User blog comment:BlackLodge/Super Smash Bros. 4/@comment-4237188-20120702152959/@comment-1966066-20120702185736

Yes, I've read that as well. I think that Sakurai knows that fans expect to see a bunch of new characters, and it's an imprtant factor when marketing the game and getting people excited. While it is a bit worrisome, I think that in context it doesn't nessessarily mean that they're going to stick exclusivley to the 35 character roster. He is expressing that they can't just add more characters and call it a day. I would love to see a 50 character roster, and with Namco sharing the development load, from my outsider perspective it certainly sounds doable. But of course I don't know what goes on behind the scenes, and they definitely have a massive undertaking, developoing two seperate games. If we look back at the previous entires, Melee added 14 characters (including Sheik) and Brawl added 16 characters (including Zero Suit Samus) but removed 5 characters. If this trend continues (and I believe that in all likelyhood it will) we can expect to add about 15 characters while removing about 5. This would bring us to a 45 character roster, only ten more slots than Brawl. Ten isn't pushing it that far. And while I'd love to see all previous fighters return, realistically it probably won't happen. But who knows? Sakurai is the kind of guy that likes to cram as much as possible into his games. It's important to note that they're still in the early development stages and a lot can change in the 2-3 years they'll be working on the game. Also the fact that there are two games could mean that certain characters are exclusive to one or the other which could wind up making one of the rosters (probably on the 3DS) smaller than the other. Spreading characters across two games could be their way of including as many fighters as possible, while still keeping things balanced. I personally would not like to see that happen, but it is a possiblity. Also, we're now living in the era of downloadable content, which could have obvious implications for expanding the character roster after the game is released. In any case, I'll be talking about all these things in much more thought out detail as I continue these posts. I hope you stay tuned!