Sorry but if it wasn't for the Ballot I FIRMLY believe King K. Rool would STILL not be in this game. Really never mattered how successful the DK series was and didn't matter that it was still going. The fans got him in. Plain and simple. Same with Banjo. Crazy enough Banjo seemingly had a better shot... Sad to even comprehend that.
When a characters own creator is surprised by their inclusion to ANYTHING this big, that really says a lot. Kevin Bayliss was very surprised he got in.
Kevin isn't even with Nintendo nor was he involved with the process. There's no reason he would know. It means nothing whatsoever to the situation. Fan demand is the core factor, but the fact DK was still active also helps a lot. There's a lot better chances of K. Rool to be in a new game than Isaac will be. And Isaac sure as hell was popular, considering the tons of GS content we suddenly got(and many Mii costumes are just consolation prizes. It was easier to add that in with tons of GS content at the same time as is. Plus, the front runners got costumes first.
Yeah, not seeing a lack of relevancy on Banjo's part, and fan demand did play a partial role, but him being kept active by Microsoft probably helped. There's nothing to suggest the duo being used over and over again didn't always make it easier to negotiate. If they were completely inactive, even with the ballot, the chances of them getting in would've been a lot slimmer. Microsoft still is a business after all. All of the Microsoft content is from some kind of active product. This isn't that odd either. But they are a competitor, so what'd you expect?
Banjo absolutely had a better shot anyway without the massive fan demand from the ballot. Sakurai was already aware of it. He didn't need the ballot to add him. K. Rool partially needed the ballot, but being from an active franchise helped too. Chrom nor Dark Samus even needed the ballot either way. Both were easy echoes. Ballot is of course the core reason, but the Echo factor also was vastly important. If they couldn't be Echoes, they wouldn't be in. Things aren't black and white to begin with. A lot of characters didn't "need" the ballot so much as it overall helped. Ridley might be one of the only cases at this point, and that's because Sakurai had to do more than make a moveset or take the character into consideration. He had to give him an all new model because he was unable to be shrunken down.
If it weren't for Verge pointing us in the right direction, no one would've predicted Hero or known what "Brave" meant.
Verge isn't the usual reason people were predicting Hero, though. That's an extra bonus. Hero's predictions were because people were sure Brave meant Yuusha, which was a guess on various leakers' parts(which wasn't a leak at that point) as well. That's what led to the debate. Verge, at the time, had a list of 7 names. Erdrick and Luminary were some of them, but Hero was not mentioned yet. In fact, I don't remember Verge outright saying Hero, just Erdrick. This at best only made people think it was Erdrick, not a Hero with alts in general. Hero was still heavily thought upon on its own merits. Just drowned out by Erdrick. Incidentally Erdrick wasn't even the face, but that just means leakers were given pieces of information, so of course few would think it's something else. There's not a ton of people who thought Luminary could be the face, or that it was full of hero alts(I did, but my reasons don't even match what went behind the scenes, so that doesn't say much).
