The days of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate DLCs have come to a close. On October 5th, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate director Masahiro Sakurai officially revealed the game's last guest characters: Sora, the main protagonist of Square Enix and Disney's Kingdom Hearts series. Sora is a fitting conclusion to Smash Ultimate's DLC run because tons of Kingdom Hearts fans have spent years expressing their hope that he'd make the cut and join Smash. After watching iconic figures join the latest game one by one, Kingdom Hearts fans may have thought that the sun was setting on Sora's chances, but it turns out their support for Sora mattered after all. In fact, Sakurai said so.
While explaining Nintendo's decision to put Sora in Smash Ultimate, Sakurai mentioned that Sora was the winner of a Smash ballot that Nintendo ran in 2015 to determine the last DLC character for the fourth Smash game. As old as that ballot was, it seems Nintendo held onto the data and used it to inform its DLC choices for Smash Ultimate. Those Smash fans who got into the series through Ultimate may not know about or remember the Smash ballot, so it's worth revisiting. It's an interesting part of Smash history that apparently affects the series today, and could continue to be impactful in the future.
The History of the Smash Ballot
Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U were the first games in the series to have DLC guest characters, expanding the playable roster after the launch of the game. The DLCs added some great characters, generating Super Smash Bros. Melee nostalgia via Mewtwo and Roy and making exciting new additions such as Cloud Strife. For the last character, however, Nintendo wanted to hear what fans were interested in. In April 2015, it opened up a public poll on the Super Smash Bros. website where players could enter any character they liked for several months. In the end, Nintendo would pick a winner among the candidates, then put them in Smash.
Although Masahiro Sakurai and the late Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata didn't reveal the entirety of the poll's results, they explained to Smash fans that Nintendo carefully weighed each character based on how realistically they could be licensed and designed for Smash. At the end of the ballot, the winner was PlatinumGames' Bayonetta, who was apparently the most requested character in Europe, as well as a leader in North America. In other words, while Bayonetta wasn't necessarily the overall winner of the Smash ballot, she was the most practical and realistic character out of all the top candidates, making her the ideal Smash guest.
For years afterward, fans were left to speculate who exactly had been the true numerical winner of the Smash ballot. Now the mystery is solved. While introducing Sora as a Smash Ultimate DLC, Sakurai confirmed that Sora was the Smash ballot's overall winner. It seems he just wasn't practical to adapt for Smash in 2015, but luckily for Kingdom Hearts fans, he was on the table for Smash Ultimate. It may have been six years since Kingdom Hearts fans voiced their support for Sora, but those requests still counted in the end.
The Smash Ballot's Final Contribution
As great as it is that Kingdom Hearts fans had their voices heard, however, this should probably be the Smash ballot's last impact on the series. The data may have been extremely valuable in 2015, but it's starting to get a little outdated. There are all kinds of newer characters who would make fantastic guests, from Aloy to Zagreus, but there's simply no data for their games in the original Smash fighter ballot. If Nintendo makes another Smash game, its guest choices should be based on newer data to ensure that the gaming industry's freshest faces get some representation in Smash too. After all, the original Smash fighter ballot just got the perfect sendoff: its true winner got his prize.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is available now for Nintendo Switch.