There's more to the Smash hype than characters.
I feel like the "final" Smash direct has a layout like so:
- opening with the joint Ken/Incineroar trailer (roughly 2-3 minutes)
- Sakurai talks about the newcomers he hasn't talked about much yet, being K. Rool, Isabelle and now Incineroar. They each get a couple minutes of moveset overview.
- A few more veterans with moveset changes are brought up, as was the case with the E3 direct
- One more item, AT and PokeBall montage
- Spirits mode gets like 10-15 minutes of discussion because it has to be good if it's being held back from the first Smash direct so it'll be hype
- We get another 10 or so minutes of all the online features
- Sakurai then shows us the full opening to the game as a 'thank you for watching'
- and ends with a trailer for the direct DLC character that will probably not be Primrose from Octopath
That's roughly 45 minutes of Smash.
I know a lot of people are saying "how can there only be two characters left to show?" Yes, by this time in Brawl's cycle, we had 5 characters left and from Smash 4, we had 3 left. But there's one big thing I don't see many people connecting into this:
Ultimate has fewer newcomers.
Assuming we have 11 in the worst case scenario, that's, roughly, 2/3rds of the Brawl and Smash 4 newcomer lists, with approximately 1/5th of the newcomers left to how off. 1/5th of Brawl's newcomer amount is around 4. And for Smash 4, 1/5th is 3. Proportionally, assuming we make it decently into October without another direct, this is par for the course, and if I'm reading the chart
P
Paperchampion23
posted, we're roughly around the Robin/Lucina reveal time on the calendar (and by this time next month, we'll definitely be past it).
I know speculation is driven by 'more. More. MORE', and Ultimate seems to have that as a design philosophy. But we were told there were 'a few reveals left', and we're all aware that newcomers seem to be the exception to 'more. More. MORE'. We would need another 9 characters to rival Smash 4 and Brawl's newcomer amounts, which is honestly crazy considering that's double of what we already have, and would mean this game has 27 more characters than Smash 4. I just don't see that being realistic.