Well, good to know expected patterns were followed. We've known since the analysis of that box that Ken and Incineroar were the last two characters, and yep, they sure were. I don't want to just gloat for anyone disappointed, but it seems like it should be hard to be really disappointed because you have had all the evidence in front of you for a good while now and surely deep down everyone knew, right?
What we didn't know about was Piranha Plant. Wow, hilarious! I would have 100% said that character would never happen, and honestly, I still wonder what development in-joke caused it to be a thing. Honestly the moveset looked pretty good; it seemed to really be able to stretch very far while maintaining a really small hurtbox when not attacking, but who can really say? Like any other character, I'll play it if it's a a powerful character who fits my playstyle needs; nothing about that was disqualifying.
Really more important than silly character reveals themselves, we got a lot of information about how Incineroar and Simon play. Incineroar at first looked really bad to me; he seems all around sluggish, he seems to have a lot of moves that don't cover a lot of space, and his recovery is suspect at best. As I look a bit more, I see that the side-special looks really nasty; it seems very fast for what it is, and it looks really rewarding on hit as long as you just get the timing down which will probably be incredibly easy. I can totally see side-B basically being the world's craziest landing trap because it not only covers the moments as you land but has extra wiggle room to cover the window immediately after landing since it is a grab and will eat shields too. I also saw in the middle of the generally mediocre Treehouse gameplay what looked like a pretty rangy jab on Incineroar which could be an important tool, and while it was hard to tell because of Boxing Ring, that bthrow looked like a kill throw to me. I'm cautiously optimistic that Incineroar will have a meaningful gameplay niche.
Simon just looks so good. His mobility is looking average which is great for what he is, that range looks incredible, and I look at a move like that ftilt and wonder why it doesn't take like twice as long to come out. Those projectiles look like all around just better versions of the traditional Link projectiles too; this character is going to absolutely dominate space like perhaps no one else in the game, and with a normal grab, a nair that hits everywhere, one of the better looking dash attacks that also counters projecitles for reasons I don't understand, and a multi-functional dtilt he hopefully has enough tools to play around situations where just zoning them out forever isn't working out. I do worry about what looks like a Little Mac tier up special for recovery, but we saw fairly little evidence of how big that tether recovery was. If it can be used a lot like Ivysaur's, maybe we still have a poor recovery overall but good enough that you can avoid having to be like Brawl Olimar whose basically dominated while on stage but had to kinda rework a lot of his strats around how essential it was for him to avoid being off-stage.
Unfortunately our Simon match was mostly him getting wrecked by Wolf, but Wolf is a kind of new character too. He looks so much better than he was in Brawl; I see just bigger hit effects on most of his moveset (fsmash was really the only move that looked smaller, and usmash in particular looked almost literally twice as big), and he just seemed to move and attack faster than in Brawl. That laser also looked like a VERY good projectile; it seemed to still have the beefy hit effect from Brawl but to actually animate at a reasonable speed which means Wolf should beat most of the cast in the projectile battle pretty easily even without bringing out his reflector which is a big deal itself. Side-B still puts Wolf in helpless so that does rule out theories that only up-Bs have helpless now (though you only had to say the name "Meta Knight" to realize that probably wasn't true anyway), and I really didn't like the knockback on Wolf's jab3 at low damage at all as it seemed to be a lot less advantage than a typical jab3, but overall I saw what was a very encouraging sign that this time Wolf might be a real character instead of "bair: the character" like he was in Brawl.
