@Fatmanonice: I'm not going to respond to every little thing. I will mention the big things.
1.Dr. Mario was planned to be in Brawl.
2. Also, no one buys games for "personality." Sakurai knows this.
3.The problem is there are two ways to ascribe it(think that's the right word). Look
He basically said "If I can add a character, even if it's not playable, then fans will still be happy."
You see it as Sakurai is being a knave. As if he's using it as an excuse.
I see it as Sakurai being apologetic. He saying that he can't add everyone, so he hopes to "make due."
I believe it's the later because Sakurai isn't not a knave. He wants people to enjoy his games. You see his attitude in other Nintendo employees (all of Nintendo's second parties share Nintendo philosophy. This is why Nintendo bought up Monolith). Also, the topic is always on playable characters. People focus on these more then static characters. Sakurai knows this. His goal would be to try and get all the characters people want. Not add what he wants. (Big note here: Games sell and developers are successful when they think about the user and NOT themselves. Miyamoto has pioneered this).
4.Bold is contradicting. The idea was fans have been clamoring for his return. And yes, they were. Sakurai said he probably wouldn't have added Pit. It was Western fans that got him in. Sakurai said this himself. No need to really reply to the rest.
5. Well, except the underline. Remember that Sakurai does not just add characters because they are popular. He said that adding only popular characters is not interesting. This also means he's looking at popularity.
6. People are never satisfied. Welcome to the internet.
7.No. Again, my reason for thinking it was a misstype was 2005 never added up. Which means I must have seen them yes? I have that thread bookmarked is all. Most of Thinkman's stuff is inline with what others wrote. I not going to buy anything until I see it.
This is kind of going backwards, but there are two distinct problems with both
8. First, you have mentioned Sakurai's journal before. But we don't know the poll's results. Just what Sakurai commented to. If you were right, and Sakurai added characters he found interesting, then what were none of the characters he mentioned we not playable and the others were. If these characters were that interesting, why did he go with the lesser interesting characters?
9.Also, unqiueness doesn't fly as 1)Any character can be unique and 2)he picked a lot of not so unique ones.Lucas, Wolf and Toon Link are very close to their original characters. With such an outcry against clones from Melee, why go back to it. And if Sakurai wanted these characters characters to be unique, then why did the borrow from other characters (we all know Toon Link could have been original).
10.Your good at countering my arguments, but not good at making your own. The problem with your claim is you found a source and then looked for the evidence to support a claim. Nothing lead you to the claim. You just decided it existed and tried to look for something to back it up. My argument is based solely on evidence. I thought 2005 was wrong because the evidence pointed elsewhere.
1. And was removed. The point still stands. I kind of have a theory that Dr. Mario was "folded" into Mario because Mario does have some of Dr. Mario's Melee traits.
2. True on its own but I don't think Smash Bros would be near as popular if it consisted of minor enemies and people like Toad. Again, bringing something new to Smash.
3. Sakurai's not a knave in the least (interesting choice of words, by the way), he simply knows that, no matter what he does, people will still buy his games. He's not bad for doing that because his wants usually align with what people like and people usually just deal with the stuff they don't like. Like I said in another post, he's like Miyamoto in that regard. Think about the Wind Waker; people were cutting their wrists and trying to build bombs in their garage when the art style was revealed but it still ended up being one of the top 5 best selling titles for the console. Super Mario Sunshine and Twilight Princess were very similar in that regard, there were things in the game that people didn't like but they still bought them and liked them regardless.
Look at Melee, nearly 1/3 of the cast was clones but it was still the best selling game for the console. Look at Brawl, crappy wifi, a lot of dumb extras, a mediocre adventure mode, and some characters choices that initially made people want to gnaw off their own arms but it's still in the top five best selling games for the Wii and sold more in six months than Melee did in its entire life span. This forum is a standing testement to how people still like the game despite it flaws even after a year and half. As he said, he somewhat caters to the fans (like with wifi when he said it'd be very hard to do with the Wii) but they do not control what he does with his games. Basically, he puts it into consideration but he's still judge and jury when it comes to whether he thinks a character is worthy or not. If popularity helps because it lets him know that the person even exists because, to be a expected, he's probably not familar with all the franchises and big games like some of us are.
Also, the reason I'm comparing Miyamoto and Sakurai is because comparing him to someone from an entirely different companry like Inafune (which I could have) would have detracked from the arguement if anything.
4. Sakurai doesn't really have any connections with North American fans. Both polls that have been done so far were both done in Japanese exclusively and entries that weren't in Japanese were pretty much thrown out. Basically, you had to use something like Babelfish to even have your opinions heard. He can speak and read English but it is very doubtful that a busy man like himself would spend his time searching through North American forums. Again, the only thing we have is a short letter he wrote to Nsider after E3 06 asking about the five new people that were shown in the E3 06 trailer.
5. He looks at it but it's not the most important factor. As said, the person has to go through his "screening process". It's not like "this guy's popular, I'll add him", it's more like "this guy's popular, why should I add him."
6. I'm fully aware with that but I think Brawl crushed most people's expectations, even more so than Melee. It's not a bad game in the least, it's just that we hyped it to be the end-all of Nintendo games. The point is that people looked at the poll (including myself) too much to determine who was going to become playable. Most people expected 50 characters, we got 39. People expected there to be at least one more third party character after Sonic but there wasn't. We expected the Wifi to be comparable to something like on Xbox Live, we got wifi that's barely passable despite probably 1/4 of the time being spent just on that. The SSE originally looked epic but was kind of mediocre in the end despite them spending nearly 60% of the development time on it. The point is, Brawl would have looked a whole lot different if Sakurai's goal was to go along with what the fans wanted.
7. Why doesn't it add up? Sakurai said himself one of the first things he did when the development building was finished was go back to HAL Labortories and get all the character data from Melee to build off of that. Considering a majority of Brawl's development focused on the SSE and online play, it makes a lot of sense that the characters were the first things they got out of the way and Sakurai obviously didn't waste any time making those his first priority when SORA was finally done and he had a solid development team to work with. Basically, from what we have from interviews, the time line kind of looks like this in terms of focus:
E3 05--> Iwata asks Sakurai to develop Brawl--> Sakurai decides the roster minus Sonic in the course of three days afterwords -->October 2005 ---> character development---> Sakurai gets all the Melee data from HAL-->January/February 2006---> focus shifts to SSE --> E3 06 --> Sakurai reveals origins of Brawl project after Brawl is revealed--> Nintendo World 06-->March 07-->Kojima reveals that Brawl is about 85% done and "feels like a finished project"--> E3 07 --> Reggies says that Brawl will be released in December 07--> focus shifts to online-->Nintendo World 07--> Demos are shown, Sonic is revealed and Brawl is delayed --> December 07--> IGN reveals delay is caused by complications with online play--> January 08--> Brawl is released in Japan--> GDC 08--> Sakurai reveals many details about Brawl's development
8. This actually adds more evidence to the roster being done early and fully programmed into the game before E3 06. Also, I've pretty much explained all the characters you asked about last time, who's left as uninteresting? Jigglypuff is a pest that won't go away and ROB was pretty much Sakurai's wild card.
9. The way that Toon Link, Wolf, and Lucas turned out was Sakurai's choice. As you said yourself, they have enough differences between their counterparts in Brawl to have original material but Sakurai didn't use it. Captain Falcon and Ganondorf are hardly alike but Sakurai made Ganondorf a clone (and then a semi-clone) anyways. They all still bring something new to Smash and follow most of the major and minor standards I've listed in other posts. (Just a recap: Sakurai's interest, uniqueness, popularity, playable in a canon game, having a leading role in at least one canon game, and able to fully and reasonably rep a franchise if they have). Like with Melee, they were probably done the way they were for the sake of efficency. Fox and Wolf are basically opposites with their personalities as are Lucas and Ness. Toon Link's radically different from Link solely based on age and graphic style. Again, something different even if in the long run its not that different/unique. In other words, they definately had the potential to be different, but Sakurai didn't go with it and that's the big key here.
10. And as I've pointed out, there's PLENTY of evidence suggesting that the roster was indeed decided in 2005, finished in early 2006. As I said earlier on, I think you're still hung up on the poll despite it being said by the man himself that the poll was pretty much a way to add cameos to at least please people with the satisfaction that their character requests weren't fully ignored (aside from the third party characters of course). Sakurai doesn't care about lists that people write in their school notebooks, he goes with what he wants and, lucky for us, we usually like it. Also, I'm not good at arguing? I really hope that wasn't an attempt at causing a STAB but you seem to be above that so I'll ignore that comment.
