He said it was a proposal, not a plan. And he calls it the "first" implying there is a second. This is far from confirmation of when characters were choosen. The most I could find is that he doesn't change the roster a lot when the project is underway which it wouldn't be from his comments.
The initial tweet's translation was indeed wrong from what it seems. That said, despite the implied revised proposals, mentioning the fact of Dec 2015 is noteworthy anyways. A proposal for this game would have a roster in mind - we know that the entire idea of everyone come back has been part it from the start.
SmashChu said:
The problem with these conversation is everyone is trying to play expert and say when this started or when this happened. We have no idea when any of these games entered development or what stage of development they were at. Xenoblade 2 started development sometime in 2014. ARMS might have started in the Spring of 2015 or earlier as they were still working on the DLC for MK8. Both of these games could have been in a decent enough state for consideration. Now, we don't know anything for sure, so why are we assuming that there is no way these characters could get in?.
???
Why are you assuming otherwise? What's the point of a message board if you believe there's no point in talking about it? What we know is what we know, and we're supposed to build from there. Bringing up what we don't know is both pointless and useless - it's fallacious.
SmashChu said:
A better approach is to look at what has happened and what is happening. Brawl and Smash 4 took content from games launching the year prior. Brawl added 2 characters who's games released in 2006 and Smash 4 added 1 (though there wasn't much to choose from). Both games had stages, music and assist trophies from those years and Smash 4 actually had content from games releasing in the same year or later.
What is the characters weren't decided until 2016 as the project got underway? What if it was Dec 15, but most of the Switch games started development in 2015 which would be a 2-3 development cycle for all the 2017 games. Or what if characters were based on concept art like Greninja. All of these are realistic scenarios. But we can't actually know what is going on or what exactly Sakurai is doing. My problem is people make all these assumptions and try to act like they can read the tea leaves. Its a silly way of thinking. Most communities would look at his comment and think "Oh, so its been in development for about 3 years." Smash fans read far too much into it.
Brawl had development problems. Despite its announcement in 2005, it was pushed all the way back to 2008, leaving much more time to work on more things. The two characters you speak of, Lucario and Lucas, are easily explained. First of all, 2006 is 2 years after 2008, a similar timeline to Ultimate's mention of 2015 and the release of 2018. Next, Pokemon's massive popularity has time and time again shown that it takes priority; Lucario's unforseen popularity and Gamefreak's famously visible development process is essentially what occurred with Greninja, and so far, with all the Alolan Pokeballs in Ultimate. Lucas was originally part Earthbound 64, and was originally planned to replace Ness in Melee. Possibly due to the cancellation of Earthbound 64, Lucas wasn't added until Brawl...as a clone in an established franchise.
Corrin was specifically a want for a character from a new game, which honestly is fishy considering Splatoon, which I'll speak on a bit.
You have a really bad habit of actually disregarding what's being said and blaming some sort of generalize bad-logic in the community. The odds are against ARMS because of actual reasons formed through looking at
what we know. It's more ridiculous to disregard everything because "we don't know". Increasing the variables of a situation helps no one.
SmashChu said:
Already, for SmashU, we have two stages shown from 2017 games as well as a few smaller reference. Heck, the music released today is from Splatoon 2. So what does that tell us? That perhaps 2017 games were considered for content like we would expect give the past games.
The two stages are from two of Nintendo's and gaming in general's largest franchises. ARMS as a new IP and its eventual unpopularity cannot be compared to Mario and Zelda. Bomb Rush Blush is form Splatoon 1. I've mentioned this in other posts but the very history of Splatoon in Smash can really tell us about how ARMS could be seen. Splatoon was massively popular yet was not added as DLC, only as quickly made costumes and a trophy. Their appearance in Ultimate is completely based on Splatoon 1, with the only reference to Splatoon 2 (a game only a month older than ARMS, and a game from an established franchise) being Lil Judd on the Moray Towers stage.
The passing over of Inklings for Corrin really makes me doubt that DLC wasn't planned from the start, in a sense that it's dubious that they wouldn't have ideas for DLC. That said it's really not useful to doubt the statements regarding DLC, so it might have been really just because Corrin comes from an established and increasingly popular franchise. Corrin, as I've mentioned in other posts, really is probably the best example for why ARMS could be valid. That said, ARMS still isn't an established franchise and has show itself to be not the next big thing.
SmashChu said:
And for reference, Mario didn't have any references to Galaxy in his moves so him not having Cappy isn't confirmation of anything.
Mario Galaxy released in late 2007. In fact, there is no references to Mario Galaxy in Brawl, with all references to it being relegated to Smash 4. Him not having Cappy in his moveset, alongside the wedding outfits for Mario, Peach, and Daisy, and, the fact that they've only shown New Donk City briefly, implies that they've only started adding Odyssey into the game very recently. You would expect New Donk City in the demo, no? You're comparing two entirely different situations- in fact, bringing up Galaxy just gives even less credits for ARMS gaining more than collectibles if even big guy Mario didn't get his games into the next Smash.
In conclusion, the information we know and the rosters and the knowledge we've had of development in the past is how conversations should be done regarding any character and any franchise. To completely disregard this is just ignoring actual facts, and blaming "bad logic" in the smash community is not only actually insulting, but actively ignoring what has been established. Bringing in unknown variables isn't actual evidence for an argument - it serves only to dilute the argument to ambiguity.
I'm not actively Anti-ARMS. I want ARMS because the more merrier. But I don't believe with information we have right now that the franchise has the 100% chance that people assume it has for no reason.
