Every time I read one of the Ridley's supporters statements, I cringe at their delusional thickheadedness. It's nothing but lunacy. Pure irrational, deluded, crockpot lunacy. Before you Ridley supporters start to hate on me, I will tell you that I too, was once a supporter for Ridley as a character and am a big Metroid fan. However, I only was hoping him to be a character when it was sensible. After the direct, all rational common sense of Ridley being a playable went down the toilet. I chuckle at all your so-called "evidence" of Ridley being a playable character looked like some laughable bull**** that I'd read at a crazy Illuminati or 9/11 "Truther" website.
It helps your point if you don't lace it with ad hominem. I'm not responding to this paragraph, because it's literally just ad hominem.
Knowing how irrational and warped your delusional subhuman "minds" are, you probably won't agree with my statement, but it was pretty obvious that all this sadness and anger should have erupted out of us in April, but then the people who still wanted Ridley as a character deluded themselves with insane "evidence" denying the simple truth that Ridley would be a stage boss.
More ad hominem. You aren't getting any brownie points like that, I suggest you stop. You just make yourself sound ridiculous.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that in the direct, it was obviously shown that Ridley was only a boss, as he was talked about during the boss segment. Perhaps it could've been a cop-out but the subtitles clearly said "OTHER BOSS CHARACTERS." In other words, Sakurai was giving us a sort of Neon sign saying that Ridley is clearly a boss. I can not comprehend the sort of deluded loony mind that would automatically interpret this obvious barely-hint as "character teasing." As for why Ridley is only a shadow and why Ridley's boss showing is seemingly vague, it's to hype him up as a boss, making the viewer wonder what will Ridley try to do to me at Pyrosphere? So the real question wasn't if Ridley was a boss or not, rather, it was "What kind of boss are we looking at?"
In hindsight, it was a neon sign. The shadow, the slowness, size and choppiness of the shadow that
is more reminiscent of a playable character whether you care to acknowledge it or not leaves more than enough room for ambiguity regarding his role. The fact that Ridley's boss showing was vague in this way wasn't a character tease, but it left enough ambiguity for people to be able to logically believe that he could still have a chance to be playable. If you believe otherwise, you're using massive hindsight bias because the shadow in the direct looked nothing like
any boss character I've ever seen, let alone in a Smash Bros. game.
You will probably respond asking how is it possible to get hyped for a boss character? I will tell you right now that not everyone thinks bosses are lame as most of you apparently do. When Brawl came out, I was excited to fight boss characters. Fighting boss characters was exciting, it offered a different sort of challenge then fighting against normal opponent, which was a powerful opponent that couldn't be killed by knock back. When I found out that Ridley would be able to do that sort of thing and I could have a normal match with my friend at the same time, I was thrilled.
There's nothing wrong with bosses, and I'm excited for the mechanic myself, if a bit miffed that the character I wanted most was left out to showcase such a mechanic. As for hyping, it's not impossible to hype up a boss character at all. To hype up such a highly-requested character wanted to be playable as a boss rather than the plethora of others that could've been picked that people would have just accepted and gotten excited for the new mechanic is very questionable, however. Because the shadow was so playable character-like, too, I'd be shocked if people
didn't still believe.
Just because you all think stage hazards are uncompetetive, you automatically think they suck, which is pure arrogance. You must be selfish to think that being a stage hazard is bad just because they aren't tournament legal. News Flash: there's far more to Smash than playable characters and platforms. My point in saying this is that just because bosses don't give you hype doesn't mean everyone isn't hyped by bosses.
What...? I'm a Ridley supporter that supported him after the Stage Boss tease, and labeling us as that literally makes no sense. I just... what? Not all Ridley fans hate stage bosses because they're like that, and I shouldn't really even have to say that... and why would anyone hate them for that anyway? There's Final Destination versions of all the stages for competitive players. I love items and the idea of stage bosses, and I'm a supporter of Ridley. The main point was that Ridley as a stage boss doesn't give us hype because he's highly requested to be playable, and because he's been a boss before. Hell, he's been a boss in this exact stage in Dead or Alive Dimensions, another fighting game. Nothing of this is a new concept for Ridley. But, really... grouping the Ridley fanbase and the competitive fanbase just completely astounds me. I don't see the link
anywhere.
I will most likely get disliked for saying this, but I feel that Ridley fits being a boss much better than being a playable character in Smash. The major reason for this is because of Ridley acts in combat. Ridley is not usually a ground fighter, (though he can be quite adept at grounded close-quarters combat when he needs to, to say the least) but a fierce foe in the air.
Nah, man. That's cool. Ridley
does work well as a boss. Most people hypothesised that playable Ridley would be the opposite of Little Mac, good in the air but with a weaker ground game. All the same, he works very well as a boss like that. I mean, the Direct didn't exactly
showcase these properties with the shadow, but still.
Ridley fly's with extreme speed and maneuverability, and that wouldn't work out as a playable character, because he'd then become overpowered and banned from competitive play. His flight ability and speed would be so cheap that he'd make Brawl's Meta Knight look tame.
By that logic, Ganondorf wouldn't be able to be KO'd by anyone but Master Sword-wielding Link, and Palutena wouldn't be able to be playable because she's a super OP Goddess. Being fast and able to fly would
never hurt his chances, because he's done it all as a boss. As a playable character, he would be nerfed in those areas. I'm surprised I had to say this at all, as well.
Ridley is also insanely large; in all canonical appearances from Zero Mission to Fusion, Ridley is large enough to have Samus, a woman who is tall in her own right, almost fit in the palm of his hand.
Um, what?
Palm of his hand?
Unlike Bowser where he can be large human sized, such as in Mario Party, Ridley is usually a consistent size throughout the Metroid series. Metroid is a more realistic game then Mario, so sizes in that game should be taken more seriously.
But this isn't Metroid. This is Smash. Plus, Ridley isn't a consistent size throughout the Metroid series. He's smaller in Super Metroid than he is in Zero Mission and Fusion, and even in Metroid Prime 3 he goes from being huge and able to fit Samus in his palm as Meta Ridley to not-so-huge as Omega Ridley in the leviathan. On a side note, Ridley is one of the most consistently
small bosses in the Metroid series, too. He's usually roughly double Samus' height, which isn't too bad at all.
As a Ridley fan I also like that he's a boss then a playable character, as that shows that he's too powerful to fight the playable cast on their level. As a boss, he can be his true humoungus self and unleash his true OP potential that he's exerted in the Metroid series.
But Ridley would get his ass kicked by Samus, probably Palutena, Ganondorf, and even Sonic. On a side note, he's not really being his OP self if literally everyone can damage him with so much as a punch, which they'll be able to with him as a stage boss. Metroid weaponry is around the terawatt level, which he can take consistently. Judging by that, no matter how he's portrayed in Smash, it's not portraying him right.
As for all the disappointment of Ridley not being a character, you have no one to blame but yourselves. I'll admit, I was angry when Ridley was deconfirmed back in April when it was sensible to be sad about such a thing. But since then, the people in denial who remained as playable Ridley supporters than created insane crackpot conspiracies as to why Ridley might be playable.
See first response.
So the way he moves is slow and is similar to how you think a playable character would move, big whoop. We barely knew anything about the game, how could we know for sure what a playable character would or wouldn't be?
It wasn't similar to how we THINK a playable character would move, it was similar to how playable characters move. We knew that because we'd seen playable characters in action already.
Grabbing Pikachu doesn't prove anything, as Ridley grabbed Samus in Brawl and Other M, he could just do that as a boss. As for why he moved slowly in his shadow, he might just be looking for characters to pick up. What I'm trying to say here is that none of the movement of the shadow actually pointed to a playable character, it was only strange because Ridley is usually quite swift while attacking.
He grabbed Samus as part of a cutscene in Brawl. In Other M, if he grabbed Samus he would instantly shift and drag her against the wall. In the clip, he supposedly grabbed Pikachu, held on for a few seconds doing nothing, Pikachu broke free and jumped free, and he continued on. It pretty much all hinted towards a playable character, actually. The animation was seriously choppy like a playable character's, he moved incredibly slowly (and if a boss was going to pick someone up, it would likely swoop down and do it, not slowly float across to perform the most easy to see coming grab ever), and he didn't attack for the entire time he was on-screen.
Sakurai never hinted that Ridley would be a character, nor was he trying to tease the fans. By your demented logic, Metal Face had an even larger chance of being a playable character than Ridley, as he appeared in a trailer, where playable characters actually appeared in, and we only saw his shadow. "Nothing about his shadow says boss yet!"
More insulting! Surprise me some more. Metal Face wasn't a popular request to be playable. People doubted Ridley because he's a highly requested character and Nintendo likely know that, so they could have given us the clip in the direct to throw us off and make the payout even more sweet.
Why was Pyrosphere unusable at the demo, then? This might also be the same reason why Ridley's movement is unusual in his shadow: because Ridley wasn't finished yet, and at this point in time, they're still working on the Wii U version, and as a boss, they're giving Ridley a lot of care because of how iconic he is.
This is still ridiculous a sentiment. When Ridley was shown, it had been months since the original Pyrosphere tease. The development team aren't so incompetent as to go "Pyrosphere complete, let's put Ridley on the backburner!" and then in April go "Oh dear, April's rolled around! Better quickly make an unfinished version of Ridley and throw him in at the end!". If Ridley was incomplete, they either would have delayed showing him until he
was complete or they would have shown another, actually complete boss. Since there are multiple bosses, they wouldn't be only finishing the second in-game boss four months before Japanese 3DS release.
Though many of the desperate Ridley supporters compared his situation to that of Zero Suit Samus, Palutena or Toon Link, there is a major difference in Ridley's case. Unlike Palutena or Toon Link, where we saw Palutena's statue, that didn't ever prove her to be playable. Nothing was said about Palutena or Toon Link being unplayable. Toon Link being able to have Alfonzo operate the train for him is not comparable to Ridley, as operating the train isn't that important compared to being a stage boss. Lastly, right after Sakurai said that ZSS would not appear in this iteration of Smash Bros., he immediately told us that that statement was just a ruse, unlike Ridley's situation, where Sakurai was more serious in saying that a certain someone who would appear as a boss in Pyrosphere.
Nothing was ever actually said about Ridley definitely not being playable, nor as definitely a boss on Pyrosphere. It was a vague implication. "Other boss character appearances". It was definitely alluding to Ridley as a boss, but in a vague enough way that it was still possible to take it the other way. Just because you say it doesn't make it so; it wasn't as desperate or far-fetched as you make it out to be to compare Ridley to them, although I will agree that he wasn't very comparable to Toon Link or Zero Suit Samus. Palutena was more similar than those, however.
I bet from Sakurai's POV, he thought people would be overjoyed to find out that Ridley would appear in the Pyrosphere stage. You may then try to rebuke this and say "but when we were confused about other characters like Chrom, they told us that they weren't characters. Why not Ridley?" My answer to this argument is that they were actually vague for characters who seemed to be possible as characters, such as Chrom who was just part of a Final Smash. Unlike Chrom, Ridley wasn't in a reveal trailer, and in many of the reveal trailers for SSB4, there tend to be many playable characters in them. Ridley was in the bosses section, or in Japanese, it was "other boss gimmicks."
Ridley wasn't in the bosses section, because it doesn't exist. He was in the Yellow Devil section. As for the vagueness, it's irrelevant to the clearing up of situations; people were still believing and creating false hype around Ridley, and Nintendo didn't step down to tell them to stop creating false hype where they did for others like Chrom. The only link to vagueness was that the shadow in the clip itself was vague, which allowed the false hype to begin in the first place.
The most likely reason why Sakurai didn't flat out say "RIDLEY IS A F^%&ING BOSS YOU MORONS" is because he probably thinks his consumer base is actually has the common sense and intelligence to get the gist of what he was saying. He was trying to have fun by giving us a sneak preview of an important boss, he doesn't want to hold you by the hand and spell it out for you, unless it was an honest mistake, such as the Chrom incident. Sakurai thinks that his fans are intelligent humans with common sense. I'm sure he'd feel like his fan base was a bunch of idiots if he had to out of his way to point out the obvious when he instead wanted to hint it out to them. The likely reason he never said anything about Ridley after the Direct was because he thought good of us.
Christ, you are so heavily biased against believing after April and it's showing everywhere in your argument. The boss isn't an important boss, and this can be seen because Ridley isn't in both versions of the game. He's not on the level of the Yellow Devil. As for intelligence, it's kinda... completely and utterly irrelevant? Ridley's shadow was ambiguous because it was more akin to a playable character than it was to a boss character, which allowed false hype to rise. Sakurai should have told people to stop. Intelligence and holding hands with us have nothing to do with it; there was more than enough reason for people to believe he could still be playable after the direct, and if there wasn't the thread wouldn't have continued.
Please, do not blame Sakurai for your disappointment in the roster. You are to blame for your unrealistic expectations. You make up these elaborate theories right after the possibility has been thrown away, and as I predicted, many people whined about it. Sad. Just sad. If you weren't so warped or delusional, you could see that this game is much better than you think it is. Stop blaming Sakurai for everything. This guy worked really hard to make this masterpiece.
Sakurai did put his all into it, I agree. However, that doesn't mean people can't be upset with the final product and it definitely doesn't mean people aren't allowed to complain. He's far from perfect, even if it is a really good game. Please try to refrain from calling people warped and delusional if you don't agree with them, also. I agree that a lot of people are seriously selling it short because of what it's missing, but that doesn't give you the right to be condescending.
He even once mentioned that he got a bad headache or something while trying to work on this game.
This is irrelevant and doesn't mean people should suddenly not be able to complain about the game because Sakurai got a headache one time throughout the five years it spent in development.
Stop being so insulting, it only makes you less credible as someone who is arguing. Argue from a less aggressive viewpoint and people will take you a lot more seriously.