when u finally add ridley after years of being pestered about it and constantly telling people it won’t happen and people are still harassing you on twitter because you didn’t add a shitty character from a mario spinoff game whose popularity is only ironic
yet they give half the characters moves that don’t even come from their own games and bring back long dead properties like Rob the Robot and the Duck Hunt dog and 18 Fire Emblem characters that a lot of people still can’t tell apart from each other.
yeah! fuck Waluigi! he doesn’t deserve a character slot even though EVERYONE fucking knows who he is.
i’m not saying we absolutely need Waluigi as a playable character but judging by the knee jerk reactions people like to give, like “why him!?” looking at the rest of the roster, and the oddball decisions they made like giving Luigi a bizarre moveset that we all accepted because we were like 9, i can’t help but say “why not??”
Rob the Robot and the Duck Hunt dog are more iconic and representative of Nintendo’s history than a character who only shows up for Mario sports games and nothing else
if i went out to a public shopping mall, with stacks of flash cards, each with a nintendo character on them, i’m willing to bet that people who actually play games and people who don’t at the very least would recognize Waluigi as “one of the Mario characters.” showing those same people flash cards of any of the 47 fire emblem characters, Rob, Lucas, and (in some cases) the 7 Koopalings and Duck Hunt, i’d argue that more than 70% of people that’d recognize those characters would only know them from Smash. im not going to say Rob and Duck Hunt aren’t important to Nintendo’s history, because they totally totally are, whether or not enough people recognize them. but if you ask me, in terms of ‘Star Power,’ which is the main appeal of these games, Waluigi holds far more charisma and recognizability than a good number of characters already in the roster. im not gonna jump down sakurai’s throat. im going to get the game and play it and enjoy it. but will i jump down the throats of everyone that’d argue Waluigi wouldn’t fit, despite characters like Rob, the Wii Fit Trainer, Captain Olimar, Mr. Game & Watch, Captain Falcon, and the Animal Crossing Villager getting a character slot when they wouldn’t lend themselves well to being fighting game characters, yet they made it work anyway?? you BET im jumpin down those throats. come ON. ROSALINA GETS A SLOT AND NOT WALUIGI!!?? YOU’RE FUCKIN ME RIGHT??? WHY IS THIS EVEN BEING ARGUED. WHO. THE FUCK. IS SHULK. I STILL DONT FUCKING KNOW. ROBIN!!?? OH YEAH! ROBIN!! FROM FIRE EMBLEM!! YEAH!! I TOTALLY KNOW WHO THE FUCK THAT IS. FUCK WALUIGI THOUGH, YEAH??
I like Waluigi as much as the next guy, but I’m not really all that mad that he’s not a playable character. After all, we already have PLENTY of Mario representative, most of whom are much more important than Waluigi (the only one who isn’t is Daisy who is a literal clone)
Rosalina has more star power because Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 are POPULAR. And she was playable in 3D World. She’s basically been cemented in the Mario universe and has a lot of popularity.
Then there’s characters like Robin or Corin who are meant to represent the new FE games (which are SUPER popular in Japan).
But when you think about it, other than FE (and Mario now)most characters in the roster are main characters, main villains or very important.
Fox and Falco are two of the main pilots and Wolf is their rival
Kirby is the main character and Meta Knight and Dedede are constantly recurring villains
The LoZ representatives are always a version of Link, Ganondorf and Zelda,
Pit, Dark Pit, and Palutena are more obscure but got a new game recently and again all 3 of them are pretty important to the series.
Captain Falcon, Ness and Lucas, Shulk and Little Mac are all a bit more obscure but they’re also the only representatives from their series that are playable and they’re the main character.
It’s not like you can play as Paula or Vaati or Slippy or Knuckle Joe or anything.
The only characters that are kinda side characters are arguably Dark Pit, and definitly Daisy and Jigglypuff and you can easily argue that that’s because they’re all REALLY easy to just reskin over another character.
Waluigi is a guy you’d have to build from the ground up, and you’d really have to weigh HOW necessary him as a representative is. Mario Luigi, Peach and Bowser are the most important characters in the series. Bowser Jr. became a big deal from Sunshine onward and appears in many main series games as an antagonist. Rosalina is the main princess character from the Galaxy games, which as I said before were incredibly popular, as was she. To the extent she makes cameos and is playable in several newer games. The only odd girl out is Daisy, who seems like she exists more to advertise the concept of “echo fighters” and again she’d be easy to just reskin over Peach.
I do hope characters like Waluigi, Marx, Bandanna Dee, Ashley, Shadow the Hedgehog and others get added in. But these choices don’t really seem to fit the way nintendo has been adding characters.
