I agree with all of what you said, but I think there's also a point where celebrating the character and their history can go a bit too far in Smash.
I feel like much of the community disagrees with this. One of the biggest things I see is that characters in Smash don't have enough representation of the character or the franchise in their move sets.
One of the key examples of this is the Echo Fighters. Think about how much people were upset over Daisy and Dark Samus for being just clones and not being good representations of the characters or the series they come from. This also applies to the rest echoes that aren't Ken and Richter, and often representation gets removed and replaced. DK no longer has his bongos for his Final Smash so that we can have a generic rapid punches finisher that is basically one-for-one what Giga Mac does.
Pokemon doesn't have a rep from each generation, Wario doesn't bring enough from Warioland, LoZ doesn't have a single rep that isn't tied to the big three, Mario doesn't have a single spin-off character in the game as playable, the lid on third party has only really just been opened...this and so much more comes from this community on how much better representation can be.
To me with SSBU out of the way, the next smash no longer has to be a celebration of gaming and should much more on effective game-play and fun characters with good / interesting personality and a quality gameplay experience. Also and more importantly how much of a celebt\rstion of gaming is it with only Japanese characters and Steve being the only true exception? More like a Celebration of Nintendo and some other third Parties & definitely excluding Sony.
1 I care. I don't want the characters you referenced in Smash anymore. Nor do I care for a single non Nintendo character in SSBU as of Sora
2 I already clarified how i see effective gameplay.
3 I cannot find more than few characters because of the bloat and the fundamental opposition the development has seem to have had against the very things i want most. I am hoping the next game can remedy via moving towards better aerial combat and effective recoveries.
4 this is not completely prove-able.
So...because one game got to celebrate videos games better than the rest, you want Smash to drop it's core identity? OG Smash and Melee celebrated Nintendo's big franchises, and Brawl expanded that ever so slightly to ALL video games IPs. Since then, we've only gotten MORE third party IPs represented in Smash, so I'm not sorry to say that Smash's identity is Video Games: The Game and has been since Brawl. We've talked about this many a time, but Smash cannot go back to being just about Nintendo reps...like, ever. It just can't, it's come too far.
So...because the roster has mostly characters from games made by Japanese companies, it's not celebrating gaming? Reality check: Japanese-based video game companies have been in the ring on average much longer than non-Japanese video game companies. Easy example: Microsoft's OG Xbox dropped in 2001. That seems like a long time, 21 years, right? Welp, Nintendo dropped the Famicom in 1983. That's working up to 40 years ago, and it was 18 years before Microsoft made their first console, and they also made the SNES, N64, Gamecube, Gameboy, Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance ALL before the OG Xbox dropped. That means over 18 years, over all these consoles, they've had time to make so many games in so many ways and have people fall in love with the characters from those games. Sony dropped the PSX in 1993, which gives them 7 years over Microsoft to make things people fell in love with.
Everyone loves characters from Nintendo, Capcom, Square, Konami, Koei Tecmo...but very few companies in the West have TRULY made iconic characters that last throughout the ages. It's not that there aren't any at all, just that there are so many more from Japanese companies. Honestly, I would blame US consumers more than anything else at this point, because what somehow sells most here are re-hashed sports games and cycled the same couple of FPS games every couple years. Kinda hard to draw from those for a character pool...
- I want you to dwell for a moment on what you just said. You just said you don't care about Little Mac, Donkey Kong, Bowser or King K. Rool in Smash...the only rep from Punch Out that people fought for during the Brawl days, the OG rival to Mario and absolute icon, the arch-nemesis of Mario that goes back almost as far as he does and was originally desired to be in OG Smash, and the arch-nemesis of DK that was fought for during the Smash 4 days and was a HUGE inclusion. You don't want ANY of them to be in the game any more, even though we JUST got King K Rool? I can't tell you how to feel, but I think you may need to either reevaluate yourself here or move to another platform fighter. Seeing that none of the third party picks between Simon/Richter, Ken, Joker, Hero, B&K, Terry, Steve, Sephiroth, Kazuya and Sora did at least SOMETHING for you reaffirms this for me: you are clearly too niche in your picks to find any satisfaction in the character choices, and that's flat out on you.
- And I already clarified that how you look at the game is not the only way the game should be looked at or designed around. Having every character be designed where you value being 'effective' or optimal eventually leads to only having one character with different colors. Characters have to play different from another and need to have flaws to create diversity in the roster: if everyone plays the same, then people will just flock to their favorite skin over that playstyle and bore themselves much faster as there are less options. Who cares if some characters aren't as good with aerial options in a game where aerial options are a key factor? Learn how to play to your strengths and adapt to the match at hand. Even if the game is changed so that the entire roster has better aerial options, some characters would still suck in that regard in comparison to others, and that's something you need to accept as a part of game design.
You wouldn't want every character in a MOBA to play the same, or in a Hero Shooter. If the most effective thing in an RPG is Fire Magic, should every character and every class do nothing but the most optimal Fire Magic? Do you think Borderlands would have made it as far as they did if you only had ONE character to play with ONE build path where they could do EVERYTHING and do it optimally? No, people love the different characters because of their personality and HOW THEY PLAY.
- I don't know what you want most, but frankly it sounds like your wishlist is very narrow. As someone who really only wants Geno, I still have other characters that I would like to see get in that I would be excited for. For example, I also want Waluigi and to a lesser extent Paper Mario, which now means that Nintendo could maybe make me happy within a range of Mario characters instead of just one. I also want a new LoZ character, and even though I prefer Skull Kid, I'm open to Impa or Minda as well, so now Nintendo has two IPs that could please me. Toss in my love for all things fighting games, a fondness for RPGs and platformers, and how I'm rooting for characters my friends want as well...and now suddenly there is a whole heap of characters from multiple companies that I would be excited to see. It's not hard to be happy about inclusions if you broaden your horizons a bit.
- Maybe not, but the Melee scene is never happy with anything that isn't EXACTLY their version of the game they play, and there is no way Nintendo would just release Melee EXACTLY how it was at first release and just update how it looks to more modern standards. Just doing that alone could easily mean needing to change hitboxes and hurtboxes, so the idea that it would be the exact same game is absurd and not enough of the competitive scene (which is all Melee really has now) would move over to keep it alive.
