Almost three months ago, it was revealed that a character from Nintendo’s newest franchise, ARMS, would open Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s second fighter pass. Naturally, everyone has theories for every single character in the ARMS roster, and why they’re the one entering the fray. Being the three year anniversary of ARMS’ release, the character’s reveal is fast approaching. Let’s go through some of the more believable theories, ending off on why the clear choice is none other than the Silver Screen Queen.
The pickings are already slim when a game has just 15 characters (16 if you count Biff!) and general consensus has narrowed down the options even further to just 7, as most of the roster has nothing in particular to potentially propel them to the top of the pack.
Being the mascots of the game, Spring Man and Ribbon Girl were relentlessly pushed as the faces of the game at launch, but the game has evolved since those prerelease days, and they’re simply no longer the focus; there are characters far more fitting for the “shill” pick.
As the game has gone on, its lore has been fleshed out to include proper heroes and villains, those being Max Brass and Dr. Coyle. If the Smash inclusion is meant to advertise future content, or even a future title, plugging the main focus of the story is a reasonable choice. Max in particular is the champion and head of the ARMS League, and thus the final character players face in the Grand Prix. This universality gives him a feel of true representation of the series. That being said, neither Max Brass nor Dr. Coyle were playable at launch, and thus missed the peak hype wave of the game; most people aren’t nearly as familiar with the post-launch characters as they are with the original ten.
There are clear picks for the most popular characters in ARMS. Min Min, winner of the game’s final fan contest, is also the favorite of art director Masaaki Ishikawa, viewing her as “the most relatable out of all the characters”. The developers have repeatedly fawned over Ninjara, going so far as to say they were most confident in his design of all the launch characters. “We know ninjas”, affirmed series director Kosuke Yabuki. Developer support carries huge weight in Smash roster choice, best demonstrated by the inclusion of Greninja and Incineroar almost solely because they were the favorite starters of the Pokémon team.
Of course, Min Min and Ninjara are not the only fan and developer favorites. Yabuki has referred to Twintelle as his favorite ARMS character, citing her archetype: “She’s a pretty rare character for Nintendo to put out there. She’s got a really strong build and I think that’s really appealing in the world of ARMS”. Yabuki has also commented on how pleased the team was with the fan reaction to Twintelle’s reveal:
Kosuke Yabuki, ARMS director
A year after ARMS’ initial release, Nintendo dropped a free ARMS demo in which just five characters are playable, half that of even the game’s launch roster. The first four slots are, naturally, filled by the four fighters revealed in the original ARMS Direct, but Twintelle, who appears later in the game’s character list, fills the fifth slot. This means a conscious decision was made by the ARMS team to ensure she specifically would be playable in the demo, to promote Twintelle over any of the other 10 characters not in the game’s original presentation, and to ensure that the new favorite of countless Smash fans would be playable for free to maximize their first impressions of the game.
Most new Smash characters reuse assets from existing characters to save time in development, but this workaround seems to cause bugs in the base character prior to the launch of the new one. Because of this, most DLC characters so far have been leaked by these glitches, some more obviously than others. You may remember a glitch in Ver. 3.0 of the game in which Mii Swordfighter and Duck Hunt both frequently corrupted All-Star Mode save data, an early indication of Hero and Banjo’s later reveal. Simon and Richter had a visual bug in their forward smash charging animation in Ver. 6.0 despite not having received any patch notes, a clue that they were used as a base for the later revealed Byleth. These bugs immediately disappeared when Hero and Byleth were released, respectively, further adding fuel to the theory’s fire.
The next character to receive an unexplained visual bug is Bayonetta, whose hair animations no longer function properly despite being otherwise unchanged from the previous patch (other than a shield buff that applied to most characters). This would indicate the next character has used Bayonetta assets. For those unfamiliar with ARMS, Twintelle has a mechanic very similar to Bayonetta’s Witch Time in that it slows down attacking enemies while charging on the ground, and thus likely borrows from the existing version of it in Smash. Of course, the more obvious and more likely reason is that both Twintelle and Bayonetta fight with their hair. The two reasons combine to make Bayonetta a perfect base on which to build Twintelle.
More importantly than anything else in this article, a lot of people seem to dislike talking about diversity, but it matters. Bluntly, Smash has zero black characters right now. Some try to argue that Ganondorf technically counts, being a Gerudo; this is a massive stretch, and regardless, the fact that we have to reach for technicalities in the first place is sad. There’s a very real likelihood that Nintendo, particularly Nintendo of America, pushed Twintelle for the sake of better representing a large portion of those who play their games.
Series director Masahiro Sakurai has pushed for representation in the past when the demand is there; two of the biggest complaints Sakurai received about the original Smash 64 roster were the lack of villains (having only DK, who hardly counts after his multiple protagonist roles), and the lack of women (having only Samus, who never exits her Varia Suit in Smash 64 and thus is never seen). Sakurai has commented that he made it a priority to fix these roster holes for Melee, leading to Peach, Bowser, the Ice Climbers, and Zelda being the game’s first revealed newcomers. Similar demand exists for minority representation, and it’s very possible that the demands have finally been heard.
We know how significant developer opinion is in character choices, and Twintelle made the director’s cut. Yabuki has repeatedly made decisions that further push her into the limelight, and both he and Sakurai want to bring more diversity to Nintendo’s character repertoire. It’s time to take center stage.
Smash Labs 