I think we sould let him repost the updae on this page just to keep him happy :)

Reposted because my theory was lost in the update. 

Characters who had to be unlocked in Melee:

Falco
Ganondorf
Jigglypuff
Luigi
Marth
Mewtwo
Mr. Game & Watch
Pichu
Roy
Y. Link
Dr. Mario

Ness and C. Falcon were unlocked from the start. The 4 crossed out are the ones who seem very unlikely to return. A few of the others up top are iffy, but the point is that none of these characters have been shown. Not one. Obviously they aren't all gone. I think what this means is that we aren't getting any unlockables at all.

In the previous two games about 2/3 of the characters were unlocked from the start (including transformations like Sheik). Assuming 1 character every 2 weeks (the pace he is currently going) we will get 4 more characters before the game launches. That will give us a total of 25 initially available characters (counting ZSS). 26 if Sheik is still in the game (which that Aonuma interiview implied). That would give us about 40 characters (I rounded up from 39). Which is exactly the number I predicted. That would be a 15 character increase from Melee. Melee was a 13 character increase from Smash. Technically it's actually 19 new characters since 4 old ones will be gone.

im not getting him up.

@naznatips. yeah it would make sense, since we havent heard or seen a thing about luigi and hes an unlockable (probably). that would mean thought that theres a fair few characters playable right from the start, my first thought was that diddy kong would be an unlockable...

i dont think mewtwo will return. who liked him anyway?

There are a few ones that I can see that you have to unlock. Snake and Ike I can see that you have to unlock. But who knows.

He's pretty big among Pokemon fans. He needs to be rebalanced though to make him useful. Honestly I can't see any non-clones being cut with the possible exception of Ness. The only clone who may make it is Falco because of his popularity, but his moves will be redone. Oh and Ganondorf, but he was never meant to be a clone.

Depends how they handled Melee. They released screenshots through IGN on a near-daily basis...did any of those screenshots give away unlockable characters?

yea im a big fan of pokemon but he was 'the big legendary pokemon' when melee was released at the time.So maybe they might put in/replace him with Diaglia or Palkia (sorry for pokemon spelling) since Diamond & Pearl are a huge hit and released the same year/time frame as Brawl??

That's not really Sakurai's style.  Oldschool comes above new characters.  That's why Marth will remain.  That's why Pokemon Trainer uses the RBY starters.