Ladies and Gentlemen, the State of the Geno™ address. Last night was amazing on a lot of fronts and I wanted to go over them in detail.
-Sephiroth's No Good Very Bad Day™: Given last night's events, I feel that I'm free to talk about this. Inside insider circles, Sephiroth now has almost as many people saying that he's flat out not going to be in as Sora. This makes sense based on yesterday's events. For starters, Joker is technically a SEGA character, adding pretty conclusive evidence that they are not going to double dip in third party franchises. My theory I made about brand saturation vs brand expansion seems to be spot on. If a franchise was going to double dip with a new unique character in Smash, Sonic was by far the most likely and these chances have gone down significantly, bringing everything else to a bottom level.
Another interesting thing that came out was the credits of Smash Ultimate. What was particularly interesting was the creative and content consultants for third party characters. Most had like 20-30 except Square Enix and Namco. Namco had one for Pac-Man. Makes sense as he's a simple arcade character with a number of references to other simple arcade games. It also helps that they're literally the ones developing the game so it's not like they needed to fly people in to ask any questions if they hit a snag with him.
Then there's Square Enix... It has three for all the Final Fantasy content. It's as bare minimum as you can get: basically the director of FF VII, Cloud's character designer, and one of the lead people for Advent Children. That's it. I'm willing to bet that even characters like Wii Fit have more creative consultants than this. More would definitely need to be on board if Sephiroth was seriously considered along with a second FF VII stage based on even the sizable number for characters like Bayonetta.
-Joker is very clearly not a corporate pick. Persona 5 has yet to be released on a Nintendo platform. Even if it's part of the sprawling Shin Megami Tensei series, this knowledge is esoteric to most people. You'd pretty much only know this if you were a fan of the franchise or cared to look it up. Your typical 12 year old isn't likely to know this series or even your typical Nintendo fan. SMT is fairly niche, especially on Nintendo platforms. This is a deliberate hook and hyper focused leading to my next point...
-A character like Joker is pretty much the exact opposite of a shill. Nintendo's not casting their net out wide with this pick, they are targeting a specific demographic. Maximum profit is not the goal, it's pleasing fans. Again, if this was Nintendo's leading concern, Tails would all be but confirmed to be the next SEGA character. Make no mistake, however, a decent number of people wanted SMT represented in Smash, they just thought it was nearly impossible. But we've seen this before. This was done with Cloud and Bayonetta largely for two reasons...
-Fans wanted the character and so did Sakurai. This is one of the biggest takeaways of last night. Sakurai has mentioned the importance of global appeal and choosing characters that not only people want but bring something new to the table. This is hard proof that Sakurai had a lot more power in choosing characters than originally thought. Again, Joker is a super niche pick but ultimately still wanted. I'd argue that this is a bullet in the head of Dragon Quest and Sephiroth that have virtually no Smash demand. Sakurai is listening to the fans and Nintendo is listening to Sakurai.
-In regards to Dragon Quest: with Sephiroth now being seen as being on as weak legs as Sora, a lot of people in insider circles have jumped onto the Dragon Quest ship, specifically Erdrick, without realizing they've boarded the Titanic and some idiot in the boiler room thinks he's discovered a quick way to remove the clutter of the excess propane tanks laying around. The reason for this is that most of them have flat out come out and said they only believe this because Nintendo wants to promote Dragon Quest Builders 2 and Dragon Quest XI S, two ports with one just being publically announced in September and without a clue when it will come out. That's it. People are banking on Nintendo to go into MAXIMUM OVERSHILL for this... It's extreme cynicism and pessimism rolled into one.
We've gone into depth about this topic but here are the biggest problems.
-The liscensing for the series is comically bad. On a base level, it's liscensed by Square Enix (asset holder), Armor Project (asset owner), Bird Studio (all characters), and Yoichi Sugiyama (all music). For Erdrick, yet another company has ownership by the name of Heart Beat, a liquidated company that still has share holders scattered around.
-The series is overwhelmingly more popular in Japan than anywhere else. It's estimated about 93% of its sales come from Japan. No prescence in Smash will ever change this.
-In its 32 year history, it's never been liscensed out for gaming crossovers. All crossovers like Fortune Street and Mario Sports Mix were developed by Square Enix, meaning that Nintendo was more willing to liscense out the most valuable IP in gaming than Square was their second most profitable IP. Let that sink in. Unless Armor Project and Bird Studio have creative control of the project, they want nothing to do with it.
-Even in Japan, demand for DQ content in Smash is near non existent. It's a complete ghost. In Japanese polls I've seen over the years, Slime is lucky to crack top 50. Yes, that's right... More DQ fans want the equivalent of a Goomba playable than any of the main characters. That's pretty telling.
So, to recap, no global appeal, no demand, and possibly the most complicated liscensing in all of gaming. Keep in mind that Sakurai has noted that Cloud was a huge struggle to get and Square fought him almost every step of the way and was constantly breathing down his neck. That's with just one IP share holder, imagine one character with up to four. I'm pretty sure my balls just shot up into my stomach just thinking about it... It's more hassle and more work for something virtually no one wants. Why bother? Add on top of this that everyone that predicted DQ to win anything or have anything shown off last night was dead wrong and LeakyPanda and Hitagi are unlikely to recover from it. On to the final point...
-People are taking Reggie's words too literally. It reminds me of "up until now" from the Brawl days, that even I fell for. There's definitely room for nuance and, let's be real, Geno would still be a huge surprise for a vast majority of people. Even as this thread has shown, Geno fans themselves are split and tons of people think the spirit/icon was a death sentence. I've watched you guys and your certainty shifts constantly. Even people on the inside are twisting themselves in knots to justify Dragon Quest despite its mountains of complications (which they probably just don't know about, to be honest).
Geno's assessed chances among insiders basically stems from Vergeben's main source's doubts. That's it. I've seen the message. He even explains that he doubts it for personal reasons he didn't want to openly talk about. That's Def-Con 1 suspicious on its own but, again, that's it when it comes to major doubts on the inside. Geno's regularly heard too and multiple people have reported on it. PolarPanda's source says it's literally the only Square Enix character he's heard this whole cycle. It's hardly a shut case and you shouldn't let anyone tell you otherwise. I can confirm everything good and bad for Geno is merely hearsay with the one bad thing coming from one person.
So, in conclusion, last night was an amazing night for Geno and people should feel optimistic. Sakurai's listening. Nintendo's listening. Third parties seem to be listening too. This is definitely DLC being made for fans. Things are very vague behind the scenes because, as evidenced last night, Nintendo is keeping DLC extremely secret. We'll be lucky to get crumbs from this point forward. Square Enix still seems likely by all of accounts and evidence emerging yesterday suggest Namco will either have Tales DLC or nothing at all for DLC with the former being more likely. Still, I want you guys to be patient and hang in there. We've come this far and things are looking up at this standpoint.