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Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Downloadable Contents Discussion Thread 6 | Hungry Like The Wolf

Where do you think Challenger #5 would be revealed at?

  • During Terry's Promo Video

    Votes: 79 23.5%

  • During the Game Award

    Votes: 194 57.7%

  • During the next Nintendo Direct

    Votes: 44 13.1%

  • During a special stand-alone live stream

    Votes: 19 5.7%
  • Total voters
    336
  • Poll closed .
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Neoxon

Neoxon

Spotlighting Black Excellence - Diversity Analyst
Member
Oct 25, 2017
85,257
Houston, TX
EricTheGamerman said:
Smash isn't a traditional fighting game in the least bit, and as multiple people have pointed out before, Smash can't make more diverse fighters to satisfy any notions of diversity. I don't think we should treat it to the same standards since it largely operates completely independent fraom basically every other fighter in existence in regards to... pretty much everything? The 30% is just as arbitrary of a number that people will disagree upon as to if it's "good enough" given that it exists as an average across fighting games with wildly different circumstances to their characters, and most importantly, these titles have significantly fewer characters than Ultimate. It is far easier to get to a 30% ratio when you have a smaller number of fighters to begin with (and especially when those rosters are not primarily developed on the premise of including gaming and Nintendo All-Stars, many of which from eras when women and PoC were not given particularly strong representation). Titles like Street Fighter V (which has had four seasons of additonal DLC content) only have 46 to Smash's 82, and the game only launched with 16 characters. Mortal Kombat 11 only launched with a meager 25 characters this year for example. A game like Blazblue Cross Tag Battle only launched with 20 fighters and spent a year selling 20 as additional DLC and is only just starting to approach the 50s for total roster (and it can specifically rely more on IPs that develop female characters in meaningful ways like RWBY and it also has a smaller scope than Smash since it only focused on 4 series at launch).

For reference, to get to your 30% female fighting roster, the next 9 fighters all have to be unique female characters, as in there cannot be a single male or "other" fighter before we even get to 30% mark. Smash currently has more female fighters than Street Fighter V (13 currently with DLC), Mortal Kombat 11 (8 female fighters with DLC), Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator 2 (9 female fighters), Samurai Showdown 2019 (7 female fighters currently with DLC), Soulcalibur VI (10 currently with DLC), Tekken 7 (9 female fighters currently with DLC), Under Night-in-Birth (10 female fighters currently across multiple revisions of the same game, though I'm relying on Wiki information that I'm unsure of how complete it is, so that's worth keeping in mind). The only modern fighting title with more female playable characters is Blazblue Cross Tag Battle with an actually really damn impressive 30 (I think, again, the Under Night stuff I'm unfamiliar with, so I'm trying to make sure everything matches up). Part of that is that Blazblue Cross Tag Battle initially had a super specific set of four series it dove into, many of which were the rare ones to have quite a few popular female fighters (Especially RWBY, which more or less had to be all female until you got to like Qrow and Ren maybe). My point is that Smash is actually in line with the number of female fighters that appear in fighting games even if you don't count alts with female at all (11), and if you do, it's actually the second best game for female representation in number of female fighters at 15 playable characters with female options (not counting any partially female characters like Banjo & Kazooie and Ice Climbers mind you). And that's despite the inherent limitations the Smash format provides with the absolute largest scope in terms of guest characters, crossovers, and franchises; the focus on main characters; and a complete inability to make unique characters that can just inherently be more diverse.

I think focusing on 30% is part of the issue with your approach to incorporating more representation of women in Smash. 30% wildly means something different to each game given the size of its roster and Smash just has so many more variables regarding the characters in its roster. That's how it can have the second highest number of female characters in a modern fighting game, yet still have one of the lowest overall percentages of the roster. As I've said multiple times before, I'm all for including some more notable female fighters and diversifying the roster through those inclusions. What I'm not so keen on is your overall approach to the situation that seems more fixated on achieving a percentage than just supporting a nice selection of good female fighters that fit into Smash perfectly fine without changing much about the selection process. When those characters are exhausted, then we can start talking about how Sakurai picks characters more so than in the past, but that's still a fair amount off. I'm glad your promoting awareness of representation in Smash, but there's a lot more nuance to this overall situation with Smash that I just think needs to be acknowledged. Especially when the quality of representation also varies wildly from game to game (look at someone like Ivy in Soulcalibur, she adds to the female count, but my god is she hyper sexualized to the point of absurdity. That's something else to really keep in mind when comparing Smash to other titles).

As for the DLC, may I remind you that Smash for Wii U/3DS had 5 characters that were all male (I mean Mewtwo was clearly intended to be a male character and is always referred to as he, with his inspiration largely being taken from Pokemon: The First Movie) before Corrin came with female alts and Bayonetta ended the DLC season. An entire Fighter's Pass that has 4 males and one hybrid male/female combo isn't really all that bad in comparison and it shows us that sometimes these droughts in additional representation just happen. I think your notions of "doom and gloom" about the current trajectory of DLC are maybe coming in a little bit too soon.
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But even back then, Corrin was primarily male (something that wasn't rectified in Ultimate despite everyone else changing course), & it took the Smash Ballot for us to get Bayonetta. And even then, she remains the only female third-party character (besides Kazooie, but she's the secondary part of a duo). Do I expect Smash to get the percentage up to 30% in Ultimate's life-span, sadly no. But as I've said before, the least they can do is try to improve things at a reasonable pace. While Smash isn't a traditional fighting game, it's still leading the pack in sales. And by virtue, it should lead by example. Because of its success, I expect better from the series. And as you said, there are popular characters who happen to be women, & we aren't even getting them. And there's still the fact that we'll likely see a Fighters Pass that's 100% comprised of primarily guys, where the only female character is the secondary part of a duo. Even putting percentages aside, that looks bad. In Ultimate's base roster, we only have 4 new characters who are primarily female. But two of them are echoes (Dark Samus, who's debatable to begin with, & Daisy) & one is a semi-clone (Isabelle). To dismiss the situation out of hand is honestly disappointing. I understand your desire to be realistic, but we won't see them improve if we don't ask them to do better. Because right now, they aren't. And it's disappointing because Sakurai has expressed awareness of the problem in the past during the Wii U/3DS days.

As for your numbers, it's not just about the number of women, it's about the number relative to the size of the roster. It's why I structured the female fighters percentage thread the way that I did. To use ARMS for example, 6 women isn't that great on paper, but 6 out of 15 character is pretty damn good. Likewise, Street Fighter V has 13 ladies (currently) out of 38 characters overall, which is respectable. Roster sizes vary from game to game, so it's hard to just compare the number of women in each game, hence the use of percentages. This is where the problem lies for Smash. 15 ladies sounds good on paper, but 15 out of 81 isn't.
 
DecoReturns

DecoReturns

Member
Oct 27, 2017
22,003
Here's something funny.

I had a friend who use to say that Sonic Runied Brawl after he learned the dev troubles of adding him late in development.
 
Naga

Naga

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Aug 29, 2019
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DecoReturns

DecoReturns

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Oct 27, 2017
22,003
Ryce said:
Because I'm bored and curious...

Straw Poll: Who is your favorite Fighters Pass character released so far?

Consider everything -- gameplay, aesthetic, source material, and so on.
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Hero is ridiculously fun. So him.

Just a bummer his music is bad. Also not a fan of his stage but it's a good stage. Just the fact that I don't like the music makes me not want to play there. Reason why I'm always playing in Mementos cause it has some good tracks and it's a fun stage as well.
 
Odeko

Odeko

One Winged Slayer
The Fallen
Mar 22, 2018
15,180
West Blue
Neoxon said:
This is where the problem lies for Smash. 15 ladies sounds good on paper, but 15 out of 81 isn't.
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I largely agree with your post, but this is one part that I think is slightly misleading, since unlike other fighting games, Smash has 10 gender neutral characters and 13 characters that are either male/female pairs or have male and female costumes.

The good news is that means 30% females isn't totally out of reach. By my count, if there are 45 purely male characters + male Corrin, male Robin, male WFT, male Inkling, 7 male Koopalings, 3 male mii fighters, male Pikachu, male Pkmn Trainer, male Villager, Banjo, and Popo that's 64 male fighters. Then there's 12 purely female fighters + female Corrin, female Robin, female WFT, female Inkling, Wendy, 3 female mii fighters, female Pikachu, female Pkmn Trainer, female Villager, Kazooie, and Nana thats 25 female fighters.

25/89 gendered fighters is 28% female, which means we're three ladies off the 30% level, or four if there's some more dudes added as well.

Now there's definitely a second issue about how frequently the female costume is secondary to the male costume, though you could potentially view that as another 30% limit — WFT, Mii Gunner, and Inkling are the three women, Robin, Corrin, Mii Swordfighter, Mii Brawler, Villager, Bowser Jr., Pikachu, and Pokemon Trainer are the 8 guys, so 27% of the multi-gender characters are primarily women and one more girl (Akira Howard plz) would get us above 33%.

So sorry that's a wall of text to say I totally agree the game needs more women, but that I don't view that more respectable 30% threshold as totally unreachable. Obviously 30% is no 50%, but it's a start.
 
Mekanos

Mekanos

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Member
Oct 17, 2018
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Ryce said:
Because I'm bored and curious...

Straw Poll: Who is your favorite Fighters Pass character released so far?

Consider everything -- gameplay, aesthetic, source material, and so on.
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Voted for Banjo & Kazooie, and they're rightfully winning, but I'm surprised Hero is beating Joker.

Banjo has everything, amazing stage, music, character that I have a longstanding personal connection to and fun playstyle. Joker has a great stage and track listing, but his moveset is a little unwieldy for me (still fun) and I just don't have the 20 years of familiarity and nostalgia that I do with Banjo (I mean, I literally only played P5 after his reveal in December). He's still really cool and definitely far and away the Ultimate newcomer I've been the most excited about outside of the K. Rool/Banjo/Ridley trifecta.

Hero is a distant third since I have no connection to Dragon Quest, the music listing is weak, and his down B is hard to play with.
 
Mekanos

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ned_ballad said:
Hero's music isn't really that weak, it's just that we know there are better versions of these songs out there. The actual song selection is varied and good.
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Having only 8 tracks and no remixes is weak. Obviously I get why but that doesn't change my enjoymet of them overall.

IntelliHeath said:


It was pretty good video. What does Super Smash Bros mean to you?
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For me there's distinctly two phases of Smash, 64-Melee and pre-Brawl to now.

When 64 and Melee came out, these were just fun cartoony fighting games that happened to star Nintendo characters. I wasn't really thinking in terms of "I hope they add XYZ to the next game." The closest it came to that was learning that Mewtwo was in Melee and rushing to unlock him. Even so, I loved the games and played them for dozens of hours, with my brother, with friends, Melee is easily one of my most played games ever.

Once Brawl speculation started, I was older and internet savvy, so I was watching everyone discuss character speculation saying "I hope this character gets in," and "this character deserves to be in." This got me thinking about Smash more as a great crossover where iconic characters and franchises get to stand shoulder to shoulder with each other, and how Smash was a validation. The DK series was in a weird spot during the GameCube and early Wii days, so seeing Diddy Kong get in, a 100% Rare created character, was very exciting and validating. I learned a lot about Nintendo and gaming history in general via Smash speculation. And sometimes the obsessive speculation made the experience more rewarding, sometimes more disappointing. I was disappointed when the K. Rool costume was shown in Smash 4 DLC, but then I cried tears of joy at the character trailer in Ultimate.

Also worth pointing out that the series has gotten me to play two of my all time favorite games, as in, literally my #2 and #3, Persona 5 and Metal Gear Solid (and by extension the rest of the Metal Gear series).

It's hard to separate how I engage modern Smash games from how I speculate about them. So many hours on the internet spent combing over patterns and clues and debating the merits of fat irrelevant crocodiles being on the roster. Obviously I love the games and still play them a ton, I put 200 hours into Smash 4 and I'm coming up on 300 for Ultimate. But the pre-release hype for Smash is intoxicating and hard to tear away from and forms a large portion of what I get out of the series. While it's been up and down, Ultimate adding so many longstanding dream characters really makes it feel like an amazing culmination of the last 20 years, and I'm very thankful Sakurai is going to be adding characters to it as long as possible. When Banjo & Kazooie were added, Ultimate became my de facto favorite game of all time, not just because it's an amazing game, but because it represents a capstone of years and years of speculation and hoping, and how essentially all of my favorite video game series and characters are in one title.

I'm gonna be late for work after writing all that...
 
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TheDinoman

TheDinoman

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Oct 25, 2017
17,092
It's weird how Persona has more spirit battles than Dragon Quest or Banjo-Kazooie, both of which only have seven.
 
Neoxon

Neoxon

Spotlighting Black Excellence - Diversity Analyst
Member
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85,257
Houston, TX
Odeko said:
I largely agree with your post, but this is one part that I think is slightly misleading, since unlike other fighting games, Smash has 10 gender neutral characters and 13 characters that are either male/female pairs or have male and female costumes.

The good news is that means 30% females isn't totally out of reach. By my count, if there are 45 purely male characters + male Corrin, male Robin, male WFT, male Inkling, 7 male Koopalings, 3 male mii fighters, male Pikachu, male Pkmn Trainer, male Villager, Banjo, and Popo that's 64 male fighters. Then there's 12 purely female fighters + female Corrin, female Robin, female WFT, female Inkling, Wendy, 3 female mii fighters, female Pikachu, female Pkmn Trainer, female Villager, Kazooie, and Nana thats 25 female fighters.

25/89 gendered fighters is 28% female, which means we're three ladies off the 30% level, or four if there's some more dudes added as well.

Now there's definitely a second issue about how frequently the female costume is secondary to the male costume, though you could potentially view that as another 30% limit — WFT, Mii Gunner, and Inkling are the three women, Robin, Corrin, Mii Swordfighter, Mii Brawler, Villager, Bowser Jr., Pikachu, and Pokemon Trainer are the 8 guys, so 27% of the multi-gender characters are primarily women and one more girl (Officer Howard plz) would get us above 33%.

So sorry that's a wall of text to say I totally agree the game needs more women, but that I don't view that more respectable 30% threshold as totally unreachable. Obviously 30% is no 50%, but it's a start.
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If we count alternate costumes, yeah, we do hit the 30% threshold (& I didn't even count Kazooie). But my concern is that we have to resort to alternate costumes to get a respectable percentage. Of course, within defaults only (which does count the likes of Inkling & Wii Fit Trainer), I'm not sure if we can hit 30% without every single DLC character from here on out being women. And while I wouldn't say no to that, I understand that it's not realistic. That's why I'm hoping that they at least give us a steady number of women as DLC from here on out, similar to how SFV approaches the matter. Even if the specific problem isn't fixed, I can respect a legitimate effort to act on the problems of the roster.
 
ned_ballad

ned_ballad

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TheDinoman said:
It's weird how Persona has more spirit battles than Dragon Quest or Banjo-Kazooie, both of which only have seven.
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Dragon Quest kind of makes sense, since it gets extra fighter spirits compared to other series, but I don't really know why Banjo-Kazooie has so few.

Seems like once they started adding evolving spirits in DLC is when the number of fights decreased.

I wonder what they're going to do with the Tockles spirit. If it'll be DQXI save exclusive, or if they'll actually add it to the spirit board. And which spirit board, the general one or the Dragon Quest one? Or make it shop/random drop exclusive.
 
TheDinoman

TheDinoman

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ned_ballad said:
Dragon Quest kind of makes sense, since it gets extra fighter spirits compared to other series, but I don't really know why Banjo-Kazooie has so few.
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Well, to be fair, there's not much material to work with in regards to Banjo, at least, for the Nintendo era of the series. The only renders we got back during the N64 era were Banjo & Kazooie themselves, Mumbo, Gruntilda and the Jinjos. And the latter two utilized the Ultimate models for their spirits.

In that sense, the only way they could of bumped the spirit lineup without having to resort to using Nuts & Bolts renders was if the Spiral Mountain stage featured more cameo appearances, like with Tooty, Bottles and Gruntilda.
 
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ned_ballad

ned_ballad

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TheDinoman said:
Well, to be fair, there's not much material to work with in regards to Banjo. The only renders we got back during the N64 era were Banjo & Kazooie themselves, Mumbo, Gruntilda and the Jinjos. And the latter two utilized the Ultimate models for their spirits.

In that sense, the only way they could of bumped the spirit lineup was if the Spiral Mountain stage featured more cameo appearances, like with Tooty, Bottles and Gruntilda.
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Looking at the manual, all collectibles have official renders

Could have made spirits for the 1 Up Trophy and Musical Notes.

Klungo should have cameo'd though.
 
TheDinoman

TheDinoman

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Oct 25, 2017
17,092
I will say, there was a missed opportunity for a spirit battle of this:

150px-BK_Blue_Egg_art.png


Conditions: fight a team of invisible Banjo & Kazooies that only use neutral special.
 
ContractHolder

ContractHolder

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I still don't understand, after some of the Banjo spirits were based on the models the Smash team made, why spirits weren't made of the stage summons on Midgard for FF.
 
GreenMamba

GreenMamba

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Oct 25, 2017
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Still wish they would add Titan and Shiva to Midgar to get the last of the classic FF summons in the game, but whatever.

EDIT: Titan could erupt a spire underneath on side of the stage, tilting it to the left or right, and Shiva could freeze the main platform (kinda like a backwards Ramuh, making the smaller platforms the safe area).
 
MrSaturn99

MrSaturn99

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I live in a giant bucket.
It's really sad how DQ's garbage MIDIs undermine such a grand stage. I mean, Battle for the Glory is decent, and playing through DQ8 I can at least excuse Marching through the Fields given how slow-paced the *original is (euphoric though it may be -- Sugiyama's antics aside, I suspect it'll end up one of my all-time game orchestral GOATs by the end), but the DQ 3/11 tracks are downright criminal)

Good god, how do you downgrade Adventure to that?!?

*Edit: Oh, DQ8 shifts up the overworld theme later? Now I get why they sound so different, ahaha. Orchestral would've been preferred, but the MIDI's not that bad.
 
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BGBW

BGBW

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Oct 25, 2017
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Considering some thought we'd not even get a DQ rep cos music was an obstacle, eight tracks should be seen as a miracle.
 
Sawyer

Sawyer

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Phantom Thieves is still the hardest DLC spirit battle so far.

Wonder what Terry's 4 star spirit will be. Team Fatal Fury?
 
Illusion

Illusion

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GreenMamba said:
Still wish they would add Titan and Shiva to Midgar to get the last of the classic FF summons in the game, but whatever.

EDIT: Titan could erupt a spire underneath on side of the stage, tilting it to the left or right, and Shiva could freeze the main platform (kinda like a backwards Ramuh, making the smaller platforms the safe area).
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We can get those two when the inevitably add Noctis as the 5th character. Titan and Shiva are the more important summons in that universe.
 
MondoMega

MondoMega

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My prophetic powers have certainly returned to me with this dream I have just woken up from.

In my dream, I woke up to find that this thread exploded in activity while I was sleeping, because a "Sakurai presentation subtitle script" leak actually turned out to be true. The final pass fighter was a Xenoblade newcomer (the pack was called "Xenoblade Chronicles Challenger Pack" so I don't even know who, lol).

Also they announced a "Video Game Dialogue" spirit board event where the spirits were text boxes from different games (including Ace Attorney for some reason). So that's fun.

Can't wait for this to happen.
 
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