Thing is, he was probably talking about the last character of Fighter's Pass 1, which did not come true. Hopefully it still comes true even though that hurts its credibility.
This would be great for Waluigi and other assists' chances. However, I have a hunch that the fighter might be Min-Min.
Who ever said it would be just one fighter? I think it highly probable that it could be four or even eight different fighters, like Hero or the Koopalings.
Actually he said he wasn't fighter 5, just that he was last.
Borrowing a statement from some other place, it'd be pointless to hide the fact they want to pick a cover boy with a guessing game, which just wastes fans time for waiting. Of course, I don't say this is a 100% proof they'd choose the first ever fighter that isn't a cover model.
FP1 was controversial thanks to Reggie, so it wouldn't be less debateable either with Waluigi or Byleth. Now FP2's trend would directly test Sakurai's own credibility.
Like I said, there could very well be more than one ARMS fighter joining Smash, like what they did with Alph, the Koopalings, and the Hero. I believe they didn't immediately announce the fighter because of this, as well as the fact that it's likely to be a joint announcement with something ARMS-related (like what Isabelle did).
Please point my to when Nintendo told us to play a game of guess who only for them to reveal Byleth.
It was slightly different then but they originally played an "announcement of an announcement" card on him, likely because they knew very well the backlash that would result.
Makes me wonder why they even chose Byleth if they knew it would create a backlash.
Same reason that Corrin was chosen as one of the last DLC fighters for Smash 4: to promote that character's respective Fire Emblem game.
Nintendo probably doesn't, but we know Sakurai absolutely does. We know Nintendo chose the Fighters Pass characters, and it was out of Sakurai's control, but unfortunately there are a bunch of Twitter flamers who just don't get that. Sakurai definitely tried to reduce the backlash--he made Byleth as interesting a moveset as possible, and he made sure to assure fans that Byleth would not be the last DLC character. Sakurai clearly cares about what the fans want, but he can't please everyone and it's a shame that so few people get that.
Well we blame Nintendo, not just him, so there is no problem. I appreciate his work for Byleth, but that doesn't mean it can cease the argument about his/her timing of addition.
It's old talk. When inappropriate cases happen, we'd just disagree with it. We don't use that for supporting more cases if people can just disagree that as well.
