Speculation in general has become a pretty black-white game of “debunking fan rules”, where if a character with a certain attribute gets in, it must mean all characters with the same attribute no longer have that as a point against them.
It becomes a bit of cherrypicking when you see posts like this.
”Character X has nothing going against them now. Duck Hunt is old, Dark Pit appears in only one game, Banjo is third party, Cloud has no connection to Nintendo and Min Min isn’t a main character! Ergo, it means that The Mean Bean Machine has literally no obstacles against it!”
You can build a case for everyone this way, if you treat fan rules as black or white from both sides and needless to say, it hinders speculation.
^
Just because someone doesn't have anything seriously going against them doesn't mean they will get in.
The circular Geno debates are honestly getting really tiring more than anything, so I'll just break off now and give a final word.
My thoughts are that he's not
impossible, per se, but his chances are overestimated. The points regularly brought up are that he's popular in the Smash fanbase, he has no major Squeenix competition, and SMRPG is the grandfather of Mario RPGs. Requests doesn't decide everything, and there's a lot of SE IPs that are far more well-known and profitable with the general audience, like Tomb Raider and Nier. On the topic of profitability, there's also Paper Mario, a more well-known Mario game than SMRPG and is getting a new installment this year, too.
Ridley, K. Rool, and Banjo are brought up as to reasons why, but just because it can happen again doesn't mean it
will. As quoted above, speculation has devolved into "(X) character invalidates (Y) fanrule, so (Z) character will get in as well!" There's also the fact that Geno is still not the main protagonist, Mario is. Just because he's an important character doesn't mean he's the
only one, and Mario's still the leader; He's even in the title. I know Geno plays a big role in the story, but that doesn't automatically mean he's the hero.
People act like fan requests are the only driving thing, ignore anyone who isn't as requested or speculated, and try to hype up who they want beyond their actual chances. I get that he's popular, I get that SMRPG is a cult classic, and I get that you've been waiting for a long time. Even if I'm not sold on Geno, I'm pretty sure I'd end up thinking he's pretty cool and fun if he gets added to Smash. If he does get a slot in the roster, I'll be content to eat my words with a side of fries.
But he's not a lock, and there's a fair bit going against him that won't magically go away because one fighter broke a fanrule or two. He's not among the most likely of characters, even if he's not impossible. Again, requests aren't going to determine everything, or we never would have gotten Joker and Terry, among others.
Eh, if Nintendo/Square want Geno in, they'll put Geno in. If they don't want Geno in, they won't put Geno in. That's really all that needs to be said about his chances, he's not a character that you can spend hours analyzing why he deserves/doesn't deserve to get in as a fighter.
Geno's greatest strength is fan-demand. And don't try telling me that Nintendo doesn't pay attention to fan-demand in some way.
Geno's greatest weakness is irrelevance. And I don't mean something like K. Rool where they can easily put K. Rool in future DK games, or even something like Banjo who had a ton of push from Microsoft as well. Geno has very little chances of returning in future games, and neither Nintendo (outside of Smash) or Square-Enix seem to really care about him.
Will he get in? Only time will tell.
Thank's for coming to my TED talk.
...Or you could listen to this guy, who makes the same points in much less time. Guess you could say I was... Ninja'd, as you call it?
(team battle w/