I personally wouldn't call it biased. While it's true that there are more eastern established franchises in the game I think it's because of completely different reasons as to what you might think. There are many strings attached when trying to add a character Nintendo doesn't own. So besides all the paperwork around the rights of a character and what not, there'd need to be communication. There's a language barrier and timezones to work with. And while that can be worked with, it's still quite the obstacle which makes things fairly difficult, especially when working on a level of quality, scope and speed that they manage to do with Smash.
So to me it looks to be more troublesome to work with a western franchise. On top of that, like Tybalt said, they're aiming for that big splash, that "OMG!"-moment. I can only imagine they'd try to aim to appeal both eastern and western gamers too and eastern games tend to do better in the west then western games do in the east (or at least that's what it feels like to me), making it more likely for eastern well known game icons to appear in smash than western icons.
It might just be as simple as perception though. Look at it from Sakurai's eyes. The man lives in Japan, where the gaming market is probably fairly different, different games are being hyped up there. That's why it's so likely to most that we'll see Erdrick from the DQ series. People over there are going nuts over it compared to the west. And while it's not as big here as it is there, it's most certainly big enough
and growing. It'd only nudge up the marketing for DQ in the west more. Seems like another
win-win situation for them.
TLDR; There is definitely more characters from eastern franchises, but I wouldn't say it's biased (rather more feasible I guess?). To me it's a mix of perception, convenience and marketing, not just pulling favorites.
That's just how I've looked at the situation though, I haven't looked too much into it.
Looping this back to Shantae though... I don't think she'd make a big splash by herself, but more so for being considered an indie-character. Her moveset potential, growing success in Asia, longer living franchise compared to other indies... etc, makes her one of the best options (in my eyes) if Nintendo did decide to go for that
'indie rep'. And I honestly think Nintendo might go that route since the Switch seems to really embrace indies. Whether or not they'll go for Shantae? I don't know, fingers crossed!
I've been kind of out of the loop on smash in general lately, because not too long ago I've been sucked into 2D animation all thanks to Shantae Half-Genie Hero. So after the announcement of Shantae 5 I just had to try this:
I'll be going back to lurk mode again now though, you guys keep up the great discussions!
