The marketing strategy for Ultimate has been pretty clear by Nintendo so far if we simply know with which angle to look at it.
All the bigger guns were revealed towards the first half of reveals of both base game and pass 1, and it's been no different for pass 2. We could even say no further than midway of the passes, as the extreme late they were revealed. Hero, Banjo, Steve and Sephiroth… none of them were left to be the closers, they didn't follow the silly fan logic of anything having to end on a "big" note. People who expect something huge are stuck in Smash 4 time just because Bayo was the closer there. People ignore this is a different game and DLCL has been handled differently, period.
Even in base game reveals, we ended with a pokemon and an echo, not with something huge like fan demand as Krool or Ridley were, hell they could've ended with Simon and it would've been big too, but alas, they ended with an echo and a pokemon, small notes. Byleth ended pass 1, also a small note too compared to what was included preivously in the pass, specifically during its climax (banjo and hero).
In the case of DLC passes specifically, this is where it's truly important because of the
pass format of the DLC, which is the most profitable option for Nintendo to have the players buy, opposite to just buying a few individual characters which obviously means less profit for Nintendo.
To ensure that the pass format sells before people ultimately decide to just buy individual characters they like as they are revealed (if they haven't decided that already since the start), Nintendo showed their biggest guns as early on as possible so that they would feel like "ok i'm gonna go blind and buy the entire pass, because this is promising". This is why big guns have NEVER closers in Ultimate, because
there is no benefiting commercial effect in having them happen that late.
The fact that
XC2 was included when it did, instead of being left for the end as closer of the 2nd DLC pass, to me it was like the "closest" to a confirmation of the fact that that they don't have anything huge left 3rd party wise to ensure more Pass format sales during the climax of the pass, which has already passed. Similar to how, like I said, the big reveals of pass 1 and base game were during the climax of such reveal seasons, never the closers.
It's funny that we find through a
dataminer here on Smashboards that Kazuya's data is located before Sephiroth and Pyra's data, which could either mean:
a) He needed to start development early on for Sakurai to figure out how to make Tekken make sense in Smash (which was the reason why he said Heihachi wasn't getting in way back during Smash 4)…
OR
b). Maybe Kazuya was actually meant to happen sooner but couldn't because of the struggle to make him work? It was already weird that Heihachi's mii happened earlier than Kazuya, separate from his pack even.
Of course this is speculation, but it IS official data placement, which makes it worth at least wondering about it… even if we will never know the real reason behind it.
In any case…
Because of how Nintendo has marketed andput the big guns during these 2 passes, I doubt entirely that the closer will be once again any 3rd party high note. This is a business to Nintendo after all, it doesn't matter if it's the end of the DLC for Smash Ultimate, that doesn't change anything, it's just a fans delusion that it should mean anything at all. Nintendo WANTS that profit the most they can, while they can. It all makes sense when you look at it from a business perspective.
Which is why this simply leads me to think that we will just get an unexpected first party character instead, which would fall in line with the fact that we got 1st parties for both base game and Pass 1 closers as it is… .