognition don't exactly exclude character options from being fun ya know?