Hey guys, I was thinking we could do another little hypothetical game to pass the time as E3 approaches.
Come up with, or pick, 2-3 “WTF” newcomers you’d like to see.
WTF characters are generally defined as curveball characters with seemingly no prior precedent set for their inclusion, and they tend to represent an iconic piece of hardware/software, or a time in Nintendo's history.
Of course you can have fun with this, and play fast and loose with the definition of a “WTF” character.
Here are some ideas I've come up with:
The Mario Paint cursor, with Mario in his painting smock in the background or foreground - its moves would rely on form swapping to one of the various cursors from the game, such as the fly swatter. Mario would be, in the vein of Pokemon Trainer, standing in the back or foreground, in his painting smock.
And we don't need to limit ourselves to first parties when playing this game...~
So, next. MissingNo. Listen, I actually don't have much of an idea as to how the hell this fighter would work, and its inclusion is typically only seen on preteen meme dream lists, but I've internally sold myself on it being a good idea.. at the very least it'd be a hilarious PokeBall inclusion, but, I digress.
Game hacking and cheating more specifically are huge mainstays of gaming and the culture surrounding it – and if WTF characters are geared toward celebrating hardware and odd quirks of the culture, then I think MissingNo. covers a few key bases.
I'd just suggest something like a GameShark/Game Genie character but there's probably tense licensing issues with those peripherals, and, hey, a WTF Pokemon character is one of the last things anyone would anticipate.
It wouldn't even need to be MissingNo., necessarily. It almost borders on being too close to Shrek and SpongeBob. A character that hacks or “glitches” the battlefield would be a lot of fun, however, and could still somehow be tied to cheating/code devices.
~~
Things like WTF items and stages are also a lot of fun to think about. A WTF item I've been thinking about, for example, would be something like an arcade cabinet item that is obtained/activated like an Assist Trophy, but instead of actually summoning AI help to the battlefield, the player would take control of a very barebones “game” UI (Space Invaders, for example) overlay that appears. Of course, the enemies you'd be aiming for in any given context of arcade game would be the other players/fighters. It'd be sort of a combination of AT/the dragoon parts/and a weaker Final Smash, in theory.