Biggest Character Changes in Smash History

smash bros games are known for having a lot of content but can you imagine just how much more we've never been able to see at all these include things like cut moves alternate costumes and yes even full-on playable characters what were some of the biggest development changes in smash history in this video we're gonna break down some characters who if a couple of decisions were made differently here and there could be looked at entirely differently today take sonic for example a character who's heavily criticized by many in the community and rightfully so for having a moveset with incredibly missed potential but did you know that his moveset inspiration could have actually turned out much differently in a 2009 interview after the release of brawl the game in which sonic debuted series director masahiro sakurai mentioned then the early development stages of the game the classic version of sonic was planned to be used for the design with the rest of the moveset taking inspiration from various parts of the series and while now classic sonic is a known character to the fan base at this time the distinction between classic sonic and regular sonic wasn't fully established yet there was likely a fear of confusion as to why he wouldn't look like he does in newer games and sacrifice ended up focusing on a mega drive inspired move set instead while using the modern design hard to say whether or not they made the right call though makes more sense from a marketing standpoint to have done what they did but a much more interesting character seemingly could have been developed otherwise since many sources claim that sonic was only added to the game later during brawl's development that could have been the deciding factor as to which idea they would want to add and the easier way is clearly throughout that they went by looking at these move animations my god but at least sonic got in to some extent though some characters never even got the opportunity to join the battle at all in a more modern sakurai interview he mentioned that hiro was actually supposed to have eight separate iterations of the character included as alternate costumes instead of the four with two colorations that we ended up getting the reason for this decision was likely just to save on development times i'm sure developing four new renders which would have to work with the tons and tons of attacks that the character has likely wasn't the easiest task to tackle something cool was kind of done as a nod to this development story though is that the four color swaps the hero did get are actually based on four other protagonists from the dragon quest series so if they were going to put these in we likely would have gotten angelo from dragon quest 8 abel from 5 the scion of erdrick from the first game and the prince of mendenhall from 2. if there's ever a smash 6 that for some reason decides to update hiro in this vein it would be kind of cool to see these guys get in as alternate costumes even more scrapped character ults occurred all the way back in smash 64 believe it or not i found this one especially interesting not only because this concept of giving multiple characters is a role for costumes in one slot never started until smash 4 for one but also because if what i'm about to go over actually happened we could have been in for a significantly different selection of star fox characters and smash modernly fox was originally going to have alternate costumes based on the other characters in team star fox yeah during the development of smash 64 this idea was considered originally for the star fox representative that they wanted in the game and if this went through not only would pepe and slippy have gotten into smash which would never end up happening but falco who did get in with melee would have already been a palette swap would this have prevented falco from joining the battle in the way that he's known for it today and with that would there have been a ripple effect with this in the series would wolf who was later added in brawl have been included as an alternate costume instead of a fighter and once it became standard in smash 4 for everyone to have a minimum of 8 costumes with the rest of team star wolf had to have been included to fill that out so many questions and so many fun possibilities arise from this one little piece of information which is why i love this series so much but the big question that should really be coming up here is why didn't this happen it's not like there was going to be a second star fox rep in smash 64 that they'd have to plan on separating them for no the real reason comes down to this guy slippy toad in the same sakurai interview which contained this piece of information he mentioned that it didn't seem right to the team to have slippy share the same abilities and play style as the other members of team star fox are you serious okay i'll admit that it would be pretty funny to see this fat frog guy with a fast-paced move set that they gave to fox but could you imagine the melee version oh my that would have been insane but this seemed a little too wild for the smash development team once again slippy holds the team back i guess it's fitting for the series but wow what a revelation there's good and bad to come out of this i guess more good in a way since we did get at least slight differences between fox falco and wolf but i can't help but think that if all the pilot characters were stuffed into this one roll that maybe there would have been pressure to add some more unique characters in separate slots like crystal for example but as we're going to see in this next section that may have actually been considered in the development anyways well during the development of brawl the team wanted to add another star fox character but as we've seen already there's sometimes a desire to take shortcuts when possible concerning how much other content is being added into these games i mean who could really blame them they just had to add this perfect tripping mechanic right and in the case of this series crystal was actually the original choice for a new star fox edition but she was ultimately rejected due to time constraints as not much from the pre-existing fox and falco models could have been applied to her new theoretical design wolff was ultimately included over crystal as his own model which could rely more on the existing space animals in the game it does make sense to an extent and while i know that wolfe is a fan favorite today and was highly requested to return for ultimate many including myself would have much preferred a unique addition to the roster which we can all but confirm from this crystal would have been she was eventually included as an assist trophy in smash ultimate though which i'm sure pleased absolutely everyone in the star fox fan base yeah i mean the way the star fox franchise has been going though who could really blame the fan base for being frustrated right another character who was changed during the development of brawl was pokemon trainer at the time of the game's release there were nearly 500 mons available to choose from for this combination of three so yeah it's needless to say that there are many changes in the consideration process but one who seems to have gotten a lot further than any other was blastoise this guy was considered to be a member of the pokemon trainer's team but was ultimately replaced by squirtle asakura felt that it could quote establish itself better as a character than blastoise which was quite interesting to me also noting that he liked the sense of balance that it gave the trainer as a whole by having pokemon of varying sizes the last part i totally get using three starters from kanto all the varying types and stages of their evolution line is quite simply the perfect concept of a standard pokemon trainer it doesn't get much better than that and having blastoise charizard and ivysaur a middle stage to go with those two finals that would certainly look pretty strange maybe venusaur was considered to go with those two at one point as well but there's no public evidence for that as of right now until someone outright asked sakurai the question though i doubt we're going to be getting any more info but for now all we could assume is that this was not the case and they were simply going to go with the three best options disregarding their position in their evolutionary line last choice according to sakurai not being able to establish itself as a character is a little more technical but would likely have to do with the move set potential and fitting in amongst the others in the cast last choice i guess just didn't belong amongst the others to them after going through some of the development process and who really knows how much better or worse off we would have been but in my opinion we did end up getting one of the best character concepts in the entire roster out of this one so i think it's easy to say that they made the right call now don't worry we've still got some more cup characters coming up but for now i want to go over some fighters who had pretty interesting moveset changes during their development i've noticed something interesting about peach's neutral beam the move where she uses a toad to shoot spores at the opponent to counter-attack well the neat thing about this move i've actually already told you and it's that it's used through neutral b out of all the counter-attacks and smash ultimate through every character this is the only one used through neutral b and as such the only one kirby could use is a copy ability which isn't really necessary to the story i just kind of wanted to mention it i thought it would be mildly interesting anyways ever wonder why this is what seems as though the answer lies in peach's origin title super smash brothers melee peach appeared to have two of her specials swapped around during development with her turnip plucking taking the role as neutral b and her counter as downbeat we could tell this because the animation for peach unearthing a turnip is called special n which is universally used for neutral b special moves in the game and this obviously didn't turn out to have that same input i guess the character just felt better to play with this input system i find it hard to imagine unless you're a peach main at a higher level so if you fit that criteria maybe comment down below why you think this would have been because from my perspective it just doesn't make sense for this to be a complete mistake or anything like that because if it was you would have certainly swapped it around for brawl but it's been kept all this time throughout history despite not being the original plan which is quite fascinating to me maybe not the most major change of the video per se but still something fairly significant this isn't it for peach's changed plans those and brawl there may have actually been a move completely taken out involving perry the name of her parasol and super princess peach the plan actually seems to have been for her to use him rather than using her own umbrella which she did in the final game his trophy textures are named after peaches and her parasol model contains his japanese name which is quite telling the idea for this likely spawned from this being a game that had released during brawl's development period and a desire probably arose to include material from a modern appearance of the character a character who back in the mid 2000s didn't have nearly as many abilities which were established to fit her specifically as we know today maybe they wanted to completely rework the character and give her the emotional abilities as seen in super princess peach and along with that you'd have to include perry to complete the reference right but as we've seen the time constraints with some characters in pearl proved to be too much for the team and with super princess peach not being an absolute success or anything like that there was likely little to no pressure to fulfill this idea and carry her over and what would be the point of adding perry without more super princess peach content right this might not even be the most interesting moveset change in brawl though did you know that kirby was supposed to have a charged hammer swing in this entry this can be determined by seeing some of the unused animations for the move in the game i'm sure he's got it nowadays and a similar van to king dedede's hammer but that ability was only added to the move slot in smash 4. whereas before that kirby could still use the hammer swing and it would be a powerful blow but it just wouldn't be chargeable but if they were going to add this move to his kit in a later entry why would they consider including it for brawl and then decide not to it doesn't make much sense right well my best guess is that king dedede was a new fighter introduced for brawl so they probably wanted to incorporate something that would differentiate the two characters more to really show off candidity as a unique addition for the game this can be supported by looking at one of the most unique moves in the series being included in his set and brawl with the waddle dee throw that would not end up being kept later if they wanted to stand standout on his own they certainly pulled it off but perhaps they wanted a more accurate version of both kirby and ddd later on so they decided to pull the trigger to make the changes a little bonus here is that kirby was originally shown attacking with his hammer in midair like he did in melee in the e3 2006 trailer for brawl but this would be changed to a horizontal spinning attack later for the final it's not the biggest change or anything but what i find interesting is that things like this seem to happen more often than you might think in smash entries where an attack from a previous entry is shown off in a trailer but isn't the same in the final release donkey kong's up special could be angled downwards in a melee trailer whereas that's not an option for the final and fox originally had a rapid firing blaster with shots that dealt hit stun damage as well which was thankfully changed oh my god with how good foxes and melee already could you imagine if he was even better there's probably more out there in older trailers but i think you get the gist of it a lot of moves that we see today still stuck around just in different form and that same situation seemed to happen with the fighters in smash 4. sakura has stated that dark pit dr mario and lucina were originally going to be alternate costumes for pit mario and marth respectively why were they all promoted to a fighter spot well beginning with dr mario number one he was already a unique character in the previous entry that he was playable in so it'd be kind of awkward to change that but that couldn't be the main reason right he's already cut and brawl so there was no reason that they couldn't have left them out once again sakurai said that he wanted to add the vitamins and the dr tornado along with the new down air to make the character more unique and sure it does make sense to include that stuff if you think it's going to create a more fun character although i don't know if that necessarily forced the team's hand in terms of dark pit while they really wanted to add his electroshock arm and his new final smash and while as i've stated in the past i'm not the biggest fan of the dark pit staff attack it does make more sense than him using the three sacred treasures final smash as pit does lucina didn't get as many major changes as these guys though making her the most interesting case of all to me but sakurai did give a reason in a miiverse quote god remember when that was a thing i still miss some of those crazy posts but anyways in this he said quote whenever there's even a small difference in abilities that character gets an actual roster slot which is pretty telling as to their design philosophy if they want a character in if they feel that there needs to be a change even if small they'll make it regardless of whether fans consider it to be roster padding or not they've carried that thought process over to this date with the inclusion of many more echo fighters but we almost got one more alpha was originally going to be included as a clone character for olimar in smash 4 according to sakura this is kind of the opposite situation as the previous three characters since there they were considered to be an alt but were eventually given full playable status whereas here alph was originally supposed to be playable but was demoted in a sense to an alternate costume leaving us with just one pikmin fighter slot that has carried over till this day but why was alph considered in the first place well this was likely due to the desire to reference the newer series release at the time pikmin 3 by having the new rock pikmin from there included as part of his moveset but the interviews that have been gathered surrounding this it seems like alph was very close to getting in with sakurai saying that he was quote next in line to get a clone spot but it seems as though time constraints put a stop to this but doesn't this contradict the philosophy before about dr mario darkpit and lucina i don't believe so considering that the changes that were made to those characters were done because it was believed that small aspects in their original fighters gameplay wouldn't be well applied to them whereas here even though alf is just a palette swap his moveset is still fitting he can use these abilities in the series and there's not much wrong with his representation in smash sure you could say the same thing about lucina and marth but since lucina's changes were mainly technically based whereas a whole new pikmin type would have to be created to satisfy the plans for alf the tiebreaker just came down to timing and lucina was fortunately able to beat the clock whereas our lovable pikmin protagonist did not the real piece to this puzzle which has kind of shocked me a bit is why alph wasn't promoted to echo status and ultimate man they were practically handing out these positions left and right you get an echo you get an echo everyone can get one well except alf maybe it would have seemed like a bad look going from an alt to a roster spot as a sign of padding for the game but i feel like the ship surrounding that would have been long sailed by this point sakurai seems to put anyone in that they want regardless of how many people it will upset it probably just came down to the lack of urgency to include out is this current moveset fitting yup is there something like pikmin 4 to promote that we have to give another slot to this franchise for nope yeah but we still believe right pikmin fans right we've got some more cut characters coming up but on the subject of alternate costumes there were still some more in development that never made the cut i've talked about rejected outfits that were included at some point in this series in a previous video but none there were outright scrapped during development and pikachu and jigglypuff in smash 64 i feel is a good place to start in the original entry of the series there was a lot of inconsistency in terms of the number of pilot swaps that a character would get obviously everyone needed a minimum of four to have four different looks for the fighters while playing in four player smash and some would only get that while others got six these two guys weren't so lucky and only got three colors plus their default look but what if i told you they were supposed to be at least one more for each from data mining the community was able to determine they were both originally supposed to get yellow outfits to go along with their red blue and green ones but it just didn't pan out i mean i get not including this for pikachu as there wouldn't be too much distinction between the default and the one with the yellow party hat but i think puff wouldn't have been that bad they would both sort of get yellow alts eventually but none in the originally intended form as in subsequent entries puff would get a crown and pikachu would get hats with yellow in them and all that but it seems like we're not too likely to get these in particular anytime in the future as even if they extend past the standard eight outfits for everyone they've continually been adding ones with deeper inspirations behind them as time has gone on and having a yellow party hat or bow just for the sake of it might not be the highest item on their priority list just a hunch a pretty interesting cup costume in this vein occurred in brawl which was a blue colored luigi under the name fit luigi o2 now as you can see here the blue alt that luigi did end up getting is shown on the right but on the left is the scrapped version which unusually has the character's shadow model integrated into the main one whereas for pretty much every other alt in the game they're completely separated while we could all see that this is a rough version imagine if they actually planned on incorporating the shadow model into the actual selection of alternate costumes that he's got it certainly would have been cool to see this form of the character included outside of subspace but it was likely just a development error now back in brawl zelda and sheik were still combined into one character slot switching between one another with down being a similar vein to pirate and mithra as we see today that all changed in smash 4 but what if i told you that wasn't the original plan zelda was originally still going to transform into chic and vice versa but due to hardware limitations on the 3ds the downbeat for both characters had to be changed to phantom slash for zelda and bouncing fish for chic something similar was done with samus as originally she would transform into the zero suit version of the character once her final smash was used however in smash 4 there were two separate slots given to these forms it happened to pokemon trainer 2 as the entire character would have to be completely dropped in favor of simply having charizard as the fighter because the mechanic of swapping the pokemon around would prove to be too much for the 3ds anzard was the most iconic of the three pokemon so it was the choice to remain if you played smash on the 3ds you'll likely remember that the load times were ridiculously long so maybe if it took this long already to load in a fighter and all their assets into a match then wanting the ability to change it all on the fly in a split second likely couldn't be done it's no coincidence that all three of these changes were made being so alike these 3ds limitations also led to the ice climbers famously being removed mid development of smash 4 as the team tried very hard but just couldn't get both of the characters on the screen at the same time during gameplay and they really wanted the 3ds and wii u versions of the game to have identical rosters so if one couldn't work then both would have to be changed i guess they never really considered just using one ice climber instead of both but i guess it just wouldn't be the same interestingly enough even though all four of these changes happened for similar reasons only half would be revered when the hardware barrier would be lifted with a shift to the nintendo switch for smash ultimate as while we got pokemon trainer and ice climbers back the positive fan reception to zelda and chic being separated along with samus and zero suit led to them remaining in that way pretty neat how some development constraints led to a change for the better that likely never would have otherwise been experimented with but even though the hardware was improved for the switch that couldn't save another fighter idea rex was originally considered a fight alongside one of either pyra or mithra in a similar vein to how the ice climbers fight alongside one another now this seems very ambitious and at least with nana and popo their move sets are identical and fairly simple here not only would you be dealing with two different move selections between the two characters but their models are also much more complicated and you'd also have to combine that with the ability to change between pyra and mithra which as we've established presents a burden on the console it all seemed to be too much and a sakurai quoted simply it was impossible can't put it much clearer than that will we ever see this idea realized in a smash 6 when we're presumably on a significantly more powerful nintendo system probably not since there'd probably be a lack of urgency at that point as it's not like rex would be at the forefront of the series protagonist-wise anymore and by then there will likely be many other characters who would justifiably receive priority over him pretty unfortunate for rex though was going to be included in the base game but got cut due to time constraints and then when he finally gets considered for that dlc role the concept just doesn't work with him as part of it and he gets cast away in favor of the new idea which the team preferred tough luck but at least we'll always have this taunt and like how rex was the original choice for a xenoblade 2 rep there were others that were originally considered for final fantasy in smash 4 as well while now it seems pretty established that final fantasy's inclusion in smash brothers is mainly seven focused with cloud originally and now sephiroth but before the 3ds and wii u iterations of the series there was no previous content like this to go off of there were many more options which could have been considered and sakurai stated in an interview that he could have included characters such as vasoya from final fantasy 4 ortz clauser from 5 or even tara blanford from 6 but ultimately said that it was difficult to imagine including a starter character from the series that wasn't cloud which is pretty understandable he's very iconic and all that but imagining an alternate reality where that doesn't happen could have completely changed the course of newcomers for the series we certainly wouldn't have gotten sephiroth out of the smash ultimate dlc if cloud wasn't the first pick so that's definitely something to think about if you're a big fan of the character this type of situation didn't stop with final fantasy though haihachi one of the most popular characters from tekken was also considered as a potential newcomer for smash 4 but would be scrapped during development this however wasn't really a character change per se since he wouldn't be directly replaced by anyone that is however until smash ultimate when he would be considered again this is really interesting to me as it wasn't really since gino and ridley that we've seen characters get rejected multiple times but here we are going over rex and haihachi who fit this criteria makes you wonder what we're gonna find out down the road but why was this done anyways well once it was decided to add a tekken character to ultimate after some deliberation he would get passed on in favor of his son kazuya due to the better move set potential granted by the devil mechanics i understand this and it's always quite cool to see some characters even if they're more iconic get passed on for ones where the team feels would be more fun to play i've touched on some instances like this in a previous video about rejected characters for smash ultimate such as decidueye getting passed down in favor of incenteroar and alucard almost beating out the belmonts for the coveted castlevania roster spot but there's one more that i've never gotten the chance to cover this being the minman situation if you remember back to earlier in 2020 the way that the first character of fighter's past 2 was revealed was quite odd to say the least it was announced that a fighter from arms would be joining the battle likely to temper fan expectations in case people were expecting sora or some other crazy character to be revealed but who is this gonna be though some thought that spring man would take the jump from assist trophy to fighter while others thought that riven girl was more well known or even someone like twinteller and ninjara but min min was ultimately the choice which i'm sure everyone is happy with now considering how great this moveset turned out right but what if i told you that the aforementioned ninjara was actually pretty close to being the choice more so than you may think sakurai originally went to the development team behind arms to get a gauge on the characters who they felt would work well in smash i mean who would know better than the people who created the game right and when he asked who the game's protagonist was and the response was basically everyone's the protagonist he realized that the major priority in development should be the unique moveset potential and nothing else and the two options at the forefront forum were min-min and ninjara the latter who could use shield warping abilities in a fast-paced playstyle but that was ultimately outweighed by the potential that they saw in minmin while some people may like how the character turned out i'd say she's had one of the most negative receptions long term by the smash fanbase as to many she doesn't feel fun to play so while we'll likely never know how ninjara would have turned out it doesn't seem like they made the greatest decision with this one the scene has animation folders labeled bow and bow arrow but they have no animations inside either one quite interesting to say the least it's unknown as to what these would have been used for but one would assume that she'd use the thon from awakening as a special attack this would have been a really cool idea to change her up more from marth and is coincidentally one of the ideas that i gave during the video where we gave echo's new move sets i assume this was in consideration because lucina is without one of the closest echo to original fighters in the entire game and using even more abilities from her title of origin could only be a good thing but maybe this was cut to give time to implement chrom as a fighter instead we have confirmation was in the planning stages of smash 4. before the team decided that robin would be much more unique and that they could create a typical fire emblem character for this entry as well through giving martha a clone the second clone that he had received up until that point if they ever declone the echoes and maybe even some semi-clones in the future though an addition of a bow-like attack would definitely be near the top of my list in terms of new additions that i'd like to see and since we've been all over the place with this video going from game to game we might as well bring it all the way back to smash 64 for this one being an element scrapped from every character in the game final smashes one of the defining features from the series which many people decide not to play with only made its debut in brawl but if you didn't know these spectacular moves were actually planned to be included all the way back in the nintendo 64 iteration of the series while it's clear that hardware limitations basically made it near impossible to include these flashy moves back then one of the more interesting questions that arises to me is what would these moves have been after all including one last final blow to a character in 2008 would be quite a bit different than in 1999 that's almost a decade of new series material for these guys to use and while we don't know all the planned original moves there are a couple of unused voice clips in the game such as pk starstorm hinting at ness's final smash the one he would end up getting modernly along with one for captain falcon yelling blue falcon also his modern final smash so while this likely isn't the case with everyone it's pretty interesting how some final smashes likely would have been the same 9 years earlier don't forget to subscribe if you want to see more videos like this on your way very soon and i'll see you next time

Channel: Siiroth

Views: 102,685

Keywords: Nintendo, Mario, Siiroth, Smash

Id: BZ-r6gHqAR4

Length: 22min 56sec (1376 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021