Apologies for making you wait so long. Apparently new posters can post a maximum 3 posts per hour. I thought it was just the 10 per 24 hours rule.
Working with Sakurai wasn't the opportunity I was hoping it would be, as he really seemed like such a nice guy from all the interviews. But I'm leaving Sora after this game is done and heading back home to the US and most likely go back to school, which is why I'm okay with being "relieved of my duties" pre-release.
As for why other characters were not chosen:
- Chrom was shot down due to looking too much like Marth. This also went for Lucina as well. His explanation was that characters in a fighting game like Smash Bros. need to stand out from the others, as getting confused who your character is can wreck the match for you.
- We initially planned to include Little Mac, but changed our minds when coming up with concept ideas for him, as he was very one dimensional.
- I don't mean to feed the "too big" crowd by saying this, but Ridley did have programming problems. He is a very time consuming character due to all of his parts (wings, tail, head and claws), and we felt that by choosing not to go ahead with Ridley, we could spend more time working on other characters. We didn't want to copy Charizard's animations as Sakurai has really high standards for this game.
- When Sakurai chooses his "retro" characters (Pit and Ice Climbers), as we found out, he only wants to choose characters who are international. Despite his appearance in Samurai Warriors 3, and a cameo in Nintendo Land, Sakurai felt he was still locked to Japan and denied him.
I didn't say spring release. Q2 implies April to June. And it's looking moreso like it'll be June.
All of the characters will be done by the end of February. We'll be finalizing everything in March, and then getting ready to release it.