From this page alone:
SO, um... any bets on the new Spirits? I'm definetly thinking at least one of those batches will be used for promotional reasons.
smashboards.com
You can see people speculating on it involving recent Nintendo games.
Thanks for linking this to me. Yeah, I kind of misread the conceptions of the community. It is odd for an anniversary event to focus on expanding content rather than revisiting popular content from previous entries. There's obviously no hard rule about this sort of thing, but does seem a bit off to me.
Don't do that to me.
Don't give me my personal best case scenario.
I'm spoiled enough as it is.
That said, are you implying the only thing to take from TotK is... Rauru?
I get the sentiment here, but I think it's overstating what this is. I'm sure the next game would have more to offer than one measly spirit, certainly none of these spirits are satisfactory representations of these respective characters or titles.
I can't tell you the exact motivation for adding these to Ultimate, outside of the Sora amiibo update being a good excuse to toss in some bonus content, but it's a bit disingenuous to suggest they just blew their load on TOTK content and now it wouldn't be a selling point for Smash 6. It still would be - all the music, stage, character options are still going to be just as enticing with or without a Rauru spirit in Ultimate. Nobody is gonna see say, Rauru get announced as a character or AT and be like ehh well we got TOTK content last game. I really don't think anyone is attributing this much weight to them.
Would be different if we suddenly got a really bulky update with new stages and music from each of these new games. That would be more reason to be skeptical of the intent, and question why they'd do this now and not next game. This just feels like biding time.
Oh, TotK definitely has a lot more content to offer beyond Rauru. TotK seems made for a stage and Link and Ganondorf will almost certainly have their designs updated to match TotK if a new Smash is in development. I think there's almost a very reasonable chance that TotK gets at least one item and an assist trophy.
How adding Rauru as a spirit to Ultimate is deleterious to a new Smash game because it pre-empts some of the fanfare of TotK's inclusion into Smash with a much less ceremonious role. Smash's selling point for new entries is always the expansion of the scale of the crossover. This is traditionally done through the inclusion of new franchises and the expansion of the way old franchises are represented. Even beyond the specifics of how an entry is portrayed, there's a certain degree of fun in just going "THAT GAME IS IN SMASH!?!". For example, people were really happy to see Undertale and Cuphead get any representation at all, regardless of the specifics of what that representation looked like. Now, late Switch-era games like TotK or Splatoon 3 aren't exactly analogous because people universally expect them to be added to Smash at some point in some form, but the general principle applies. Why spoil the fun of seeing Tears of the Kingdom being added to Smash generally by shoehorning it into Ultimate when you could just wait two or three years and give the game a more complete inclusion that better matches how the other mainline Zeldas in Smash?
It would be like adding trophies to represent Super Mario Odyssey, Breath of the Wild, Pokemon Sun and Moon, and Swapnote into Smash for Wii U in early 2017. Would it ruin the content added to represent these games in Ultimate? Of course not. However, it would dilute the general impact of these games being added to Smash, which harms Ultimate as a product.
I think it's moreso the idea of Sakurai going out of his way to use his limited development resources to make Ultimate a better game and the next Smash worse is bizarre, even if it is through pretty minor elements in the grand scheme of things. Everyone knows Ultimate is a tough act to follow. It's a stormcloud that hangs over the next Smash game and has characterized much of the post-Ultimate speculation period. Even Sakurai has acknowledged this to an extent, noting that there's no way that the next Smash will be able to match the size of Ultimate's roster. A new Smash game needs every advantage it can, especially in terms of how it will build off Ultimate as a crossover. Why go out of your way to make this task more difficult?
It's especially weird when you consider that labour had to be taken
off this hypothetical new Smash game to work on Ultimate. Even if making these new spirits was done by one employee in an afternoon, that's still an afternoon of work that is not being done on the next Smash. Sakurai's entire design philosophy is based on maximizing efficiency during development to stuff games with as much content as possible. Moving employees to work on an already complete project when they could be working on a new project directly contradicts this approach.
