Rumour: Professor Layton in Smash Bros???

[LuckyTrouble]

Soundwave said:

LuckyTrouble said:

Aielyn said:

LuckyTrouble said:
How many characters does a person need to have that they'll only use a few times before shelving them for good for the one or two regulars they tend to stick to?

That might be how YOU play it, but not everybody does. I like to mix things up, and play with a variety of characters.

I'm not trying to be the very best at one character. I have a few favourites that I'll play more than others, but I play with all of them, for the enjoyment of playing with all of them.

Almost anybody I know that plays any fighting game at all, whether it be Smash, Street Fighter, Soul Calibur, what have you, they find a character or two they're good with and tend to use them essentially always. Yeah, a different character may get used here or there, but most people focus on getting better with a select few characters, both to take on higher tier in game challenges, and to be able to compete online as is the case with any fighting game basically from the past decade. Now YOU may not play that way, but I assure you, you are in the minority. Or maybe you're just assuming you use more characters actively than you really do. Even then, there is no way even playing that way that you can say you fully utilize a 50+ character roster and that it needs more characters just because your fan service needs haven't been entirely fulfilled.

So then ... uh ... don't use the other characters? No one's forcing you to use the 40 some other characters. 

When I buy a sports game, I don't play as every team, but I want them all in there. 

Good thing sports teams aren't fighters, and that the only real work that goes into balancing a sports game is making sure the engine reflects the real world ability of the players being represented. In the case of sports games, more equals good because, well, you can't exactly cut a team because you decided its overall stats are too close to another team. That's not how making sports games works. In the case of fighting games, you may notice this if you look around, but it tends to be the case that less is more. Unnecessary bloat leads to redundant move sets, generally useless characters, and balance issues that take endless tweaking because of the sheer number of move sets to work with, despite how similar many of them end up being.

The tl;dr is that your comparison kind of sucks. :p

Edit: It's worth noting that sports games are basically entirely fan service. They're making it so people can play as their favorite teams to smash the teams they hate. In the case of fighter games, they should not operate off of fan service, but rather, the best logical choices for keeping the game balanced. I'd rather a roster of 20 well made characters than a roster of 50+ that exist almost entirely to appeal to the effort of trying to make everybody happy all of the time.