- He is the last of the really big Brawl picks. This is good for him because Ultimate has been seemingly hyped-focused on characters that meet this criteria.
I think I and others have already explained why this is wrong.
He's still a fan favorite to this day, and one of the biggest ones even now with all these new characters people are falling in love with. This is good for him because Sakurai is specifically trying to cater to fans with the DLC.
What evidence is there that Sakurai is specifically catering to always-online vocal fans? Because as it stands, literally 1 of 6 DLC characters fits that trend. And no, don't tell me stuff like "insiders heard" this or that because that means literally nothing.
Square Enix already have a playable character for their two top series, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Of course they have other games people love, but Geno easily places at the top of the Square Enix request list right next to Sora, and Sora has his own barrel of issues that really makes him no competition.
Big pillars of modern Square Enix not yet represented in Smash:
Nier
Eidos properties
Kingdom Hearts (shared with Disney)
Medium pillars of modern Square Enix not (or barely) represented in Smash:
Bravely
Octopath
Saga
Mana
TWEWY
Square Enix non-entities:
Mario RPGs
Sakurai himself has desired to make Geno playable since back in Brawl, and this is from an interview that dates right after the end of Smash 4's DLC. Sakurai mentioned said that 'I think he [Geno] fits in really well with Smash' which is very important because this means that Geno qualifies for being unique and having fun moveset potential, something that Sakurai looks for in a character.
"He has a gun arm" was Sakurai's biggest takeaway. And Geno is far from the only character that Sakurai has said "I'd like this character to be in Smash, but it didn't happen". We're now 4 and a half years out from that interview.
In the game interview, Sakurai proves that he is aware of Geno's popularity. 'He’s very popular. When talking about older characters, Geno always gets a lot of requests.' This means Geno isn't in a situation in which the developers are unaware of his demand.
Again, there's a lot of characters like this.
For some reason, Geno's Mii Costume has yet to return in Ultimate. We've had two Mii Costume waves that were pretty grabbag random and had nothing to do with the character and a Square character, yet it didn't appear in any of these. This is odd when you consider that bringing back the costume would just be free money for Square and that Square wouldn't be about making a Premium Mii Costume package that includes music and still only get $.75. It gets even more odd when you consider that Geno and Mallow's Spirits, which would be considered to be of their likeness and would require negotiations, are in the base game along with references to SMRPG enemies in Piranha Plant's Palutena's Guidance in which Plant was originally intended for the base game. Wouldn't they have already negotiated for his costume and included it with Wave 2 then?
Some people may bring up the Heihachi costume returning as evidence that Geno's costume could still return, but Heihachi is a fighting game
character and ARMS is technically a fighting game, so not only was the inclusion thematic but Heihachi was never really heavily requested and Lloyd Irving was always the leader for another Bamco character anyway.
Where? Show me where Lloyd was the definitive Bamco choice character.
Heihachi is literally in the same position Ridley was. Sakurai directly mentioned him but couldn't figure out how to make him work. And since his costume hadn't returned yet, people were given hope that he would eventually be coming. So why wait 2 years to crush that hope? Because maybe Nintendo doesn't actually care about what vocal people online think?
Absence of the Mii costume means nothing. In fact, Sakurai said something in the Min Min presentation that strikes me as problematic for any older costumes not yet in the game. He mentioned spirit battles changing, but only in the context of Mii costumes. Notice how Min Min's WoL spirit battle didn't change.
Now who would be a prime candidate for a spirit battle change with a returning costume? In fact, he's the only one of the missing costumes that even has a spirit battle. Seems a little too convenient if you ask me.
The CacoMallow images and video have never been debunked all this time. Every possible argument brought up to disprove it has been properly countered and no single modder at that time could replicate it and no one came forward to own up to being the one who did it. When you consider how Ken was involved just like he was in his own Ken Debug leak, how the Cacodemon hat was designed to be more family-friendly, and how we just recently got a Bethesda costume in Vault Boy which proves that Nintendo and Bethesda have already negotiated on content being in the game...it becomes very hard to refute.
Vault Boy should be proof that CacoMallow isn't real. Yeah, I saw the dumb Bethesda/Zenimax split theory and it's nonsense. I know a guy at Zenimax and brought the thing up to him and he just laughed. The separation of the companies is overstated as far as IP management goes.
Most recently, the common man has now accepted that Spirits do not deconfirm due to Min Min's inclusion, even though the argument never made sense because so long as there is DLC or the game is still in it's active lifecycle the game can be updated and changed however they wish.
Sure, but there's no precedent for spirit battles being updated where a costume precedent exists. It could happen, but it's not even close to your 100% guarantee.