Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Inafune hand-pick Zero & Tron Bonne for MvC3?
than put in min-min, dr.Coyle, or whatever, as long as it's not twintelle.
I could see Ribbon Girl getting in as Spring Man's echo next Smash, but not over him. If anything, if we got a 2nd unique rep, it'd be between Twintelle & Min Min.
We need Min-Min because she's proven her popularity through the Party Crash. MIN-MIN FOR SMASH!
This isn't just about ARMS.
Even with your Three Houses example, they'd probably go for Edelgard over Claude given......spoiler-related reasons.
Then you know what a minor character Black is compared to Red. The situation's not comparable to ARMS at all, where you could pick literally any character of the roster as adequate representation of the game.
While that is especially true for the lack of racial diversity in Smash, Sakurai bears a decent chunk of the responsibility for the lack of women in Smash thus far when characters like Dixie Kong, Elma, & more exist (at least for the base roster). One could argue that he doesn't really care about that kind of thing, but that can be just as bad as having a negative opinion in cases like this. Though unless I'm mistaken, he mentioned that he wanted to bring more women to Smash during the Wii U/3DS days, so I have some hope that we'll get at least one more woman in the Fighters Pass.
I'm well aware of this.
Yeah, I actually made this thread with the (unlikely) "tease" from the trailer and I realized just how bad Super Smash Bros is at this.
That's the thing, I'd imagine that Sakurai would go for Andy over Sami is Advance Wars ever got a rep (which I honestly don't expect at this point unless AW gets a revival). Like most other main-character-first choices, it makes perfect sense for a crossover fighting game like Smash on paper, but it comes at the cost of potential representation for women on the roster as well as for people of color (though Sakurai's options for the latter are much more sparse overall.....something that I hope is rectified in the near future). I completely understand why Sakurai has this thought process when it comes to character selection. But as I said earlier, it's a double-edged sword that I wish that Sakurai eased up on from time-to-time (even with Robin, he was just as much the protagonist of Awakening as Chrom was, if not more so). Maybe not to the extent of MvC3 leaving out Mega Man, but maybe to the extent of Morrigan getting in MvC1 over Donovan.
I don't think we've seen any indication that Nintendo will change course to Twintelle as the face of ARMS. Even for Min Min's Party Crash Bash victory art, Spring Man is featured the most prominently of the characters who didn't win.
For better or worse, it doesn't seem like Nintendo is backing down from Spring Man being the face of the series. However, Twintelle is positioned much more prominently here, even more so than Ribbon Girl. Between this & how Twintelle is featured in Women of Nintendo materials over Ribbon Girl as of recently (see the Switch News section), I could see Twintelle &/or Min Min taking over Ribbon Girl's leading-lady status.
Again, this is what I'm largely focusing on.
Why?
The other thing that likely contributes to Sakurai's protagonists-first mentality is the fact that he usually consults the developer (especially for third-party franchises). For example, if Sakurai were to consult Kamiya for a Wonderful 101 rep, Kamiya would probably tell Sakurai to go for Wonder Red.
I was pissed. I bought vanilla MvC3 in hopes we'd get a Mega Man as DLC. Instead, we got Ultimate and still no Mega Man (not even another series rep), and I sold my copy, didn't buy Ultimate, and never looked back.
Humanoid characters make up the majority of the cast.
