I am going to talk about Geno for Smash Bros. here, and say something I said on another thread (which was in response to a post about Sakurai wanting Geno in Smash Bros.) and I quote:
"Well, I can see that if Sakurai wanted Geno, he could have added him by now, but, there were other Square, no no...Square Enix characters to work on. I bet given how easy it is to make humanoid characters, and how many of them were in DLC of Smash Bros. Ultimate, I think that is one of the reasons why Geno probably was not DLC, other than things like Nintendo, who was picking the DLC at the time, not choosing him.
Another theory of mine, which is about why Geno was not even in the base game of Ultimate where he could have been more likely for that than DLC, is that if I heard correctly, Hero from Dragon Quest was planned for the base game of Smash Bros. Ultimate, but was moved to DLC. If this is true at all, I can see that they were focusing on other Square Enix characters at the time and not Geno, and given how many newcomers were in the base game, which were not much, I think Sakurai just did not have time to make Geno playable. "
What do you all think of all this? I am curious to know.