This might be the most math I've ever done over Smash, lol.
There's a lot of problems with that chart though.
It counts spirits like the Warp Star, Whispy Woods, and Waddle Dee as Sakurai-era Kirby content even though they're from the entirety of the series. If you were to instead divide Kirby's spirits into "Reoccuring elements", "classic Kirby characters", and "modern Kirby characters", its likely that the modern Kirby spirits would outnumber the classic characters.
Similarly, a good chunk of the songs sourced as "Sakurai-era Kirby songs" are reoccurring motifs throughout the entire series like Green Greens and Dedede's theme or medleys that encompass both modern and classic Kirby games. Sakurai has also said in the past that he largely allows the sound team to decide which songs they remix, so that's which games are getting remixed most often isn't really his fault.
That's fair, so, because "classic" doesn't inherently mean Sakurai (he only ever made three mainline Kirbys - Dream Land, Adventure, and Super Star) let's look at the recurring elements just from Sakurai's games that became spirits. They make up 32% of Kirby's spirits.
Let's look at Zelda's recurring ones from across the whole series. 15%
Mario's. 25%
Metroid. 14%
And that's without the less recurring Sakurai characters like Dyna Blade, Heavy Lobster, the Meta Knights, Marx, etc. If they only showed up like twice, I didn't count that as really recurring.
And again, this comes from only three mainline games in a series with like fifteen mainline games. So I didn't count characters like Bandana Dee or Galacta Knight, who recur, but aren't really from Sakurai. I also didn't limit the recurring spirits to only a few games from the other series, and they still clocked in at less. I mean characters like Waluigi, E. Gadd, Petey Piranha, Toadsworth, Luma, etc. would all be recurring, even though they're comparatively newer, so I counted them. And Kirby still comes in higher. Doubly so, in some cases.
Also, he only said Ultimate had free reign for the soundtrack. iirc, he even made a point to say doing that was new for the series. So that would really only count towards Ultimate's remixes.
But frankly, more important than spirits and music (though I also believe those disproportionate) are the actual major categories, which have, like I said, 0% non-Sakurai content. That stuff is more pertinent in gauging the fate of future Kirby
characters, which is how the conversation began.
The stages are bit more complicated, but they're still not that bad. Green Greens, Dream Land 64, and the Fountain of Dreams all came when Sakurai made all of the mainline Kirby games, so that's half the stages right there.
No they don't. By Melee, Dream Land 2, 3 and Kirby 64 were all out, and those weren't created by Sakurai.
Dream Land GB was originally a Mario Land stage and was converted into a Kirby stage late in development, presumably to give a Kirby a stage in Smash for 3DS when he otherwise wouldn't have one.
Ok. You know Kirby's Dream Land isn't the only Kirby game on Game Boy? Why not Dream Land 2? I mean the original Dream Land already had a stage, and Sakurai chose to give it another.
Likewise, the Great Cave Offensive started as an Epic Yarn stage and got reworked to not step on Woolly World's territory. Those two were not attempts to disvalue modern Kirby, they were last minute efforts to save other stages and give Kirby something. That just leaves Halberd, which was more likely chosen to give Meta Knight a stage, not to flaunt Sakurai's run on Kirby.
...and Sakurai could've chosen to re-work it into any number of other Kirby stages from any Kirby game. He chose giving Super Star another stage.
Marx is the most popular final boss in the entirety of the series other than maybe Magolor, so it makes sense he'd get priority to be a boss.
Magolor is more popular. Especially in Japan. Marx only eclipsed him once he showed up in Star Allies. But then everyone else did too. And if popularity takes precedence over the bias, where's Bandana Dee? Shouldn't he be at least an AT or something?
If there's bias for the original Kirby games behind Kirby, Meta Knight, and Dedede being the playable Kirby characters in Smash, then there's bias for DKC1 behind Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, and King K. Rool being the DK characters.
The characters all come from DKC1 (though Dixie was planned). Well, other than DK himself. But the stages don't. There's arcade DK, there's DK64, there's Jungle Beat, there's DKCR. The items don't. The costumes don't. The AT does, but there's only one.
I won't deny that most of Kirby's content comes from his older games, that's an empirical fact. I'm much more hesitant to accept that this is motivated by bias though and not 20 years of development across 6 different games and the complications that come about through that.
Well, you're conflating all old games with Sakurai games. Half of the old games weren't even made by Sakurai. More than half. And those ones have no major content, and only small amounts of minor content. Dream Land 2, 3, Kirby 64, Amazing Mirror. And all the spin-offs other than Air Ride (which has as much content as a mainline Kirby game). It seems very clear to me that he's deliberately stepped around other titles in the series to mostly focus on his. Even if we had gotten one stage from a post-Sakurai game... that doesn't somehow tip the scales around the massive weight of Sakurai's content.
, but also to show Brawl's sheer scope: the E3 2006 trailer depicts the Halberd as huge. Also, the Halberd features prominently in SSE.
