RR 1-6: Rebooting Super Smash Brothers!

ROUNDTABLE RELAY!!!
I've tossed out my pitch for a Smash Reboot, so now it's the audiences turn! In this livestream we are going to continue diving into viewer feedback, try to get to as many as possible, and see if anybody else has some cool ideas for what direction this series should take!
Here's the document where all the submissions were placed for those that want to follow along!
Doc: docs.google.com/document/d/1U...
If you like this content, consider joining the channel. Doing so will give priority to your response when we cover it! (Though, I will try to get to all of them regardless):
/ @thedukeofdorks

[@jaredhebert942]

OKAY, DIDN'T KNOW THERE WAS GONNA BE A ROUNDTABLE TODAY *GUESS IT'S DO OR DIE ON ME GETTING THE SMASH PITCH OUT OF MY HEAD* *_LEGIT KINDA PANICKING, AAAAAAAAAAA_*

[@robhillen8007]

Hi, everyone! I'm that Polychorus guy that got a big head and gasted some flabbers. Since questions were asked, I thought I'd try to answer. First of all, I'm a silly little guy, so anything I say that's not a design choice is probably a joke. This includes my note on Lucario's gen 5 alt, the decimal change sections, and, yes, me saying I know more about game design than one of the founding fathers of good videogames. I'll start with an explanation for my roster choices. If you count fighter-specific assists as half a character slot, Zelda has 4.5 fighters while Xenoblade only has 6. Checkmate. In all honesty, it's basically impossible to have more than three fighters for Zelda, because Impa is already an assist, and there's basically no other characters that are significant for more than one game. Just like in official smash, I'm going to give the series plenty of items for casual play, but the only other thing I can do outside of Story Mode is make clones or give slots to relatively unimportant characters for the overall series. I'm hesitant to do that when the only example of either already in the game is Riolu, who is a preevolution to a movie Pokémon and a semi-clone. I want to keep a good track record. As for having four Xenoblade reps, I just really like Xenoblade. I know I would probably have to cut Mio if my game were actually made, but she's just as important to Xenoblade's themes as Noah, and I really wanted to equalize the roster's gender ratio by that extra 5%. As for not having any Pikachu, I just really don't like Pikachu. No, that's a joke. I think Pikachu is plenty serviceable as a Pokémon, in Pokémon, where it having a small learnset is offset by only being able to have four active moves at a time, and it having stubby limbs it offset by the abstraction of battle animations. As cute as "only four active moves in Pokémon and only four specials in Smash" is as a design philosophy, I honestly think it was the main reason Pikachu was able to have a moveset at all, and I don't think it's popularity is worth sacrificing the ability to show off just how crazy and diverse Pokémon gameplay can get. Zoroark, Lucario, and Mewtwo are all marginally less popular, but have way more potential due to having more focused gameplay and lore identities in their home series, and Riolu is there because because I thought "What if Pichu, but Lucario" would be an interesting play on the existing reps. When it comes to Megaman Volnutt, he wasn't my first choice, either. I would have picked Megaman X over him any day, and I don't even play Megaman. There's two main things he offers, though, that only one other Megaman does: his game is the most recent in his timeline, which means my fanfiction can be treated as canon without retcons. I want the story mode to build off these characters' official stories, but doing so requires acknowledging the stories that have already been told. That philosophy is also why Shulk and Rex use their Xenoblade 3 appearances, and why I'm now correcting Belmont to specifically be Julius Belmont despite his smaller role in his home game. Now, for other stuff. While it is true that anyone can use a fire flower to shoot fireballs, Mario doesn't need to. He can just do it naturally as of 2003, but he's a nice guy and chooses not to let you use it because he knows you can't handle having fireballs on top of another powerup. Sorry for not having Elma as a fighter, 3XHS. I haven't played Xenoblade X yet because I never owned a Wii U, and I know from my obsession with the other games that its gameplay is too complex to derive moves from text descriptions and screenshots. I'm banking on Xenoblade X: Definitive Edition as a launch title for the Switch 2, and then I'll be obsessed with it, too. For my opening statement of the timeline rework, Nintendo obviously didn't plan anything out ahead of time, but what I meant was that nearly every game from Zelda 1 to Skyward Sword was made with an explicit temporal relation to the games that released before it. I explain that in the following sentences of the introduction. It's only with BotW and TotK that Nintendo has decided to take a firm "f*ck you" stance to anyone who was trying to piece together the puzzle they left. I don't think you were too harsh too harsh. I felt like you were mostly praising or curious about my choices, and the things you called out I mostly agreed with after thinking about it. Super Smash Bros. Z is not a pitch. It's a manifesto.