Even if it happens, I won't give up hope. They could be thinking "we don't have enough villains" and go with Coyle.
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Edit: I almost want to make this stupid meme my signature.
Maybe there's some subtlety that I'm missing but just doing a little reading I can't tell if Coyle is a "villain" as much as she's just the spooky science person that works at the spooky science lab. ARMS seems pretty lighthearted. But really, think about it... They've never lead off a franchise with a villain, and in fact, villains seem to be extremely low priority - it took until Melee to get Bowser, they had so few ideas for Ganondorf that he was made a clone... of Captain Falcon. Wolf was such an afterthought they didn't even properly incorporate him into SSE. Fire Emblem still doesn't even have one unless you count Robin due to time travel shenanigans.
It would be so unorthodox for a DLC character from a franchise not yet represented by a fighter to get its first fighter in the form of a villain that there's no reasonable argument to stand on that it wasn't done because something currently in the game stopped them from doing it, especially in the case of ARMS - the most recognizable characters from the game are all spirits already.
This is another reason that it's worth paying attention to the point that ARMS was not that popular, and I wish that Nintendo was at least in the early 2010s as far as online gaming goes so that we could look up metrics of how many people were and are playing ARMS at any given time... but seriously think about how few people are deep into ARMS. 2.1 million copies sold in one year's time, how many of those quit playing the game as soon as Splatoon 2 came out? That's one month. How many quit playing it as soon as, say, Mario Odyssey came out? That was 4 months. How many people weren't that fond of it and just went back to Mario Kart 8 deluxe? How many totally dropped it when Smash came out? With every new game, the playerbase for an older game drops outside of people who have made more out of the game than just a single playthrough - speedrunning or playing competitively, stuff like that. Splatoon 2 got all of Nintendo's esports love, and while ARMS kept getting content for six months... how many people really know that content?
As someone not interested in the game, the last thing I remember people hyping up was Lola Pop. That was in September of 2017. That's the last time my friends talked about it and that's the last time I saw it in the popular eye. I didn't know that Springtron, Max Brass, Misango or Dr. Coyle even existed. I'm not saying this to knock them as characters or to knock ARMS or any of the things that get tossed around when it gets pointed out how ARMS fell off the radar, I'm only saying that putting those guys into Smash would be extremely strange. This sort of goes back to the recognizability thing, so my argument could be totally moot - it just seems like the obvious play is to put someone in that is popular or in one way or another iconic to the franchise, even if the franchise is not iconic. It's like the Fatal Fury situation - imagine any other Fatal Fury character that
isn't Terry.
Who the **** are these people?! Is that Mike Haggar?!
It's a total hypothetical, obviously, but what if Terry, Andy, Joe, and Mai had their spirit in the game to begin with, but then they said we're getting a Fatal Fury character? We're essentially in the same boat right now - Terry is such an obvious choice that swerving him for someone like Geese would just prove that there's a legitimate reason to believe spirits are characters that had absolutely no future for reasons that will never be made clear.
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