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Smash Wii U & 3DS Downloadable Characters Discussion and Information on Smash Ballot

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Much as I loved using Squirtle, I don't think he and Ivysaur have much of a chance by themselves.

Squirtle honestly could stand on his own just fine. He's iconic and popular as a starter. He'd also be the only first stage Pokemon in the game.

Ivysaur... not so much. Not terribly popular. It's an awkward middle evolution and really only seems to have gotten in Smash because they needed a middle evolution that was a grass type and also from the first gen. So basically, it defaulted to Ivysaur.

Unfortunately, I think the two of them are kind of tied together.

What's interesting is if they were swapped, with it being Wartortle and Bulbasaur, their chances also would have been swapped, with Bulbasaur being a better shot than Wartortle. Middle starter evolutions are always kind of awkward and not popular unless they're Grovyle because he actually starred in a game.

Did I mention Grovyle is the perfect middle evolution grass starter for Smash yet? Because he totally is. And he'd be a playable raptor-geko that messes with space and time. How cool is that?

Pikachu...

Squirtle had the rolling shell, which is a Bowser custom move now. That is about it. The water spray was so bad.
I thought Pikachu was a middle weight, but Smash Wiki shows me this is wrong.

Anyway, my person opinion for Squirtle would be that his down special would have been Rapid Spin, and would work like a Doc Tornado and act as a small recovery mixed with a reflector. It's one of the only "iconic" moves of Squirtle that I feel would work as a down special. I think that, combined with his really good agility and decent normal attacks would make at least an upper mid tier.

Withdraw also isn't anything like Bowser's custom. Withdraw basically turned Squirtle into a living Koopa Shell item. It even makes the same hit sound as a Koopa Shell.
 

kirby_fox

Banned
Withdraw wasn't a great move, nor was water gun. I would love to see withdraw act as a counter where if you take damage during the match it builds up it's own damage.

With hydro pump probably a final smash, they could use down special as rain dance. A slight temp boost in his water based attacks.
 
Ivysaur had a lame projectile and...nothing else, really. The bullets were cool as an antiair.

I thought the pollen explosion attacks were pretty fun.

Did I mention Grovyle is the perfect middle evolution grass starter for Smash yet? Because he totally is. And he'd be a playable raptor-geko that messes with space and time. How cool is that?

I'm getting Sceptile vibes here.
 
Squirtle honestly could stand on his own just fine. He's iconic and popular as a starter. He'd also be the only first stage Pokemon in the game.

Ivysaur... not so much. Not terribly popular. It's an awkward middle evolution and really only seems to have gotten in Smash because they needed a middle evolution that was a grass type and also from the first gen. So basically, it defaulted to Ivysaur.

Unfortunately, I think the two of them are kind of tied together.

What's interesting is if they were swapped, with it being Wartortle and Bulbasaur, their chances also would have been swapped, with Bulbasaur being a better shot than Wartortle. Middle starter evolutions are always kind of awkward and not popular unless they're Grovyle because he actually starred in a game.

Did I mention Grovyle is the perfect middle evolution grass starter for Smash yet? Because he totally is. And he'd be a playable raptor-geko that messes with space and time. How cool is that?


I thought Pikachu was a middle weight, but Smash Wiki shows me this is wrong.

Anyway, my person opinion for Squirtle would be that his down special would have been Rapid Spin, and would work like a Doc Tornado and act as a small recovery mixed with a reflector. It's one of the only "iconic" moves of Squirtle that I feel would work as a down special. I think that, combined with his really good agility and decent normal attacks would make at least an upper mid tier.

Withdraw also isn't anything like Bowser's custom. Withdraw basically turned Squirtle into a living Koopa Shell item. It even makes the same hit sound as a Koopa Shell.
He withdraws into his shell and spins across the screen, hitting stuff. Sounds similar enough to me.
 

jph139

Member
Honestly they could easily put in Squirtle and downgrade Ivysaur to Bulbasaur. They're both among the most popular Pokemon and then you have the advantage of both being anime regulars and merchandise machines. Unlike Charizard, the first forms have always been the most popular among them.

That'd give you a majority of Ash's Kanto team, actually. You'd just be missing Pidgeotto from his standards.
 
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Actually, it sounds like he recorded lines for Smash, he just don't want people to think that means Layton is in Smash?

That's actually what I'm reading into it now that I see it again.
 

Kouichi

Member
I don't see how the new tweet changes anything. All the original tweet said was that he might be in Smash based off an extra recording session he did. This just further confirms that he doesn't know what the recording session was for. Could be Smash, could be something else.
 

Frofro

Banned
I don't see how the new tweet changes anything. All the original tweet said was that he might be in Smash based off an extra recording session he did. This just further confirms that he doesn't know what the recording session was for. Could be Smash, could be something else.
This very well could be the case! I'd say not to hold our breath, but this can still give us hope that Layton is actually possible for the game
 
I wouldn't be mad if Squirtle and Ivysaur returned. I liked using Ivysaur especially because of how satisfying it was to hit with the pollen explosions and its attacks felt meaty compared to Squirtle. As people have pointed out, its projectile kinda sucked and the seed attack was situational. Tether recovery was also problematic at times but I'm not sure what it could be changed to since they kinda distanced characters from those this time around. Maybe the vine could come out, pause momentarily mid-air then fling Ivysaur in a desired direction, kinda similar to Pac-Man's side B.

Squirtle was ok, but I wish Water Gun was more powerful (same with FLUDD tbh) and that it dealt a bit of damage. Withdraw was ok but is a bit slow and weak. If it was more powerful and faster maybe it could be used as a horizontal recovery since he's so susceptible to launching that it would help him a lot since Waterfall wasn't massively effective at doing that.

And with all this Layton talk going on - I never played the games but wouldn't be mad if we saw him make an appearance. Not sure what his attacks would be, and I see him as another "non-violent" character like Villager, but his games have always stayed true to the DS platforms so the character has paid his dues and then some and lots of people enjoy them.
 

Tyeforce

Member
Yeah, I definitely think we'll hear something sometime between September 13th and October 3rd...

Also, regarding Professor Layton, here are my thoughts from the other thread:
Professor Layton would be a great addition to Smash Bros.! Though I haven't really played any of his games (I own Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask but I've barely played it), I've always thought he should be in Smash post-Brawl. I didn't think there was much of a realistic chance of that happening, though, since he's kind of in that weird gray area between third-party and first-/second-party. I mean, yes, technically he's third-party, but he's essentially a Nintendo character regardless of that, having only appeared on Nintendo systems with his games being published by Nintendo outside Japan. It's kind of comparable to Mega Man on the NES, but even more closely related to Nintendo.

If you compare him to the other third-party characters in Smash, no, Professor Layton isn't quite on the same level in terms of being iconic. To be fair, though, Professor Layton is a much newer character and franchise than PAC-MAN, Ryu, Mega Man, or Sonic, and you could argue that Professor Layton is a modern gaming icon. But regardless, maybe we shouldn't be comparing Professor Layton to other third-party characters, but rather to other Nintendo characters, since he essentially is one in many ways. In that regard, I think he definitely fits in and deserves a place in Smash.

Plus, Professor Layton would finally bring some good Nintendo DS representation to the roster. For Nintendo's most successful system, the DS sure is underrepresented in Smash Bros., at least when it comes to fighters. Currently, Lucario is the only character born on the DS in Smash Bros., and it's not even from a franchise that originated on Nintendo DS. While I've been (and still am) hoping for Chorus Kids as a DS rep, Professor Layton fills that role even better, coming from a franchise that debuted on the DS. Actually, I can't think of a better character to represent the Nintendo DS than Professor Layton.

With that last part, I've been thinking about representation per system in Smash Bros., so I decided to put together a little visual for that. Bold characters come from a franchise (as determined by Smash Bros.) that debuted on the system, italic characters are DLC, characters in (parentheses) are alts, and characters within [brackets] are from the same franchise.

Arcade: PAC-MAN, Donkey Kong, [Mario, Luigi], Little Mac, Ryu

Game & Watch: Mr. Game & Watch

NES: Duck Hunt, R.O.B., [Peach, Bowser, (Larry, Roy, Wendy, Iggy, Morton, Lemmy, Ludwig), Dr. Mario*], [Link, Zelda], Samus, [Pit, Palutena], Mega Man, Marth, Meta Knight

SEGA Genesis: Sonic the Hedgehog

Game Boy: Dr. Mario*, [Kirby, King Dedede], Wario, [Pikachu, Charizard, Jigglypuff, Mewtwo]

Super NES: Yoshi, Captain Falcon, [Fox, Falco], Ness, Diddy Kong

Virtual Boy: N/A

Nintendo 64: [Sheik, Ganondorf], Villager

Game Boy Color: N/A

Game Boy Advance: Roy, Zero Suit Samus, Lucas

Nintendo GameCube: Pikmin & Olimar, Bowser Jr., Toon Link, Ike

Nintendo DS: Lucario

Wii: Rosalina & Luma, Wii Fit Trainer, Shulk

Nintendo 3DS: Dark Pit, [Robin, Lucina], Greninja

Wii U: (Pikmin & Alph)

*Dr. Mario debuted on both the NES and Game Boy simultaneously.

I'm sure this doesn't mean too much when it comes to character inclusion, but it's interesting, and it does show just how underrepresented the Nintendo DS is in Smash Bros.
 

IntelliHeath

As in "Heathcliff"
With that last part, I've been thinking about representation per system in Smash Bros., so I decided to put together a little visual for that. Bold characters come from a franchise (as determined by Smash Bros.) that debuted on the system, italic characters are DLC, characters in (parentheses) are alts, and characters within [brackets] are from the same franchise.

Yet we got a franchise from Game Boy Advance, which is WarioWare. I meant Sakurai are pushing WarioWare more than he actually did for WarioLand.
 

Tyeforce

Member
Yet we got a franchise from Game Boy Advance, which is WarioWare so it's sticky for your list.
Smash Bros. considers the "Wario" franchise as both Wario Land and WarioWare, so I followed that.

EDIT: Just saw your edit. While true that WarioWare is more represented, it doesn't change the fact that Smash Bros. treats the two franchises as one. And if you go by that logic, then that messes up a bunch of things. For example, Donkey Kong becomes a SNES rep for the Donkey Kong Country series, specifically, instead of an arcade rep., etc.
 
Wario's series is just called "Wario" so it's assumed it comes from the Game Boy, not Game Boy Advance. WarioWare is featured for Wario, but the series also has one song unrelated to WarioWare labeled as from the Wario series and also Wario's alt costumes.
 

kirby_fox

Banned
http://www.poll-maker.com/poll395154xD2B5C2B5-15

I'm working with several other Smash fans to get as many votes as possible from all the smash communities. Lets see what Neogaf brings!

This is where fan polls fail.

The huge difference between this poll and the one Nintendo is doing is that you're giving us characters. The placement of answers actually has an affect on votes. Say for instance someone wants K Rool and Wonder Red. Since they see K Rool first, they quickly select K Rool- even though maybe they wanted Wonder Red more and actively voted for Wonder Red in Nintendo's.

Well, that and having a fairly small sample size and the ability to vote consistently over and over...
I'll always vote Ice Climbers, never give up hope!

Edit: Not to disregard what you're doing here, but more so to warn not to be so invested in your results. I don't expect them to differ much from what we've been seeing.
 

Frofro

Banned
This is where fan polls fail.

The huge difference between this poll and the one Nintendo is doing is that you're giving us characters. The placement of answers actually has an affect on votes. Say for instance someone wants K Rool and Wonder Red. Since they see K Rool first, they quickly select K Rool- even though maybe they wanted Wonder Red more and actively voted for Wonder Red in Nintendo's.

Well, that and having a fairly small sample size and the ability to vote consistently over and over...
I'll always vote Ice Climbers, never give up hope!

Edit: Not to disregard what you're doing here, but more so to warn not to be so invested in your results. I don't expect them to differ much from what we've been seeing.

You can only vote once per IP, so im doing my best to filter out spam votes. Yet I agree order matters, however with 98 choices, its nearly impossible to display choices without affecting others. I did my best to sort them by series

Also you can write in your own posts, and I can add on new options as the poll goes, very handy!

You have two entries for Midna as well ('Midna/wolflink' and 'Midna')
Do you mean Imp Midna and Twili Midna?

Just looked into this, the second Midna is just one someone else voted in with the "Other" option. Guess I'll have to adjust the results near the end and combine them.
 
You can only vote once per IP, so im doing my best to filter out spam votes. Yet I agree order matters, however with 98 choices, its nearly impossible to display choices without affecting others. I did my best to sort them by series

Also you can write in your own posts, and I can add on new options as the poll goes, very handy!

Well, for fun I voted then noticed a character in the results that wasn't there when I voted the first time so I voted successfully a second time to add my vote to their stack so the system itself doesn't seem to stop multi-votes (unless someone else also did the same at the exact same time XD)

edit: that said, I didn't check to see if the first character I voted for decreased? Maybe it changed my vote rather than letting me vote twice? :eek:
 

Frofro

Banned
Well, for fun I voted then noticed a character in the results that wasn't there when I voted the first time so I voted successfully a second time to add my vote to their stack so the system itself doesn't seem to stop multi-votes (unless someone else also did the same at the exact same time XD)

edit: that said, I didn't check to see if the first character I voted for decreased? Maybe it changed my vote rather than letting me vote twice? :eek:

You can change your vote as many times as you'd like, but it will remove any other votes you have. I can actually see how many votes each character got with the same IP. This is a nifty poll dashboard.
 
You can change your vote as many times as you'd like, but it will remove any other votes you have. I can actually see how many votes each character got with the same IP. This is a nifty poll dashboard.
Fair enough :3
Probably susceptible to IP spoofing or even just using another device (e.g. your phone via data will have it's own IP and UID if someone wanted a second vote) but I suspect the Ninty ballot will likely have similar weaknesses :p
 

Frofro

Banned
Fair enough :3
Probably susceptible to IP spoofing or even just using another device (e.g. your phone via data will have it's own IP and UID if someone wanted a second vote) but I suspect the Ninty ballot will likely have similar weaknesses :p

True, I have an option of including a form of a captcha, so If votes seem to get out of hand I'll do so, but for now nothing seems excessive (I previous poll saw like 100 votes for Ashley in a few mins haha)
 

kirby_fox

Banned
You can only vote once per IP, so im doing my best to filter out spam votes. Yet I agree order matters, however with 98 choices, its nearly impossible to display choices without affecting others. I did my best to sort them by series

Also you can write in your own posts, and I can add on new options as the poll goes, very handy!

Happened to keep hitting next on your poll for results. It actually shows when votes are counted. Oddly enough, a lot of Snake's votes seem to have happened at the same time if I'm reading it right. Sadly, there's little to do to weed out people who really want to make it seem like their character is "winning" for some reason- it's not hard to alter your IP address these days.

It's why a lot of us don't take these polls seriously I think. Why someone so desperately needs their character to win a fan poll, I have no idea.
 
Seems like that poll lets you vote as many times as you want on the same IP, so you might want to fix that if you don't want people to spam votes for the same character.
 

Frofro

Banned
Seems like that poll lets you vote as many times as you want on the same IP, so you might want to fix that if you don't want people to spam votes for the same character.

Its once per IP, but if you vote differently it changes your vote, so no worries about voting from the same IP :D

Sadly theres very little I can do, or anyone including Nintendo, about changing IPs to vote.

The purpose of this is not to "get your favorite character to win," its simply to measure the popularity in numbers of each character with just around a month to go. We can use this compare to older polls to see which characters are "bandwagon" characters, and which have stayed strong.

We've already contacted sourcegaming and are hoping to compare our results to PushDustin's updated Japanese findings.
 
Surprised to Dixie charting so low on the results, I guess given the chance most would prefer K.Rool, and the fact he got a Mii outfit does mean Sakurai is aware of his popularity, but I'd still prefer Dixie myself since I'm always a supporter of more females to be added to the mix. K.Rool would still be awesome though and they're both long overdue.
 
These polls don't really work out that great because from the results it's pretty evident that flavor of the month characters are always going to do well. Look at Shantae. A character with pretty much 0 chance to ever get in and who is entirely unknown in Japan. Next month maybe it'll be Commander Video. Who knows. There's always some random indie getting in the top of these polls and it's always changing. Which means it's going to not really reflect the "real" ballot because the real ballot is basically already over. Nintendo hasn't advertised it at all since release, so probably like 99% of those who would have voted have already voted so the flavor of the month stuff will not get support.

Also for example, every other poll and the general "feeling" of whose popular has Wolf way higher than this poll shows. Even if people voted for Wolf in the real ballot, seeing Mewtwo, Lucas and Roy all come back makes Wolf a "shoe-in" and people might not want to "waste" their vote on him, even if they might have voted for him back before Lucas was released and Roy was announced.

A big list also means someone might get a "oh, I didn't think of that!" moment, rather than actually voting for who they actually would have voted for if they were thinking up the name on their own.

It's also missing Blaziken :(
 
Wolf will probably come out earlier.

I expect a big Zero Wolf trailer eventually revealing them and their role in the game and that would be a good time to reveal and/or release Wolf for Smash.
 

Javier

Member
And Yusuke Kozaki did fanart of Cookie Clicker. It doesn't mean they're completely unknown properties in Japan; but it's still not really indicative of their chances for something like Smash DLC.
Of course not. I'm just pointing out that she's not as unknown as some may think she is. She's relatively popular in Japan for a character who has zero presence game-wise.

For the record, I do support Shantae in Smash, but I'm not holding my breath for her to ever be in.
 

Frofro

Banned
These polls don't really work out that great because from the results it's pretty evident that flavor of the month characters are always going to do well. Look at Shantae. A character with pretty much 0 chance to ever get in and who is entirely unknown in Japan. Next month maybe it'll be Commander Video. Who knows. There's always some random indie getting in the top of these polls and it's always changing. Which means it's going to not really reflect the "real" ballot because the real ballot is basically already over. Nintendo hasn't advertised it at all since release, so probably like 99% of those who would have voted have already voted so the flavor of the month stuff will not get support.

Also for example, every other poll and the general "feeling" of whose popular has Wolf way higher than this poll shows. Even if people voted for Wolf in the real ballot, seeing Mewtwo, Lucas and Roy all come back makes Wolf a "shoe-in" and people might not want to "waste" their vote on him, even if they might have voted for him back before Lucas was released and Roy was announced.

A big list also means someone might get a "oh, I didn't think of that!" moment, rather than actually voting for who they actually would have voted for if they were thinking up the name on their own.

It's also missing Blaziken :(
So interesting early findings with the poll

http://www.poll-maker.com/poll395154xD2B5C2B5-15

So while it automatically filters IP, people can get away with voting for the same character over and over by hiding their IP. We decided to use some of the tools the dashboard has and found something concerning. We decided to compare votes from the same computer/browser/location, and characters like Shantae are getting a lot of fake votes. Votes like these are "valid" because they are using different IPs from the same device.

For example, at the moment, Shantae has 80 votes....but 43 of them are fraudulant votes (between 3 different people).

What else is interesting, Snake has quite a bit fake votes as well, about 20 of them.

Whats even more interesting, while K Rool does have fake votes, I've only counted 7 of them. The rest of his numbers are genuine at the moment. I'd say based on these findings K Rool isn't a flavor of a month character, and is really the most popular character at the moment. So while this is just a sample poll, early data is showing me that characters like Shantae don't have as many fans as they would appear based on pollings. We are hoping to get as many votes as possible in the west to help determine a sampled idea who are the top contenders with only a few weeks left to poll.

Polls are flawed, but I'm glad I can figure out what is real with these tools.

Also feel free to write in Blaziken with the "other" option :D
 
I'd say based on these findings K Rool isn't a flavor of a month character, and is really the most popular character at the moment.
This I can believe. He's always felt like a genuine leader of results. I never got the flavor of the month stuff from him.
 
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