Agreed, there will be more massively requested characters added but my only issue is that people are too over confident in the amount of newcomers requested.
I expect at least 3 or 4 left with one of them being a WTF/oddball choice since Sakurai likes surprises.
When Sakurai said “don’t expect too many newcomers” he didn’t mean “expect slightly less newcomers” he means too many.
Right. Let's talk strictly numbers, as a fun little exercise.
Super Smash Bros 64. started the series with 12 characters, technically
all newcomers.
Melee came out with all 12 veterans, as well as 14 newcomers (counting Sheik and Zelda separately), for a total of 26.
Then, we had Brawl, with 21 veterans and 18 newcomers. (Again, counting all transformations separately), for a total of 39.
Most recently, we had Smash 4, with 37 veterans (this is only
two less than Brawl's entire roster.), and a whopping 21 newcomers. This is including DLC, and this brings us to a whopping 58 characters.
Finally, this brings us to what we have with Ultimate
so far. We've got a whopping 65 veterans, and 8 newcomers. Bringing us to a total of 73 characters and we're not even done yet.
So, sorry for being long winded, but let's recap here and give you just the numbers without as much fluffy text. "N" will stand for "Newcomer" and "V" will stand for "Veteran".
SSB64: 12N = 12
SSBM: 12V + 14N = 26
SSBB: 21V + 18N = 39
SSB4: 37V + 21N = 58
SSBU: 65V + 8N = 73
I don't know about you guys, but when you lay the numbers out like that and just look at the numbers, it kind of gives a sense of the absolute scale of this game. Will this be the first game where the amount of newcomers is
less than the previous games? Sakurai's "don't expect too many newcomers" statement seems to have planted that thought in our minds. If the trend were to continue, we would need at least 22 newcomers, which would be an incredible 87. This seems nearly impossible without extreme padding from Echo Fighters (which already comprise half of our 8 newcomers), but it's a really exciting thought.