Aww man, when I left this thread to go play some PM, we were talking about SkullKid's moveset potential and how awesome he could be. (I really loved everyone's suggestions btw, the in-depth breakdown by Fortress was really fun to read). And now we're arguing about how many people like/care about each franchise. @_@
I'm not really interested in that kind of argument (it really never seems to go anywhere, but it's also just not any fun : > ), but there is something I wanted to say... I personally feel like the bar has to be pretty high for a character in an uninitiated franchise to get into the game. I'm good with Tom Nook getting in - heck, that's awesome. I like the idea of Isaac gettng in, because he seems really beloved and I've been hearing about Golden Sun being a special series for a while now. Beyond that, I honestly feel like I'd rather see the franchises we already have get more reps.
That's why I don't agree with things like "Star Fox has all the characters it needs." What does that even mean? What does the game, or any particular franchise, really need? Heck, you could argue that we had all the characters we needed in demo 2.0 - the game had a pretty sizeable roster (more than Melee at that point, I think it was at 29 characters?) and was extremely fun. After Roy and Mewtwo got in even when that seemed impossible, you can definitively say that this game doesn't need a single additional character. At this point, it's all gravy.
So I think if you bog yourself down too much by running the numbers on which franchise deserves X number of reps, is the most popular, trends the best among this demographic, etc etc, you'll eventually find yourself focusing more on numbers and statistics than the sheer "This would be hype" factor that's been driving PM since day 1. Sure, maybe a mathematical analysis would conclude that Advanced Wars is sufficiently popular to warrant a character - but it's probably more important to pick something that's going to make people lose their minds. =)
One of the franchises we've talked about a lot in this thread is LoZ. We've talked about Tetra, we've talked about Skull Kid... and
MAN have we talked about Ganondorf! Now, LoZ has 5 reps, and I'm sure any aspiring mathematician could tell me that I'm numerically wrong for wanting another LoZ character. There's 5 already, which is plenty for a franchise of their size, and other franchises are starving, and if you run the numbers, it's only fair, etc etc etc.... But that doesn't really change how I (or anyone else who'd love a LoZ rep) feel about the characters. It doesn't change the fact that if we're browsing FB one day and see a trailer from the PM team showing off a Skullkid reveal, we're going to go nuts. It's just exciting, and you can't really put a qualifier or a numerical value on that.
I dunno, this ended up being a really long, esoteric rant. If you guys are having fun crunching the numbers, I'd hate to be that guy that tells you you're using the thread the wrong way, because I don't think that's fair either. (After all, I took up tons of time campaigning for Pichu
). But maybe it's not the most important thing to be focusing on - that's all I'm saying.