Here's a more in deph analyisis.
I spent all night looking up translations and sources.
64
Bowser, Dedede, and Mewtwo were planned for the game, but had to be cut (presumably because of time or space limitations).
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/PostResult2.html
Smash 64 was being developed at the same time as Ocarina of Time. Because of this, Sakurai didn’t know that adult Link couldn’t use the boomerang, and if he had, Link’s B probably would have been different.
(crap, I don’t have the exact link for this one. Please trust that I (not really me, actually) didn’t lie about this one. Everything else is cited, I promise.)
A fan wanted Dr. Mario as a costume for the next Smash (which, in this case, is Melee). Sakurai said that it would be odd for Dr. Mario to shoot fireballs. This is a little relevant because Sakurai responded to this during Melee’s development process (probably kind of early on). Same for the next one.
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/PostReturn006.html
Another fan said that if Jigglypuff could be playable, so could Mr. Saturn (are there Japanese fans who hate Jigglypuff just like some American fans?) Sakurai says that Mr. Saturn has no arms and different framework, so they aren’t comparable. However, he does say that Mr. Saturn could work as an item…
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/PostReturn020.html
Sakurai mentions that if there was ever another Nazo no Murasame-jou game, its protagonist, Takamaru, would probably get into Smash. This was said about eight or nine years ago and the closest thing was the GBA port of the game, so it didn’t work out.
(note: NnM is a Zelda-ish, Japan-only NES game (in fact, it runs on Zelda’s engine like how Kid Icarus runs off of Metroid’s). The series never got any kind of continuation and as I understand it, Japanese fans see it and its samurai protagonist in a similar light to Kid Icarus and Pit)
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/PostReturn025.html
Sakurai’s favorite Fire Emblem character (at least, at the time this statement was written) is Nabarl. The only reason I’m putting this here is because a lot of people believed that his favorite character was Sigurd (or Siglud), the protagonist of the fourth Fire Emblem, and along with that idea came the rumor that he was planned for SSB64 or something. Neither of those are true.
Also, one of the fans in this link feels that Japan-only characters have lower chances of getting into the game (he uses Fire Emblem and Panel de Pon as examples), and suggests that it would be better to include those characters in the Japanese version only instead of not putting them in the game at all because of a lack of overseas popularity. Sakurai dislikes the idea. (However, I’m not entirely sure if my “translation” here is accurate. I would appreciate it if anyone could tell me whether it is or not.)
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/PostReturn014.html
Nothing remotely concrete, and this barely belongs here, but Sakurai says (in response to a fan asking for Rockman / Mega Man) that he gets lots of overseas demand. He doesn’t say anything else on the subject, though.
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/PostReturn147.html
Melee
One of the plans for Melee was to use a character who would represent NES games in general. Sakurai revealed a list of characters who had been considered (we don’t really know if it was all of them or not, though) along with reasons they had been dumped (some of the reasons were joking, some really weren’t). The rejected choices were:
-Balloon Fighter (“if his balloons were popped, he couldn’t do anything”)
-Urban Champion (“there’s not much you could do with him”)
-Bubbles (from Clu Clu Land) (“she (?) doesn’t really know how to fight”)
-Excitebike (“you’d have to install ramps on all the levels for him to be playable”)
The character that was actually chosen for this position was, of course, the Ice Climbers. Interesting that Pit apparently wasn’t in that list.
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/flash/1009/index.html
People here would likely know this one, but Lucas was intended to be in (well, actually Sakurai just says “the protagonist of Mother 3” but it’s clear that that was always Lucas), and that he would replace Ness. However, Mother 3 was in development hell during Melee’s development (or had it already been canceled?), so the team just stuck with Ness.
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/flash/0717/index.html
Sukapon was “planned” at some point for Melee (actually, it’s not totally clear. It could have been (but probably wasn’t) the first Smash), but the team didn’t go through with it. Sakurai tells two fans that they probably shouldn’t expect to see Sukapon in the future. In an earlier comment, he said it was “doubtful” that the game would make it overseas.
(note: Sukapon is from the Japan-only NES game “Joy Mech Fight”, a fighting game with robots)
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/flash/syukeiken/return510.html
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/flash/syukeiken/return578.html
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/PostReturn137.html
This one isn’t a case of characters who didn’t make it, but of characters who almost didn’t make it. Marth and Roy were almost going to be removed from the American version of Smash (for not being international), but people on the American side liked them and so they stayed. (Actually, Sakurai just says it was Marth who almost got cut, but it wouldn’t make sense if a character got cut just for being Japan-only while another Japan-only character made it.)
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/flash/1204/index.html
The original plan (or at least, one of the last “original plans”) for Melee had just 20 characters (not counting Sheik). At some point in development (probably in the later stages), someone felt the roster wasn’t big enough, so they decided to boost it by making several “model swap” characters – characters who mostly used the same animations as characters who were already established, but with different models and stats (which they had already done before with Luigi in the original). These are characters who we now call clones. They were:
-Dr. Mario (part of the reason he was chosen was because someone wanted to put his music in the game)
-Falco
-Ganondorf (Sakurai mentions that he was lucky to get in – if he hadn’t had such a similar body type to Captain Falcon, he wouldn’t have made it into Melee)
-Young Link (although he was just an “afterthought” character, Sakurai seems to consider the idea of having both an older and younger Link important)
-Pichu (Sakurai says that he wanted a character who was bad on purpose, which is why Pichu was brought in. He also says that he had considered Jigglypuff the joke character of the first game, but now Jigglypuff was seen as more of a serious character because of Pichu’s inclusion. Also of note – one fan suggests that Raichu should have been used for Pikachu’s model swap instead of Pichu. Sakurai says that Pichu did more to differentiate himself, and that he added more by being a joke character.)
-Roy (his game, the sixth Fire Emblem, came out a few months after Melee did. Sakurai makes note of this. Although there’s no real evidence supporting this, some people think that the higher-ups at Nintendo wanted Sakurai to include Roy as an advertisement for FE6.)
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/flash/1225/index.html
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/flash/0101/drmario.html
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/flash/0101/falco.html
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/flash/1218/index.html
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/flash/0122/index.html
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/flash/1211/index.html
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/flash/0115/index.html
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/flash/syukeiken/return586.html
Brawl
There’s less to add for Brawl than there is for the others, and unfortunately Sakurai talked less about Brawl. All we really have to go on is this.
Inside the game’s data, where the character data is stored, there are the names of several unused characters. They are:
-Dixie Kong
-Dr. Mario
-Mewtwo
-pra_mai (chances are very, very high that this was for Plusle and Minum – third-generation Pokemon. This is how their names are shortened in Japanese.)
-Roy
-Toon Zelda
-Toon Sheik
There’s just a little more than that. Mewtwo and Roy had unused victory fanfares (apparently, at some point, all characters were supposed to have their own victory themes. Interestingly, the unused fanfares include most characters that don’t have them in the finished game plus Mewtwo and Roy’s, but not Wolf’s.)
Also, another filename shows that Mewtwo was supposed to have a “before match” screen for Classic mode. It seems like Mewtwo and Roy made it the farthest out of the cut characters.
http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=141093
This one doesn’t have evidence and is only my speculation, but I’d like to think it’s accurate speculation (of course I would, it’s my idea).
Sakurai has said that everyone now in Brawl was already in the game in some form in 2006, except for Sonic, who was only added after the Brawl polls were taken. It’s my belief that Wolf was actually the last character finished.
Look at what’s in the game. Wolf is always listed last in the character lists (except for Snake and Sonic). He has no role in the Subspace Emissary. He’s the third-to-last character in the last single-player All-Star event match (the only ones who come after him are the third-parties), and he really is the last character in the final co-op event match (even after the third-parties). And then there’s the fact that he had no unique victory fanfare planned even when Mewtwo and Roy did.
It’s my theory that Wolf was scrapped relatively early on, with some of the other cut characters, but for whatever reason he was revived later in development. (Going by this logic, it’s also possible that Jigglypuff and Toon Link may have been in similar situations, but not as “extreme”.) But unlike the other stuff, this one really isn’t a fact.
One of the most hotly debated characters was Ridley, partially because of the Prime-induced boost in popularity the Metroid series got. Sakurai does mention him when asked about it in a Nintendo Power article (228). His response was (and this isn’t an exact quote) “that would have been pretty impossible. If we had to put our best efforts into it, it might have been able to happen, but he’d probably be a little slow.”
A lot of people take that too literally and say “Sakurai was just being lazy!”, but I think that’s kind of unfair. It sounds like the Brawl team just didn’t think Metroid had any suitable non-Samus characters (Sakurai said that he wanted to include more Metroid characters, and they came up with an alternate Samus), which isn’t really that out there. They clearly tried to give the series its due, though (more stages than most other series and more bosses than any other series), so it’s not like they hated Metroid.
http://wii.ign.com/articles/710/710752p1.html
Sakurai wanted to represent Animal Crossing and Nintendogs in Brawl, but he didn’t feel like either series had characters suitable for a fighting game, so they were represented through Assist Trophies and stages. The same can probably be said for any other series mainly represented by Assist Trophies and stages, but Animal Crossing and Nintendogs were “heading the list”, probably because of their high popularity.
http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/ssbb/vol5_page2.jsp
It’s common knowledge that the reason Snake got in Brawl is because Hideo Kojima (the Metal Gear series creator) approached Sakurai. But some people didn’t know that Kojima had approached Sakurai during Melee’s development as well. Of course, by the time he did, there wasn’t enough time left to get Snake in, but the idea wasn’t dropped, and it seems that it was actually Nintendo who went to Konami to get Snake for Brawl.
http://wii.ign.com/articles/707/707504p1.html
Sonic may have been in a similar situation, but I’m not sure. There was a magazine scan floating around (from a little after Melee’s release) in which Yuji Naka claims he had asked Nintendo to put Sonic in Melee, but there wasn’t enough time left. However, this interview was the only place that statement was ever made, and it seems odd that Sega would go to Nintendo at that time (since the Dreamcast was still alive, so they were still in direct competition). It’s possible that the scan may have been faked, but no one really knows for sure.
Lastly, I’ll present the Melee polls. They clearly have a lot of relevance to Melee’s roster, although they are very old now, so they might not be the most accurate look into the Japanese fanbase’s wants.
The polls were translated completely by Kimarhi Ronso of GameFAQs, who is unfortunately no longer around.
Credit goes to her. Everything written in here was done by her.
The third and final poll results are a list of every character who was requested, and their respective votes. This list groups the characters within a category (such as a series), and then sorts them in descending order within that category. Note that Sakurai listed the main protagonist from the first generation Pokemon games as "Satoshi” (“Ash”), rather than as Red.
NOTE: When a vote tally is something like “someone from <series>,” that means it’s all of the votes by people who either said they wanted a character from that series but didn’t care who, or voted for a minor character that Sakurai felt didn’t warrant their own mention.
The format for these results is as follows:
Category name
(Rank) Name: Votes (English name if different)
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/software/nus_p_nalj/smash/PostResult3.html
Super Mario series
(1) Koopa: 169 (Bowser)
(2) Princess Peach: 66
(3) Wario: 65
(4) Kinopio: 27 (Toad)
(5) Nokonoko: 9 (Koopa Troopa)
(6) Kamec: 8 (Magikoopa)
(7) Kuribou: 7 (Goomba)
(8) Mallow (Mario RPG): 5
(8) Geno (Mario RPG): 5
(10) Baby Mario: 3
Pocket Monsters series
(1) Mewtwo: 35
(2) Mew: 24
(3) Satoshi (main character): 18
(4) someone from Pokemon: 12
(5) Lugia: 11
(6) Nyarth: 8 (Meowth)
(7) Raichu: 7
(8) Maril: 5
(8) Fushigidane: 5 (Bulbasaur)
(8) Togepy: 5
Legend of Zelda series
(1) Ganon (including Ganondorf): 36
(2) Young Link: 8
(2) Princess Zelda: 8
(2) Sheik: 8
(5) Darunia: 2
Kirby of the Stars series
(1) Great King Dedede: 46
(2) Gooey: 17
(3) Meta Knight: 11
(4) someone of Kirby’s comrades: 10
(5) Waddle Dee: 3
Mother series
(1) Dosei-san: 18 (Mr. Saturn)
(2) Poo: 6
(3) main character of Mother 2, etc: 4 (Earthbound)
(3) Paula: 4
(5) Starman: 3
(5) Jeff: 3
Star Fox
(1) Falco: 7
(2) Slippy: 5
(3) Wolf: 4
(4) Peppy: 2
Fire Emblem series
(1) Marth: 21
(2) someone from Fire Emblem: 18
(3) Oguma: 8
(4) Celice: 4
(5) Siglud: 2
(5) Leaf: 2
related to the Rare company
(1) 007 James Bond: 35
(2) Banjo & Kazooie: 18
(3) Diddy Kong: 15
(4) Blast Dozer robot (nothing specific): 2 (Blast Corps)
(4) 006 Trevelyan: 2
various Famicom / Super Famicom forces (NES / SNES)
(1) Sukapon (Joy Mecha Fight): 15
(2) Lip (Panel de Pon): 9
(3) Prince Richard (The Bell Tolls for the Frog): 8
(4) Metroid (Metroid series): 6
(4) Blacky (Wrecking Crew): 6 (Spike)
(6) Pit-kun (Parthena’s Mirror): 5 ((Kid Icarus))
(6) main character of Shin Onigashima: 5
(6) main characters of Marvelous: 5
(9) Samurai Goroh (F-ZERO): 4
(9) Popo & Nana (Ice Climber): 4
(9) main character of Balloon Fight: 4
these are non-Nintendo forces
(1) Chocobo: 9
(2) Doraemon: 7
(3) Bomberman: 5
(4) Crash Bandicoot: 4
(5) Sonic: 3
(5) Rockman: 3 (Mega Man)
Please remember that third party characters were not said to be allowed at this time, so anyone who voted for non-Nintendo characters either did not realise this or did not care that their vote was wasted. As such, there is nothing that can really be drawn from that group.
And the very last bit of info – the Brawl polls.
First, a bit of explaining on how the polls worked. There was a form on the site you could fill out – you put in your username, what category your suggestion would go under (characters, items, music, or other stuff), and then you wrote your suggestion in the box. You can see the results in the links above – it wasn’t just a vote for whatever you were suggesting. You pretty much wrote as much as you wanted to and submitted it.
The staff went through all the responses and looked at them for ideas (basically making them a “poll”.) Eventually, they posted a relatively small selection of them on the site, and Sakurai responded to some of them.
The entire process in the last two paragraphs was exactly the same between the Melee and Brawl polls. The only difference was that the Melee poll results were eventually posted. The Brawl poll results were never posted and probably never will be. But the problem is that a lot of people think it is. See the page below.
http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=71872
There’s a list of the “top characters”, along with data on “how many times Sakurai mentioned each character” or “how many votes they got”. None of those are really true. Like I said, the suggestions that were posted on the Brawl site were only a small selection. If you went through the posted Melee suggestions and counted up all the appearances of the name of any character from the poll, it probably wouldn’t be the same as the actual poll results. And on top of that, the number of mentions isn’t even accurate – the list was created by people who went through those pages with an online translator and counted up the number of times they saw a character’s name, whether or not it was an actual “vote” for the character.
The annoying thing about this is that the posted Brawl suggestions no longer exist – they were on the old Brawl site, which was replaced by the current one (even though the other suggestions are still intact). They can be accessed with the Wayback Machine, though.
There’s only one detail we know about the Brawl polls – Sonic was number one. That’s all. I’m just bringing this up because there are still some people who bring up that list above in arguments and say “Geno was one of the most requested characters on Sakurai’s poll, he should have gotten in!”
That’s everything.
Hopefully people find this interesting, but even more hopefully people have interesting things to add.
All credit for translating work goes to xubelox and Kimarhi Ronso, who both disappeared a long time ago.</series>
lolol
3DS Friend Code is 3823-8664-3087
