Now that I've had time to reflect on the Direct...
-Ken makes perfect sense as an Echo - no issues there.
-I felt like Incineroar was an anti-climactic way to end the roster at first, but I'm interested in his grappler playstyle. I figure my bigger issues were my unfamiliarity with Pokemon outside of gens 1-3 and 6, combined with the sheer amount of characters who were confirmed as assist trophies or spirits. Speaking of which...
-I'm not as worried about the Spirits mode as I was at first. Given the way that it was described, I was concerned that any character announced for that was confirmed to not be considered for DLC, but if it's supposed to replace trophies, that's not necessarily the case
-I hope that there's a gallery mode for Spirits that gives you a biography of the character, like what we had for trophies - it was interesting to find out about characters that I wouldn't have been familiar with otherwise.
-I feel like the Direct didn't need to be forty minutes long - it felt like way too much time was spent on relatively minor options, like screen brightness.
-I wonder what we'll be getting for beating Classic and All-Star Modes with a character, seeing as trophies are no longer an option. Once the DLC's released, we'll have to do it at least 82 times, so it would be hard to motivate anyone to do that without some kind of reward.
-some of the assist trophy confirmations were still really rough, especially Isaac (who would have made a great playable character) and Skull Kid (who was only confirmed through the website as still being an AT - not sure why the Smash development team hasn't added a brand new Zelda character in 17 years, when any of the Zelda assist trophies (EDIT: not including the Moon) would make for great playable characters)
-Piranha Plant could be a fun character, and it definitely shows that Sakurai and the rest of the development team are still having fun with making characters for this game. It's just a shame - Smash 4's first DLC character was Mewtwo, which got people excited because he was a veteran with a lot of demand behind him, and it really set the tone for Smash 4's DLC. Piranha Plant just inspired confusion or anger, it seems
-I have no idea what to expect for the DLC. I figure it's going to either be characters from new series (whether it's first party or third party), or characters from games where the cast changes with each installment. I'm guessing, since Xenoblade Chronicles 2 came out too late to be included and there's a lack of Xenoblade Chronicles X music, that we'll be getting Elma along with a stage from Xenoblade Chronicles X, but beyond that, I have no idea
-despite Akira making the jump from Mii costume to assist trophy, there was no Tekken content - maybe we'll be getting a Tekken character as DLC?
-with Kencineroar confirmed, I think the only major material from Vergeben that we haven't gotten are a Square-Enix character and a Minecraft stage. Not sure how likely it is that we'll be getting Steve? as DLC, but there could have been other bits of info that Vergeben mentioned and I missed.
All in all, I'm okay with it. It was a little underwhelming, and probably longer than it needed to be, but the game's looking fantastic.
: *preexisting getting hit noise*
