re: Min Min, I think people are vastly underestimating how much sense it makes to bring this character back.
I have a gut feeling that all three of the first party DLC characters (excluding Plant, since that's kind of a special case) may as well return. It's likely that we'll be losing a fair number of other DLC characters for one reason or another, since they're third party, but there's little reason to part ways with the first party newcomers.
Well the reason would be a notably reduced number of total spots.
Many people agree that the next roster will, and probably should, highlight what the previous console generation had to offer.
I don't agree with this. At least not in terms of console beginning to end being the partition. I think previous Smash games did because they didn't have much if any DLC, so there was a much greater span of time between roster selection periods, and therefore a generation of content to cover.
There are still a good many titles which came out too late to be major DLC - basically everything mid-2019 and afterwards - and which will likely make up a good portion of the base content, but stuff from before then has already been covered.
Byleth, Min Min and Pyra / Mythra got us a head start on that which otherwise would not have been feasible. As it currently stands Min Min is the newest IP represented in Smash... that's a very valuable thing to lose.
Well one, not if Nintendo doesn't plan to use the IP. ARMS as an IP is probably among the least valuable on the roster.
And two, there will probably be a newer IP in the next Smash, like Ring Fit. So ARMS... would be the second, potentially third newest IP. Which... isn't that profound.
Simply put, if you're going to put characters like Ring Fit Trainee and Officer Howard on your roster there is zero reason that Min Min shouldn't be there with them, period. These two are pretty much in the exact same state of limbo as ARMS is.
The difference is that those two are still in the window Smash would look back towards when compiling base - they happened since the previous round of character inclusion. ARMS has elapsed outside that window, because its window was when Ultimate's DLC was being decided.
It will have gone one cycle without any updates. Because the cycle isn't system to system, it's based on developments during the interim of Smash's selection phase to next selection phase. If it was system to system, Ultimate should've continued to include Wii U and 3DS characters instead of ones like Min Min, Byleth and Pyra/Mythra, and saved them for Smash 6.
But each selection period looks back at what's happened since the last. ARMS hasn't happened since the last. Ring Fit and Astral Chain have.
Not to mention these are some of the last characters the team would have worked on, so (like it or not) these characters could probably be brought in largely unchanged.
Right but if things were based on ease, clones would be the least likely to be cut, assuming their base returned. But that's not how it goes.
I also think we need to start easing up on seniority and past priority as some law of the land. For now I understand, because it's one of the only definitive things we have to point to. But I think continuing to say "this character has been around since Melee / Brawl, they'll get in over x or y" is unsustainable, or will at least make the series very stagnant moving forward. I'm willing to do away with a handful of series staples in favor of new faces, or giving newbies from Smash 4 or Ultimate another chance instead. Cycling out the new faces every game just to make way for the same 30-40 old ones is gonna get stale, and new characters will continue to enter the fray as mainstays. I can't tell you how Sakurai and Co will choose to handle this but I don't think it's a tried and true defense anymore.
I sort of agree, insofar as I think characters will be cut despite seniority and past priority, but not insofar as I don't think those things are still factors. I just think the quantity of cuts will demand verging into exclusions that were previously considered safer.
I think some of the new additions will remain - Inkling, Ridley, Isabelle. I hope K. Rool sticks around, and I think there's a good chance he will. The thing about Incineroar, Byleth and Pyra/Mythra is in addition to being recent, they were added in part to coincide with a then-current release. The absence of that reasoning will weaken their cases, as will the fact that all three of those series will likely expand, and that two already have a lot of characters. Not that I'm saying they'll definitely be cut (though I don't have high hopes for big fire cat), I actually think Byleth is likelier than Corrin and at least one of the Marth clones - just that I don't think any of them are safe.
And it's not even because Min Min is new that I think she's in a tenuous situation, it's that ARMS is small for a series in Smash - it has one game and it did good but not amazing - and it hasn't had anything since it got included. I do think seniority is also a factor, but by no means the only, or even biggest one. If there are sizeable cuts, there are just a lot of other options that outclass her. But if ARMS returns, it's a completely different story.
The new third-parties I have no clue how many we keep, other than definitely not all. I could see losing half of them, but there's a big plus/minus window of plausibility either way imo.
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