Big-Cat
Challenge accepted.
Considering that the game was being developed on the N64, and he worked as a second party developer for Nintendo, Sakurai more than likely had access to such information. Anyway, popularity isn't the only factor as I've said before.Unless Sakurai had a special preview to the story of Mother 3, and loved it so much that he had to put Lucas in, I'm pretty sure his pottential inclusion in Melee would have been soley because he was topical, because unless Sakurai somehoe had access to the unreleased 64 game, there's no way he could have really judged the character as worthey/not many fans would actually be asking for him to get in.
If Link and Zelda were strictly their TP incarnations, we would have had very different movesets. Heck, we wouldn't have Sheik in Brawl either. While the Adult Link is used only in OoT and TP, I think he's considered the standard Link. We didn't see Young Link in SSB after all.I wouldn't really see how exactly they are supposed to be culminations of all the other Links and Zeldas designed for Smash, since they were clearly taken straight from TP. Now if you were to argue that TP's versions of them were supposed to be culminations, then that's another thing, but I kind of doubt that, seeing as their adult versions were only really used in OoT and TP, rather than the other games.
And I don't think Toon Link is going anywhere either, since he's technically still topical, given PH and ST. In fact, out of all of Link's incarnations, that one is the one that's used the most at this point.
Technically, Roy doesn't. If FE was subject to "topical" (I think this is a poor word for how recent something is.), then Roy wouldn't have been the second closest character to making it in Brawl. Heck, he wouldn't have been one of the Seven Deadly Fighters in the first place.Roy actually reinforces the idea that at least FE is governed by being topical, since his game wasn't even released in Japan when Melee came out. Also note that pretty much all of the Pokemon from Gen 1 and 2 were just taken from the last Smash games. (Bar Meowth kind of, since he worked differently there)
So what if the first two gens of Pokemon were taken from the last smash games? That still doesn't explain third gen Pokemon like Gardevoir.