I guess I kinda enjoyed Smash 4's speculation more because I was constantly learning about new games, franchises and characters.
While I would never give Ultimate up, I do miss learning about a new franchise.
I got this feeling with dragon quest and king of fighters, not so much the others
Yeah, I get that. Back around the 2019-2020 range, it felt like everything was a new game to learn about and immerse myself in. Now I've learned of a lot of games, but now that feeling of discovering something new is gone. Sometimes I wish I could rewind a year or two so I could re-experience my Touhou and Ys crazes. Those were fun times...
I mean, your mileage may vary. Personally, I became very studious about which franchises Nintendo owned after Melee was released, though even from the beginning, the only franchise I didn't at least hear about at the time it had Fighters added was Fire Emblem (and yes, this includes the likes of Earthbound, which I rented a few times).
And I dunno, but I hated the ESRB leak. It made the Shulk/Duck Hunt/Bowser Jr reveals feel less interesting because "Oh right, this leaked."
To be fair, they released trailers for Duck Hunt and Bowser Jr. well after the 3DS version was released, so it's not as if the surprise wouldn't have been ruined anyway. Granted, I guess those trailers did serve to segueway into secondary announcements: 8-player Smash and the Virtual Console release of Duck Hunt.
No seriously, why didn’t Ultimate bring the Wooly World and Orbital Gate stages back? Why could the Wii U run those just fine but the Switch just… couldn’t for some reason? And yet it has a heart attack if you attempt Fountain of Dreams with more than three players
It is pretty confusing, though for what it's worth, the Orbital Gate stage was supposedly worked on for a ridiculously long period of time, so maybe it'd be a major undertaking just to port it..... but then again, with how much work went in, you'd think they would've at least taken measures to future-proof it. No idea on Woolly World..... problems with the stage's unique texture effect, maybe? And you didn't mention it, but many theorize that Jungle Hijinks was cut because it wouldn't work with Stage Morph (which actually seems like a pretty stupid excuse; if Stage Morph can automatically reposition Fighters when shifting from a massive stage to a small stage, then it should damn well be capable of doing the same with Fighters in the background).
I wouldn’t say it NEEDS to be something else entirely. Nintendo’s biggest strength with its handhelds is to just reiterate on the previous one. Gameboy to Color to Advance. Then DS to 3DS and now the Switch. It’s likely the next console will be a stepped up Switch more so than a Next Gen console without a handheld mode. That’s a baffling step backwards and throws away the Switch’s main selling point.
It helps that Nintendo can keep centralized by focusing on only one system. I
really don't want them to go back to having console and portable divisions, especially after the 3DS and the WiiU proved that they absolutely can not balance the two like they used to (the 3DS was getting pretty much everything developed for it while the WiiU was left with scraps..... some of which would get ported to the 3DS to add insult to injury; I'd also like to add that splitting Smash4 was a HORRIBLE idea). I was actually happy to see the 3DS finally die out, because I was worried that Nintendo would actually go through with that supposed "3DS successor" that was planned to be sold alongside the Switch. They sure tried to drag it out, though (the thing was getting ports and remakes all the way into 2019, most of which absolutely bombed BTW).
I also like that Nintendo seems to have stopped chasing after gimmicks for the most part. I mean, not that they still don't try to "innovate", but in an age where wireless peripherals are commonplace, there really is no reason to forcibly tie your system down to, say, a tablet controller that nobody asked for. They also seem to be better embracing the return to standard control schemes. Going forward, I'd honestly like it if the next system, rather than being completely defined by what kind of controller it uses, turned out to just be a more powerful Switch, much like how the GameCube was essentially a more powerful N64 and the SNES was a more powerful NES. Though I hope they manage to have digital backwards compatibility (or even physical BC), because when you consider that PC has become viable competition in the past decade or two, it would be best if Nintendo just had one centralized library stick around (Microsoft seems to have the right idea in that regard).
, and not having any real hope for Isaac (due to the direction Smash 4 was taking with many of its character picks and not even knowing how demanded Isaac was in the first place at that time), so I was just able to cruise control through Smash 4 speculation with much less stress.