Sorry I forgot to respond to this, but I have a question. If you think it's possible that the reason Chrono Trigger and the DQ games aren't on the SNES Classic, then wouldn't you think that the licensing could be used as a point against Erdrick/DQ in Smash? In the past, you didn't think so:
I'm just curious.
I still stand by those comments. I think Sakurai is a developer willing to go to more extreme lengths to get the characters he wants in the game, whereas I think the NES Classic and SNES Classic are far more likely to be more lazily made products overall despite still having the best build quality of any plug and play. Reggie has positioned them as temporary consoles to profit off of nostalgia in times of uncertainty. They were never meant to be a long term product and that leads me to believe that they put in fairly minimal effort with regards to most of the process. Obviously they cared more about their Classic systems than Sony did with their awful PlayStation Classic, but I think there's a decent amount left to be desired with both of Nintendo's classic consoles.
Sakurai is an auteur with both a vision and the vast resources of Nintendo backing him and his decision making. I think he's largely capable of making any video game character happen if he sets his mind to it and commits to that vision. If there are issues with characters, I'm sure he's willing to work through them and navigate road blocks along the way.
My comments surrounding the missing Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest games were positioned to just be a possibility and my original comments on the inclusion of DQ content in Smash were also positioned as there being multiple possibilities and explanations for things. As I originally said, we just don't know much about the inner workings of Square Enix with regards to Dragon Quest content and I don't know if we get to make definitive statements on the possibility of content without more knowledge of that situation.
And to be fair, if legal made for issues with Dragon Quest, than yes it would seemingly make for more issues its inclusion in Smash. I just don't see that roadblock as insurmountable in the context of Smash when it might be for other potential inclusions given, again, Sakurai's autonomy, resources, and willingness to make the unthinkable happen. In a situation where Geno and Dragon Quest both come up as potential inclusions, I have doubts of Sakurai shying away from DQ just because of a perception of how difficult it might be to get content in the game. The limited content of Final Fantasy clearly didn't bother him too much. Now in the event that Dragon Quest content does become too much of a headache or negotiations fall through, I think Geno certainly may step up as a pick (And to be clear, all of this theoretical stuff is assuming Dragon Quest was initially chosen over Geno for the sake of conversation and not because of any definitive take on the issue of one over the other). But we're getting super far into speculation and I'm playing a little too far removed from anything concrete for my own comfort at that point.
Maybe I'm placing too much faith in Sakurai's ability to make anything happen and work through legal specifics that may be more complicated than we even know, but given what he has accomplished with Ultimate, he seems to wield an enormous amount of power in the industry as both a recognizable name and faithful content interpreter for cross-overs. He just genuinely seems, to me at least, the man capable of basically anything he sets his mind to and someone like Banjo Kazooie or someone else from Microsoft in Smash will only further that legacy haha.
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