User:Erik the Appreciator: Difference between revisions

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==All About Erik (AAE)==
==All About Erik (AAE)==
[[Image:AnimAppreciator.gif|right]]Greetings, greetings. I'm Erik, editing from California, but I primarily edit Golden Sun Universe, which I am a bureaucrat at. Otherwise, I don't post or appear anywhere else on the Internet, and I don't give out my email address. SmashWiki is my "secondary wiki", and even after saying that I rarely appeared here for several years after Brawl's release; it's the all-new Smash Bros. games that prompt me to put in lots of hard work into revising and restructuring the universe-franchise articles for the time being. ;) A more detailed profile of myself is on my user page at the Golden Sun wiki, if you're into that sort of thing...  
[[File:AnimAppreciator.gif|right]]Greetings, greetings. I'm Erik, editing from California, but I primarily edit Golden Sun Universe, which I am a bureaucrat at. Otherwise, I don't post or appear anywhere else on the Internet. SmashWiki is my "secondary wiki", and even after saying that I rarely appeared here for several years after Brawl's release; it was the latest pair of Smash Bros. games that prompted me to put in lots of hard work into revising and restructuring the universe-franchise articles for the time being. A more detailed profile of myself is on my user page at the Golden Sun wiki, if you're into that sort of thing...  


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==Past and Current Activities==
==Past and Current Activities==
I write the fully-detailed Franchise Descriptions for every character-based Universe page, and am interested in a variety of other edits to the content of those pages.
I wrote the initial forms of the fully-detailed Franchise Description sections for every character-based Universe page. As part of my efforts to cover them all, I had also written several universes' descriptions in advance so that I wouldn't have to scramble to write them and post them shortly after their first reveals, assuming the likely scenario that they would have made it in - but this left me with several universe write-ups for pages on franchises that never got roster representation in the final game, and I therefore felt they did not warrant an entire section with a wall of heavily-descriptive prose because Smash players wouldn't be anywhere near as interested and willing to read them. I have these potential write-ups posted below as an extra treat, as well as to show the writing style I used for the articles:


 
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!Ballot
!My Alternate-Reality Golden Sun Franchise Description
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|Camelot Software Planning was originally founded in 1990 as a division of [[Sega]], and as Sonic! Software Planning, they developed and strictly focused on the multi-game ''Shining'' series of fantasy RPGs up through 1998, even after they officially separated from Sega but agreed to keep ''Shining'' a Sega-exclusive property. After the last game they handled in the series, ''Shining Force III'', Camelot formed their present-day partnership with Nintendo, for whom they would develop every iteration of [[Mario (universe)|''Mario Golf'' and ''Mario Tennis'']] for the Game Boy Color, Nintendo 64, GameCube, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo 3DS. Early in their partnership with Nintendo, Camelot began development of a new fantasy JRPG, which was originally planned to see release as a single game for the Nintendo 64. When it became apparent that the GameCube's superseding of the Nintendo 64 was fast approaching, Camelot shifted their focus to the upcoming Game Boy Advance portable system and developed their project for that. Camelot previously wrote ''Shining Force III'' with the narrative device of playing through the perspective of both the "good" and "bad" characters, having felt that it was an effective method of conveying the full story of a fictional game world. Hardware limitations with the Game Boy Advance made it unviable to achieve this with the new game in a single release, so Camelot was compelled to release their final product as a duology: ''[[goldensununiverse:Golden Sun|Golden Sun]]'' in November 2001, and ''[[goldensununiverse:Golden Sun: The Lost Age|Golden Sun: The Lost Age]]'' in 2003.
#Peach
#Diddy Kong
#Wario
#Sheik
#Toon Link
#Zero Suit Samus
#Ice Climbers
#R.O.B.
#Olimar
#Captain Falcon
#Jigglypuff
#Ike
#Mr. Game & Watch
#Snake
#Sonic
#Bowser Jr.
#Waluigi
#King K. Rool
#Vaati
#Viridi
#Krystal
#Mewtwo
#Zoroark
#Samurai Goroh
#Chrom
#Little Mac
#Isaac
#Matthew
#Andy
#Ray Mk III


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''Golden Sun'' was critically praised as a successful presentation of a "classic" JRPG formula that creatively married fast-paced battles with out-of-battle environmental puzzle-solving by including a progression system dependent on collecting magical creatures called [[goldensununiverse:Djinn|Djinn]] hiding in the game's world, which were equipped to party members to modify and improve their character classes and also provide them with unique abilities. The game similarly enjoyed a priviledged position early in the release timeline of the Game Boy Advance's budding library, where it was released within months of the system's launch amidst a dearth of RPGs available for it. While reviews of ''The Lost Age'' noted that it was extremely similar to the first game and was primarily differentiated by a much sharper difficulty curve, it enjoyed a comparable degree of success for completing the story and for making use of a non-traditional form of backwards-compatibility with the first game; party and event data from a completed ''Golden Sun'' save file could be transferred into a ''The Lost Age'' file either by a link cable between multiple systems or by a massively long [[goldensununiverse:Password|password]]. Following ''The Lost Age'', though, the series began a very long multi-year hiatus, with the only appearance of anything ''Golden Sun''-related being a non-playable cameo appearance by its main character, [[Isaac]], in ''[[Super Smash Bros. Brawl]]''. The silence was broken only with the summer 2009 announcement of the third game in the series, ''[[goldensununiverse:Golden Sun: Dark Dawn|Golden Sun: Dark Dawn]]'' for the Nintendo DS, which was released late 2010 and sold over half a million copies worldwide. Subsequently, the main character of the third game, [[goldensununiverse:Matthew|Matthew]], was featured in ''[[Super Smash Bros. 4]]'' as a playable character alongside many established Nintendo characters.
Okay, so on 6/19/2013 I submitted my character ballot for [[User:Omega Tyrant/The Smash 4 Character Prediction Game|Omega Tyrant's Smash 4 Character Prediction game]] in the form shown to the right.


'''4/9/2014:''' Well, a lot's been revealed since the E3 reveal (as of this edit), so I'm just going to lay out what my original thought processes were for each character choice:
The ''Golden Sun'' series takes place on a flat-Earth-styled world named [[goldensununiverse:Weyard|Weyard]], the continents and cultures of which are spiritual analogues to those of the real world, where all matter is composed of the four classical elements - earth ("[[goldensununiverse:Venus|Venus]]"), fire ("[[goldensununiverse:Mars|Mars]]"), wind ("[[goldensununiverse:Jupiter|Jupiter]]"), and water ("[[goldensununiverse:Mercury|Mercury]]"). The world's ancient past was a golden age of civilization fueled by the power to manipulate all four of these elements together as one, referred to as Alchemy, but this gave way to conflicts and strife which only ended when the power of Alchemy was sealed away within one Mount Aleph. Many ancient ruins, chief among them four gigantic towers spread across the world representing the four elements called the Elemental Lighthouses, are holdovers from this era, while civilizations across Weyard in the present day are relatively sparse. Knowledge of the existence of Alchemy has long since dropped out of common knowledge; however, certain individuals living in the present have the capacity to conjure a form of spiritual sorcery called [[goldensununiverse:Psynergy|Psynergy]] to separately manipulate one of the four elements in the surrounding environment, and the element a person can cast Psynergy of is determined at birth. This makes a person an "Adept" of that element.


*The first 15 choices, the returning veteran predictions, were my attempt to handpick the vets I thought were technically less "might-as-well-be-confirmed" than others like Dedede, but still likely to remain in the roster compared to Lucario's chances. But nowadays I think I probably should have looked more at the other contestants' ballots and simply picked vets that had fewer votes for them, if I wanted to get points; it's like, of course most would have picked Peach, Diddy Kong, Wario, Captain Falcon, Jigglypuff, and especially Mr. Game & Watch. To some degree, these count as wasted votes in my ballot in terms of trying to get points for them. Meanwhile, though, I missed a large opportunity in leaving out Lucario... At least I can hope that if Ike makes it in, he'll be in his Radiant Dawn vanguard form.
It turns out that a sanctum hidden inside Mount Aleph, Sol Sanctum, contains four elementally-aligned jewels, the Elemental Stars, that can permanently light each of the four corresponding Elemental Lighthouses when brought over to them, and that lighting all four will break the seal and restore Alchemy to the world. In ''Golden Sun'', warriors from a secluded northern clan of Mars Adepts that know of all this raid Sol Sanctum and steal the Stars, then rush across the world to light the Lighthouses; a young man and Venus Adept from a village near Mount Aleph, [[Isaac]], is chosen by the omniscient guardian of Alchemy's seal living inside Mount Aleph to go on a quest to stop the antagonists from unleashing a potentially dangerous and abusable power upon Weyard. Isaac forms a group of four friends that are Adepts of all four elements during his pursuit, but despite his best efforts, his enemies succeed in lighting two of the Lighthouses because one of his childhood friends, the Venus Adept Felix, is in league with them. ''Golden Sun: The Lost Age'' is told entirely from Felix's perspective, and the player takes control of his own four-Adept party's effort to light the remaining two Lighthouses while avoiding Isaac's efforts to stop them. It is revealed later on that Felix's side had very good reasons to bring Alchemy back.


*Bowser Jr. and Waluigi were, of course, my two Mario predictions chosen over Rosalina, with these three seemingly the most likely of all the prospective non-clone newcomers from the core Mario universe. It's definitely not like I disapprove of Rosalina being chosen - I just had the mentality that she would fit in the roster of SSB5 after the other two would make their debut in SSB4, due to the mental image I had of two other colorful, certain-to-be-uniquely-playing characters versus one that was specifically designed aesthetically to be very similar to Peach (who she was once considered to be made a relative of). I'm personally glad they at least took all the opportunities to make Rosalina play entirely different from anyone else, and given how even outside the Marioverse's core portion you have two often-predicted newcomers coming from just the Donkey Kong series, I can clearly see how you can justify holding off on Waluigi for another game. Though I do fear that even Bowser Jr. may not make it in at this rate...
''Golden Sun: Dark Dawn'' is set thirty years later, and the unleash of Alchemy has had time to radically change not just Weyard's geopolitics, but the geography itself. Isaac sends his son, [[goldensununiverse:Matthew|Matthew]], and the other offspring of the now-world-infamous eight heroes on an initially innocuous rite-of-passage quest to hone their abilities as Adepts so that Isaac's generation may pass onto them the responsibility of looking after the world. Early on, however, Matthew's party gets sidetracked into a darker plot by agents of a sinister, militaristic nation named Tuaparang, and their quest delves into more carefully-concealed secrets from the ancient past, some of which are best left undisturbed.
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*It was either King K. Rool or Dixie Kong for me because both are realistically likely for that third DP-rep slot if there is a third slot in store, and even if one can argue that Dixie seems more likely, I supported K. Rool with vote on the basis that he would provide more opportunity for roster diversity by virtue of being a heavyweight and by having various different get-ups from the DK games to draw from. Dixie would be just fine in his place because she is perfectly capable of a distinctive moveset of her own.


*For Vaati, that was an exotic newcomer choice I put in because I figured that, between the triforce of Link, Zelda/Sheik, and Ganondorf for the core Zelda aesthetic, and the representation of the more childlike cel-shaded style in Toon Link, the best fifth-character-slot choice for a balanced series representation on the final roster would be a second Toon character, and a villain is always more interesting. Now, I never played Skyward Sword, so I never heard of Ghirahim when I made my poll, though he definitely looks cool... Now, of course, all of this speculation was before the confirmation that any form of mid-battle character transforming/replacing would be removed, and that Sheik and Zero Suit Samus would therefore occupy character slots independently. In effect, Zelda now has 5 character slots devoted to it already, and unless there really will be a total roster of ~50, I doubt there would be any room for a sixth of any sort; in other words, I'm not sure there will be ''any'' new Zelda representation now.


*It was either Viridi or Magnus for me, and choosing her was for both gender diversity and weapon diversity's sake - Magnus is technically another sword-wielder, as much as he looks like he'd be a very different-playing one and an awesome character to play as in and of himself. ...Yeah, it somehow didn't occur to me that Palutena even ''could'' be playable because she was squarely planted in my mind as Pit's Final Smash from Brawl (where her modern design was first debuted), and as a very large entity in that appearance to boot. Despite how she doesn't appear quite athletic, it does seem incredibly likely now that she's the only second KI character that ''could'' have ever been considered for Smash by the developers, since of course she isn't that large in Uprising, and Viridi, at least, seems to have been confirmed as a background element.
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!My Alternate-Reality Shovel Knight Franchise Description
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|WayForward Technologies is an American independent video game developer best known for the ''Shantae'' intellectual property. In 2011, a former director of WayForward, Sean Velasco, founded a separate video game development studio, Yacht Club Games, and two years later, the company launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign in tandem with the March 2013 announcement of their first title, ''Shovel Knight''. The project's $75,000 funding goal was satisfied four times over, and despite delays that postponed its release to June 26, 2014 - roughly eight months after what was originally intended - it was released on the PC, Nintendo 3DS, and Wii U to critical acclaim. It was subsequently released on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and Xbox One in April 2015, and by June 2015 it had sold over 700,000 copies total, with an eventual Japanese release planned.


*I have a fairly unique and radical prediction for Star Fox representation in SSB4: That ''both'' Falco and Wolf will be cut, and Krystal - who seemingly gets more discussion than the other Star Fox characters combined - will replace them. This is based on a mental image I have that the sheer dearth of new ''Star Fox'' content since ''Brawl'' would end up signifying to the developers that the series warrants only two reps nowadays, and for that second character slot, one that is much more colorful, represents a much more significant dimension to the Star Fox series than some co-pilot, and is guaranteed a different moveset based on psychic powers seems like the ideal one.
''Shovel Knight'' is a 2D side-scrolling platform game mimicking both the design and visual styles of the multitude of such games made famous in the library of the Nintendo Entertainment System, but with modernized twists. The player controls the eponymous main character, an undersized, cartoon-styled, blue-suited medieval knight armed with a shovel instead of any form of conventional weaponry, not only to attack enemies in front of him, but to drop down upon and "bounce off" enemies and obstacles from above (in a move reminiscent of the "pogo jump" featured in the acclaimed NES platformer ''DuckTales''). The shovel also serves a variety of vital utility purposes, including digging up treasure from the ground and boring through walls. Treasure is spent at in-game shops for both character upgrades and limited-use secondary items such as long-range projectiles and temporary invincibility providers.


*Of course I would love to have Mewtwo back in like everyone else, and Lucario's confirmation previously did little to indicate he won't make a reappearance in SSB4. This was because I think I understand how Mewtwo ''had'' to be removed in Brawl (Sakurai strongly expresses that the Brawl roster being as large as it was required an especially great effort from the production staff, as if to imply they couldn't even make many more characters available on the roster if they wanted; there is also a very thorough column-per-series logic on the Brawl roster screen in which 4 slots can represent 1 series like Pokemon or Zelda. This basically means there was only 4 slots available for Pokemon on the roster screen to begin with - and between Pikachu, the much-expected return of Jigglypuff as the trump-card wielder of the smashers, the desire to push a very different and unique multi-character-swapping mechanic with the Pokemon Trainer, and the need to have Lucario - a Pokemon Game Freak continues to put a lot of effort into promoting in its own games - represent the entirety of the modern Pokemon style, there basically was no room for Mewtwo back then). I therefore had hope that he would be included on the basis that the SSB4 roster would be able to devote at least 5 slots to Pokemon now, and that there would be no better choice for that 5th slot than Mewtwo - and Game Freak had seemed to have provided more impetus for Mewtwo's inclusion by giving Mewtwo ''two'' mega evolutions. But with Greninja confirmed for a slot now, it seems a little more of a long shot now to hope that, either there will be a ''sixth'' Pokemon slot reserved for Mewtwo, or that Jigglypuff will actually be cut (though I do think either of these scenarios are still possible).
Praised alongside the game's gameplay, level design, graphics, and soundtrack were its cast and the methods by which its story was expressed through the gameplay. In an abstract fantasy setting referred to in-game as "The Valley", the Shovel Knight loses his taste for wanderlust when his lover and traveling companion, Shield Knight, is possessed by a cursed amulet and sealed within one Tower of Fate. He only brings himself back into action when an evil Enchantress subsequently rises to power and unseals the Tower of Fate in doing so, and embarks on a journey in hopes that he may rescue Shield Knight. Along the way, not only must he take arms against each of the eight members of the Enchantress' elite knightly order, the Order of No Quarter, but he must separately contend with the interference of his rival, Black Knight, who attempts to prevent Shovel Knight from reaching the Tower for reasons not initially known.


*On the subject of Pokemon, we come to Zoroark. I originally thought that Zoroark, if not some kind of 6th-gen "Lucario equivalent" from the then-unknown, then-upcoming 6th Generation, would outright replace Lucario and basically amount to being your latest representation of the collective "modern Pokemon" concept for your latest Smash game - something that could be done for each future Smash game. Since the poll was launched prior to Gen 6, however, I obviously couldn't name any 6th Gen Pokemon specifically, and though I could have easily chosen to incur the minor point penalty to change Zoroark or someone else to a Pokemon like Greninja after Gen 6 was launched, I was more interested in seeing how many points my original choices would get without any competitive tinkering at all. But as it turns out, while they would indeed end up including Greninja as that Gen 6 newcomer, Lucario was kept as well, and the same 6th Gen games provided more of a solid foundation for that happening by giving Lucario a mega-evolution (and not Zoroark, incidentally). It does seem likely that we would have had Zoroark in the space Greninja now occupies were this game released 2-3 years ago, though. And in a hypothetical future Smash Bros with like 75 characters or something, while Zoroark would still be really cool, I imagine that translating his Illusion ability into the Smash Bros. format would be incredibly difficult to program.
Following the game's release, an expansion called ''Plague of Shadows'' was released for free. Running parallel to Shovel Knight's story, the game features one of the Order members, Plague Knight, as the playable character, as he enacts his own scheme to gather the ingredients for a potion that will grant him any one desire. Meanwhile, Nintendo created and released an [[amiibo]] of Shovel Knight in 2015, apparently as if to extend a gesture of goodwill towards independent developers. Furthermore, Nintendo included Shovel Knight as a post-launch downloadable content character for ''[[Super Smash Bros. 4]]''.
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*Samurai Goroh was a simple newcomer choice for me - a rival to Captain Falcon that was already established as able to fight in the Smash Bros. environment by his assist trophy appearance. Of course, that vote was before Goroh was confirmed to return in SSB4 exactly the same way as he had before. But would there still be a possibility for one of the other, more villainous racers to appear as a secondary rep? I'm not sure how much Zoda, Black Shadow or Deathborn would work for that.


*I basically put in Chrom without thinking about it too much, since, you know, latest Fire Emblem hero and all that. Maybe he's too much of a "second Marth" due to being a distant descendant of Marth in the game itself, but I personally wouldn't know the best way to handle SSB4's overall Fire Emblem representation at this point in time, since it's a question whether there should even be more than two reps for Fire Emblem and whether Ike should be cut because of it. One creative idea, I suppose, is that Intelligent Systems could announce Fire Emblem 14 and SSB4 could include its hero, much like Melee included Roy before the release of Roy's own game.


*I ''definitely'' hoped for and wanted Little Mac in this game, since it sort of makes sense his outdated version wasn't included in Brawl, but he certainly had the credentials to be included thanks to the Wii Punch-Out!! game and design. And I was definitely not disappointed.
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!My Alternate-Reality Splatoon Franchise Description
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|In mid-2013, one member of the {{uv|Animal Crossing}} development team, Shintaro Sato, created a prototype third-person arena-based shooter based on control of territory - which was expressed through the player-character shooting and splattering ink all over the ground. After management at Nintendo EAD approved development for a full game derived from Sato's prototype, the directors sought to expand the concept while keeping its formula filtered down to an easily-approachable game, and wanted to incoprorate squids thematically somehow, despite the need to have a humanoid character capable of holding an ink-spurting firearm and despite original considerations to use {{uv|Mario}} characters. These and other project goals, which ordinarily conflict with each other on a conceptual level, were resolved by introducing characters that were humanoids freely capable of transforming into squids and back, and could hide and swim through the ink while in squid form.


*But since I'm probably the "Mr. Golden Sun" the nursery rhyme is talking about, it should come as no surprise that my greatest hope for Smash 4 is one representative from Golden Sun. And the complete lack of anything Golden Sun-related in the April Direct seems almost like they're specifically hiding it as a final surprise, since if they did show anything that wasn't a character, the series symbol shown alongside it would have given away what kind of representation the overall Golden Sun series would get in the final game (Saki getting the Smash symbol seems to confirm no Sin and Punishment character or stage, but if an Assist Trophy were shown with a new GS symbol attached, that would have confirmed at least a stage for the series, and therefore spoil some of the initial surprise value of a Golden Sun newcomer reveal). But who should it be? Everyone knows Isaac from the Brawl assist trophy and from being from the better-loved first two games of the series, but I would actually be even more excited if it's his descendant Matthew, main guy from the third game; after all, it's pretty clear that that game's story is not done yet, and Camelot would obviously want to conclude their series with at least a fourth game. Matthew probably would be an important character in Golden Sun 4 as well, and there's no better promotion for that than Matthew being in here. But I can't rule out Isaac will be chosen for the reasons I listed, so I'll just have to devote an "expected" vote for Isaac and a "dark horse" vote for Matthew.
The game, ''Splatoon'', was released to critical enthusiasm in May 2015, with many in the gaming press expressing surprise that Nintendo was creating a shooter IP. Praise was given to its refreshing and colorful take on the populated team-based third-person shooter genre, which rewarded tactical maneuvering and team coordination in a fashion not prevalent in genre mainstays such as ''Call of Duty'' and ''Battlefield''. But while its campaign was commended for its own allotment of creative elements in spite of its short length, the game was criticized for a sparse selection of multiplayer maps at launch, and for locking off challenges behind potentially hard-to-find [[amiibo]]. However, Nintendo proceeded to release a consistent and expansive stream of free downloadable content in the months that followed, greatly expanding the game's collection of weapons, stages, modes, and costumes, included among which was a surprise collaboration with the manga and anime ''Shinryaku! Ika Musume''. After the game's main character design, the [[Inkling]], was included in ''[[Super Smash Bros. 4]]'' as a [[Mii]] costume, it was introduced as a fully-developed playable character in its own right as DLC.


*Andy, main "boy" commanding officer from three of the Advance Wars games, was a prediction I had for Brawl because he was much more recent at the time. But there hasn't been a single Nintendo Wars game since Days of Ruin - released right around Brawl - so I have my doubts my vote for him is more than a dark horse vote. His weapons would be a pair of wrenches, and he could call in an air strike or something as his Final Smash.
In stark contrast to its cartoon-style aesthetics and light atmosphere, ''Splatoon'' technically takes place in a post-apocalyptic rendition of Earth after its rising sea levels rendered its land-dwelling inhabitants extinct. Squids and octopi eventually evolved into Inkling and Octarian forms and began fighting over habitable land, and the Inkling race eventually won out and established the city of Inkopolis while the Octarians were forced into their hidden and industrialized retreat, Octo Valley. The "Turf War" sport seen in the game's multiplayer modes is Inkling society's commemoration of the original struggle. In the game's story mode, the Octarians launch a rebellion by kidnapping the various Zapfish that provide power to the city, and it is up to an unnamed Inkling referred to as Agent 3 to infiltrate the secret underground base within Octo Valley and retrieve the Zapfish.
 
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*Finally, the Ray Mk III Assist Trophy makes me think there should be a Custom Robo rep, mainly him (and it has not yet been shown to return as an Assist Trophy for SSB4), though I don't know much of anything about the series - for all I know, maybe I was supposed to submit my vote for him as "Ray", not "Ray Mk III". But a battle robot with missiles would inject a distinctive flavor into the roster.
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The only character exclusion I'll bother talking about is Ridley, the most controversial character of all. Back when I didn't put him in my ballot, I had two different reasons, which I think weren't as puerile as "he's too big" because that's obviously not an issue that can't be fixed with a simple solution like a resize. One: How would you possibly be able to translate a limber wyvern that predominantly hunts from the sky into a grounded, hopping smasher that can be grabbed, tossed around, and sent helplessly falling off the stage and into the bottom blast line, without compromising any of his distinctive menace? I wish I knew what ways it could be possible, because I fear it's likely that the fans who want Ridley in could ultimately be even more angry about the actual playable Ridley they are going to get than those who don't want Ridley in. Two: Would having ''any'' Metroid character other than Samus being playable compromise the "one-woman-against-the-world" theme that the Metroid series seems to treasure greatly?
 
Perspectives change over the course of many months, however, and with all the unfortunate problems Nintendo has been coming across and putting itself into recently, there were times where I was alternatively thinking that -not- including Ridley could be as destructive to Nintendo's image as not handling Ridley's inclusion very well. Nintendo has definitely been needing to show more of a certain boldness and vision, the kind that Greninja's debut as a smash brother demonstrates IMO, and Ridley in a Smash game could actually be a very important saving grace as that kind of bold inclusion. Prior to the April Direct, my best guess as to how it could be feasible is if, in the reveal trailer, there's a Kid Icarus: Uprising-style conversation where Pit and Palutena talk about how she is able to temporarily give Pit's wings several minutes of flight at a time, and Palutena explains she was brought in to Super Smash Sisters - er, Bros. - to temporarily take away extended flight in the same sort of fashion, in order to qualify a certain anticipated newcomer. And this would be the lead-up to a Ridley debut in which Ridley is shown now to be a grounded combatant that is clearly forced now to obey the laws of jump-based smashing like everyone else. That's the only possible compromise I could think of...
 
But in the end, the contents of the Nintendo direct seem to put forth Ridley's exclusion a little too tangibly to be argued further - besides everything else, the way that shadow is seemingly being cast by an entity that is maintaining stationary, hovering flight above a platform and going back and forth without touching the ground - much unlike a Smasher like Peach - tells me that THAT particular Ridley is not playable. I would love to be surprised by some kind of revelation that a classic-style Ridley will be able to Smash on that stage at the same time the Other M Ridley is flying overhead like in the Direct, but what are the chances of ''that''...
 
 
Something else I'd like to express, though, is that even if we are to assume that the Smash 4 roster screen will be Brawl's with a 5th row underneath, to make it a 9x5 grid capable of supporting 45 characters, that still does not leave a lot of room for further speculated characters between now and release. Here's what I came up with:
 
*9 Mario characters: Mario, Luigi, Peach, Bowser, Rosalina, Yoshi, Wario, Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong
*5 Zelda characters: Link, Zelda, Sheik, Toon Link, Ganondorf
*2 Metroid characters: Samus, Zero Suit Samus
*3 Kirby characters: Kirby, Meta Knight, King Dedede
*2 Star Fox characters: Fox, Krystal
*6 Pokemon characters: Pikachu, Lucario, Charizard, Greninja, Jigglypuff, Mewtwo
*1 F-Zero character: Captain Falcon
*2 EarthBound characters: Ness, Lucas
*1 Ice Climber character: Ice Climbers
*2 Fire Emblem characters: Marth, Ike
*1 G&W Character: Mr. Game & Watch
*2 Kid Icarus characters: Pit, Palutena
*1 Pikmin character: Olimar
*1 Robot character: R.O.B.
*1 Animal Crossing character: Villager
*1 Wii Fit character: Wii Fit Trainers
*1 Punch-Out!! character: Little Mac
*1 Golden Sun character: Matthew
*3 third party characters: Snake, Sonic, Mega Man
 
Notice how I could only fit these character choices after applying that radical concept of cutting both Falco and Wolf, as I mentioned above. Yeah, we can only really hope at this rate that there will at least be a 10th column on the select screen, so that there'll be exactly 50 to choose from (49 including a Random tile). I would need a 10th column of 5 slots to put in characters like a third DK rep, Ridley, a sixth Zelda character, a third Fire Emblem character, a Custom Robo rep, an Advance Wars rep, not have 1 of the space animals cut, etc.. But if there's fewer total characters than that, some fairly painful cuts do look like they'll be happening. The likeliest to me, besides the whole Star Fox thing, seem to be Lucas (being very similar to Ness and being from what may well be a franchise that was "forever finished" 7 years ago) and Snake (being possibly rotated out of the Smash series' 3rd party character collection the way Soul Calibur guests don't return for multiple games).
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==Erik's Miscellany==
==Erik's Miscellany==
Prior to my getting into the crazy wacky world of Action Replay for ''Melee'', my ''Melee'' credentials included the following more hardcore achievements, all without the help of any Action Replay:
I'm not at all a skilled or competitive player, and I only ever focused on the single-player portions of these games. But I like achievement-hunting, and these are my Melee milestones:
*I have collected all 290 non-AR trophies  
*I have collected all 290 non-Action Replay trophies  
*I have beaten Event match 51 without losing a life.
*I have beaten Event match 51 without losing a life.
*I have beaten Classic mode on Very Hard
*I have beaten Classic mode on Very Hard
Line 131: Line 78:
*I have beaten All-Star mode on Very Hard. Took forever, but I pulled it off with Roy on April 13, 2007.
*I have beaten All-Star mode on Very Hard. Took forever, but I pulled it off with Roy on April 13, 2007.


 
Meanwhile, my ''Brawl'' achievements include having gotten every single trophy and sticker in the game, as well as having devoted the time to beating 100-Man Brawl legitimately with every character choice and repeatedly putting ALL of the characters through the five Target Tests, 10-Man Brawl, and Home Run Contest to minimize the total time ratings and maximize the total distances. In some ways, this kind of Stadium-mode play was the real meat of Brawl's single-player offerings.
Meanwhile, my ''Brawl'' credentials include having gotten every single trophy and sticker in the game, as well as having devoted the time to beating 100-Man Brawl legitimately with every character choice and repeatedly putting ALL of the characters through the five Target Tests, 10-Man Brawl, and Home Run Contest to minimize the total time ratings and maximize the total distances. Yes, I'm devoted.





Latest revision as of 11:52, February 10, 2021

Erik's userpage directory: Golden Sun Universe | SmashWiki

All About Erik (AAE)

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Greetings, greetings. I'm Erik, editing from California, but I primarily edit Golden Sun Universe, which I am a bureaucrat at. Otherwise, I don't post or appear anywhere else on the Internet. SmashWiki is my "secondary wiki", and even after saying that I rarely appeared here for several years after Brawl's release; it was the latest pair of Smash Bros. games that prompted me to put in lots of hard work into revising and restructuring the universe-franchise articles for the time being. A more detailed profile of myself is on my user page at the Golden Sun wiki, if you're into that sort of thing...

Past and Current Activities

I wrote the initial forms of the fully-detailed Franchise Description sections for every character-based Universe page. As part of my efforts to cover them all, I had also written several universes' descriptions in advance so that I wouldn't have to scramble to write them and post them shortly after their first reveals, assuming the likely scenario that they would have made it in - but this left me with several universe write-ups for pages on franchises that never got roster representation in the final game, and I therefore felt they did not warrant an entire section with a wall of heavily-descriptive prose because Smash players wouldn't be anywhere near as interested and willing to read them. I have these potential write-ups posted below as an extra treat, as well as to show the writing style I used for the articles:

My Alternate-Reality Golden Sun Franchise Description
Camelot Software Planning was originally founded in 1990 as a division of Sega, and as Sonic! Software Planning, they developed and strictly focused on the multi-game Shining series of fantasy RPGs up through 1998, even after they officially separated from Sega but agreed to keep Shining a Sega-exclusive property. After the last game they handled in the series, Shining Force III, Camelot formed their present-day partnership with Nintendo, for whom they would develop every iteration of Mario Golf and Mario Tennis for the Game Boy Color, Nintendo 64, GameCube, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo 3DS. Early in their partnership with Nintendo, Camelot began development of a new fantasy JRPG, which was originally planned to see release as a single game for the Nintendo 64. When it became apparent that the GameCube's superseding of the Nintendo 64 was fast approaching, Camelot shifted their focus to the upcoming Game Boy Advance portable system and developed their project for that. Camelot previously wrote Shining Force III with the narrative device of playing through the perspective of both the "good" and "bad" characters, having felt that it was an effective method of conveying the full story of a fictional game world. Hardware limitations with the Game Boy Advance made it unviable to achieve this with the new game in a single release, so Camelot was compelled to release their final product as a duology: Golden Sun in November 2001, and Golden Sun: The Lost Age in 2003.

Golden Sun was critically praised as a successful presentation of a "classic" JRPG formula that creatively married fast-paced battles with out-of-battle environmental puzzle-solving by including a progression system dependent on collecting magical creatures called Djinn hiding in the game's world, which were equipped to party members to modify and improve their character classes and also provide them with unique abilities. The game similarly enjoyed a priviledged position early in the release timeline of the Game Boy Advance's budding library, where it was released within months of the system's launch amidst a dearth of RPGs available for it. While reviews of The Lost Age noted that it was extremely similar to the first game and was primarily differentiated by a much sharper difficulty curve, it enjoyed a comparable degree of success for completing the story and for making use of a non-traditional form of backwards-compatibility with the first game; party and event data from a completed Golden Sun save file could be transferred into a The Lost Age file either by a link cable between multiple systems or by a massively long password. Following The Lost Age, though, the series began a very long multi-year hiatus, with the only appearance of anything Golden Sun-related being a non-playable cameo appearance by its main character, Isaac, in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The silence was broken only with the summer 2009 announcement of the third game in the series, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn for the Nintendo DS, which was released late 2010 and sold over half a million copies worldwide. Subsequently, the main character of the third game, Matthew, was featured in Super Smash Bros. 4 as a playable character alongside many established Nintendo characters.

The Golden Sun series takes place on a flat-Earth-styled world named Weyard, the continents and cultures of which are spiritual analogues to those of the real world, where all matter is composed of the four classical elements - earth ("Venus"), fire ("Mars"), wind ("Jupiter"), and water ("Mercury"). The world's ancient past was a golden age of civilization fueled by the power to manipulate all four of these elements together as one, referred to as Alchemy, but this gave way to conflicts and strife which only ended when the power of Alchemy was sealed away within one Mount Aleph. Many ancient ruins, chief among them four gigantic towers spread across the world representing the four elements called the Elemental Lighthouses, are holdovers from this era, while civilizations across Weyard in the present day are relatively sparse. Knowledge of the existence of Alchemy has long since dropped out of common knowledge; however, certain individuals living in the present have the capacity to conjure a form of spiritual sorcery called Psynergy to separately manipulate one of the four elements in the surrounding environment, and the element a person can cast Psynergy of is determined at birth. This makes a person an "Adept" of that element.

It turns out that a sanctum hidden inside Mount Aleph, Sol Sanctum, contains four elementally-aligned jewels, the Elemental Stars, that can permanently light each of the four corresponding Elemental Lighthouses when brought over to them, and that lighting all four will break the seal and restore Alchemy to the world. In Golden Sun, warriors from a secluded northern clan of Mars Adepts that know of all this raid Sol Sanctum and steal the Stars, then rush across the world to light the Lighthouses; a young man and Venus Adept from a village near Mount Aleph, Isaac, is chosen by the omniscient guardian of Alchemy's seal living inside Mount Aleph to go on a quest to stop the antagonists from unleashing a potentially dangerous and abusable power upon Weyard. Isaac forms a group of four friends that are Adepts of all four elements during his pursuit, but despite his best efforts, his enemies succeed in lighting two of the Lighthouses because one of his childhood friends, the Venus Adept Felix, is in league with them. Golden Sun: The Lost Age is told entirely from Felix's perspective, and the player takes control of his own four-Adept party's effort to light the remaining two Lighthouses while avoiding Isaac's efforts to stop them. It is revealed later on that Felix's side had very good reasons to bring Alchemy back.

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is set thirty years later, and the unleash of Alchemy has had time to radically change not just Weyard's geopolitics, but the geography itself. Isaac sends his son, Matthew, and the other offspring of the now-world-infamous eight heroes on an initially innocuous rite-of-passage quest to hone their abilities as Adepts so that Isaac's generation may pass onto them the responsibility of looking after the world. Early on, however, Matthew's party gets sidetracked into a darker plot by agents of a sinister, militaristic nation named Tuaparang, and their quest delves into more carefully-concealed secrets from the ancient past, some of which are best left undisturbed.


My Alternate-Reality Shovel Knight Franchise Description
WayForward Technologies is an American independent video game developer best known for the Shantae intellectual property. In 2011, a former director of WayForward, Sean Velasco, founded a separate video game development studio, Yacht Club Games, and two years later, the company launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign in tandem with the March 2013 announcement of their first title, Shovel Knight. The project's $75,000 funding goal was satisfied four times over, and despite delays that postponed its release to June 26, 2014 - roughly eight months after what was originally intended - it was released on the PC, Nintendo 3DS, and Wii U to critical acclaim. It was subsequently released on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and Xbox One in April 2015, and by June 2015 it had sold over 700,000 copies total, with an eventual Japanese release planned.

Shovel Knight is a 2D side-scrolling platform game mimicking both the design and visual styles of the multitude of such games made famous in the library of the Nintendo Entertainment System, but with modernized twists. The player controls the eponymous main character, an undersized, cartoon-styled, blue-suited medieval knight armed with a shovel instead of any form of conventional weaponry, not only to attack enemies in front of him, but to drop down upon and "bounce off" enemies and obstacles from above (in a move reminiscent of the "pogo jump" featured in the acclaimed NES platformer DuckTales). The shovel also serves a variety of vital utility purposes, including digging up treasure from the ground and boring through walls. Treasure is spent at in-game shops for both character upgrades and limited-use secondary items such as long-range projectiles and temporary invincibility providers.

Praised alongside the game's gameplay, level design, graphics, and soundtrack were its cast and the methods by which its story was expressed through the gameplay. In an abstract fantasy setting referred to in-game as "The Valley", the Shovel Knight loses his taste for wanderlust when his lover and traveling companion, Shield Knight, is possessed by a cursed amulet and sealed within one Tower of Fate. He only brings himself back into action when an evil Enchantress subsequently rises to power and unseals the Tower of Fate in doing so, and embarks on a journey in hopes that he may rescue Shield Knight. Along the way, not only must he take arms against each of the eight members of the Enchantress' elite knightly order, the Order of No Quarter, but he must separately contend with the interference of his rival, Black Knight, who attempts to prevent Shovel Knight from reaching the Tower for reasons not initially known.

Following the game's release, an expansion called Plague of Shadows was released for free. Running parallel to Shovel Knight's story, the game features one of the Order members, Plague Knight, as the playable character, as he enacts his own scheme to gather the ingredients for a potion that will grant him any one desire. Meanwhile, Nintendo created and released an amiibo of Shovel Knight in 2015, apparently as if to extend a gesture of goodwill towards independent developers. Furthermore, Nintendo included Shovel Knight as a post-launch downloadable content character for Super Smash Bros. 4.


My Alternate-Reality Splatoon Franchise Description
In mid-2013, one member of the Animal Crossing development team, Shintaro Sato, created a prototype third-person arena-based shooter based on control of territory - which was expressed through the player-character shooting and splattering ink all over the ground. After management at Nintendo EAD approved development for a full game derived from Sato's prototype, the directors sought to expand the concept while keeping its formula filtered down to an easily-approachable game, and wanted to incoprorate squids thematically somehow, despite the need to have a humanoid character capable of holding an ink-spurting firearm and despite original considerations to use Mario characters. These and other project goals, which ordinarily conflict with each other on a conceptual level, were resolved by introducing characters that were humanoids freely capable of transforming into squids and back, and could hide and swim through the ink while in squid form.

The game, Splatoon, was released to critical enthusiasm in May 2015, with many in the gaming press expressing surprise that Nintendo was creating a shooter IP. Praise was given to its refreshing and colorful take on the populated team-based third-person shooter genre, which rewarded tactical maneuvering and team coordination in a fashion not prevalent in genre mainstays such as Call of Duty and Battlefield. But while its campaign was commended for its own allotment of creative elements in spite of its short length, the game was criticized for a sparse selection of multiplayer maps at launch, and for locking off challenges behind potentially hard-to-find amiibo. However, Nintendo proceeded to release a consistent and expansive stream of free downloadable content in the months that followed, greatly expanding the game's collection of weapons, stages, modes, and costumes, included among which was a surprise collaboration with the manga and anime Shinryaku! Ika Musume. After the game's main character design, the Inkling, was included in Super Smash Bros. 4 as a Mii costume, it was introduced as a fully-developed playable character in its own right as DLC.

In stark contrast to its cartoon-style aesthetics and light atmosphere, Splatoon technically takes place in a post-apocalyptic rendition of Earth after its rising sea levels rendered its land-dwelling inhabitants extinct. Squids and octopi eventually evolved into Inkling and Octarian forms and began fighting over habitable land, and the Inkling race eventually won out and established the city of Inkopolis while the Octarians were forced into their hidden and industrialized retreat, Octo Valley. The "Turf War" sport seen in the game's multiplayer modes is Inkling society's commemoration of the original struggle. In the game's story mode, the Octarians launch a rebellion by kidnapping the various Zapfish that provide power to the city, and it is up to an unnamed Inkling referred to as Agent 3 to infiltrate the secret underground base within Octo Valley and retrieve the Zapfish.

Erik's Miscellany

I'm not at all a skilled or competitive player, and I only ever focused on the single-player portions of these games. But I like achievement-hunting, and these are my Melee milestones:

  • I have collected all 290 non-Action Replay trophies
  • I have beaten Event match 51 without losing a life.
  • I have beaten Classic mode on Very Hard
  • I have beaten Adventure mode on Very Hard
  • I have beaten All-Star mode on Very Hard. Took forever, but I pulled it off with Roy on April 13, 2007.

Meanwhile, my Brawl achievements include having gotten every single trophy and sticker in the game, as well as having devoted the time to beating 100-Man Brawl legitimately with every character choice and repeatedly putting ALL of the characters through the five Target Tests, 10-Man Brawl, and Home Run Contest to minimize the total time ratings and maximize the total distances. In some ways, this kind of Stadium-mode play was the real meat of Brawl's single-player offerings.


You don't see funny trolling like this nowadays...