I’m really not that negative all things considering. I’m still here supporting Geno and I constantly bring up how I am actually satisfied with the base roster and the game overall. I’m incredibly hype actually and I adore Smash Bros. I also love Nintendo and my Switch eats up most of my gaming time (Currently Dark Souls lol, so maybe I just love the darkness).
Because I love them both, I’m more critical of them both. Because I want them to do better and it definitely feels like they make lots of mistakes. Complacency in the face of those mistakes is a HUGE issue. The whole be grateful mentality for a product consistently baffles me because we’re consumers. Nobody is entitled to anything except for the product we pay for. Nintendo is still a corporation at then end of the day, and expecting them to always act in our best interests of for the more hardcore fan is just not realistic. There are several great people at Nintendo who believe in better products and they do a great job with a lot of things, but they’re also human and **** up too (See Miyamoto and Star Fox Zero or Paper Mario for example). The company at large has always done some scummy things too (6 billions redesigns of the portables, Wii U games with embarrassing amounts of content like Mario Tennis Ultra Smash, their online basically every time around). They have issues like any other company and I want them to be better. I love people for who they are, not corporations and companies. Those can be changed and influenced with a loud enough voice that indicates something in their favor.
But I am a fairly realistic person leaning on the side of cynicism, and that means I’m often not going to be as optimistic about certain things. Especially because I generally ask for logical things. The number of people I encountered pre-November and Grinch who completely were illogical about the number of characters with Sakurai’s exact words in play against them baffled me, and whenever I tried to point out, hey what you’re saying is kind of unreasonable, I got called the hype police (and I was even advocating we’d get another Echo and unique than we got at the time).
Our Smash community can be relentlessly positive and constantly demand positivity about everything it feels like sometimes. I mean, that’s great and all, but it achieves two very different, but equally bad things:
1. It’s just worst for real discussion when entire viewpoints are neglected and you can’t have real discussion about a character’s chances or situation because people perceive you as being toxic, hype police, or overly negative.
2. We become a massive Echo chamber that feels like objectively have this and that, when it’s like most internet related things in that we have sought out reaffirmation in our particular tastes. That reaffirmation is always going to skew our perceptions inadvertently because that’s what being a part of any community does that believe one collective idea.
None of this is necessarily specifically to be leveraged at this thread. But more SmashBoards in general I suppose. It’s the cost of not allowing true toxicity, **** posting, etc. like GameFAQs I know, but sometimes it does feel like things swing too much in the opposite direction.
Again, to be clear, Geno is still my most wanted character at the moment. I still think he’s a really cool pick and he represents an amazing amount of support and continued love for a minor and unlikely character. I will continue to love and support him for the near future for Ultimate in the ways I see fit. I have always maintained that he had a very good chance for the game. But that’s still a chance and a long way from being a lock.
Where I think negativity gets perceived is when I bring up hey, there are things we maybe aren’t considering as much as we should in terms of competition (Sora, DQ, etc.), or that we overstate some things with regards to Geno’s popularity and importance. And I still believe both of those things and generally have things to point to for both in terms of logic to back them up.
I think Geno is an extremely rare case of a one-off, side character becoming popular within a community of dedicated fans. Nothing more, nothing less. I don’t think he’s important to anything or anyone but us as the fans (Super Mario RPG is important, not individual characters created for the game) and potentially Sakurai. Those are where his chances as a character lie, and those are still amazingly better than they ever should because of that support from the community and Sakurai himself.
