Good evening everybody! I just wanted to comment on a few things. Also, I may use roster maker and literally just make a grouping of potential newcomers.
Alright, here we go:
1) Nintendog is
not going to happen. It's better off as a stage, and given the fact that it's a literal dog, Nintendo could get into some crap for that. That
would receive coverage. Newer games coming out have been targeted for other big issues (Detroit: Become Human for using child abuse or "glorifying" it or something). If you use Nintendog, you're pretty much asking for it.
I would also feel very uncomfortable grabbing a dog as Mario and swinging it around. No thank you.
Also, I'm not entirely sure that putting Dr. Kawashima would work. Sure, it's a cartoon version of a person, but he's also a floating head. If they are planning on putting a real person in, I firmly believe it would be advertised as a Mii Fighter. I honestly believe they would not add Kawashima on these grounds. You may disagree and that's fine. But I simply don't see it happening.
2) I think Elma would be pretty fun. I will admit, I owned XCX but never played it because my friend told me about the soundtrack. I also watched videos making fun of the worse songs from that game. Oy. More than anything, I would love to see what she actually does in-game.
HOWEVER...
How is it, exactly, that we can be expecting content from Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild but not Xenoblade Chronicles 2? That doesn't make any sense. This is where I think we all need to take a deep breath and realize there's more to this character selection stuff than "what's popular" at the time of roster selection. This takes me to #3.
3) Sakurai, when picking the roster would, logically, not only think about what is popular at the time of roster selection. He would (at least I would think) think ahead to what would be more relevant around the time of release of the game itself. Based on what I've read, Xenoblade 2 started development in 2014, which would be 2 years prior to the selection of the roster. Xenoblade X released in 2015.
If you ask me, this suggests the possibility that Sakurai visited Monolith Soft and examined his options. At this point, there would have already been fanbase complaints about the change in direction of XCX, but this may be a negligible detail. Regardless, Sakurai likely saw stuff for Elma AND Rex.
I would say Elma has an edge over Rex+Pyra as far as unique abilities, given the fact that she uses an entirely different weapon from Shulk and Rex. Although I don't really know, because Rex probably wouldn't fight like Shulk at all, or any other sword fighter for that matter. Would this put Elma in over Rex+Pyra? I'm not so sure.
4) The Pokemon choice may not be obvious, but I don't think it's really that wide open. Every character we've gotten is either a hyper popular Pokemon, or has been a focus of either the games or anime. While I realize Greninja was a very different case in that he was chosen as the "X/Y" character, I
do believe Game Freak/The Pokemon Company
probably gave them a few different concept arts of suggested choices. I do not believe they gave him entirely free reign over what he picked. I don't think it was that Sakurai was at their mercy persay, but I really,
really don't think they just let him choose out of however many new ones there were.
In addition, we've been playing in Alola since November 2016, and just got Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon this past Fall, 2017. If the roster was decided early on in development (or Summer-Fall 2016) what would Game Freak have told him? Alola is the focus for the next two installments, timing would be roughly at least a year and a half.
If we reference the amount of time between Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire and Sun/Moon, it was a two year difference. OR/AS is the midway game (so the Gen 6 US/UM). If that is the case, we can estimate the release date of Generation 8 (which we know nothing about, by the way) would be in 2019, at least a year after Smash Switch comes out. Based on this, I believe we can logically assume that we
will not get a Gen 8 Pokemon character in the base game. I will firmly put my guess at 0%, but will gladly change it if we get a surprise reveal at E3 this year (in which case I would probably **** my pants and gladly be wrong).
5) Not about characters, but I think some of my dudes here need to relax. Dudes, it's a video game. It's fun to talk about, and even more fun to play. Don't let "predicting the roster selection!" take over your lives, it really doesn't matter anyway. No one in this community will hail you as a god if you get it right. Most people will probably be like me and fade away to
play the game once it comes out.
Enjoy yourselves, and remember what brings us here is the love of the game! (AT LEAST I THINK!)