 The first new character from the Super Smash Bros Ultimate, Fighters Pass 2, has been revealed. Sort of. We don't know who the character is yet, but we know it's a fighter with arms. Wait, sorry. It's a fighter from arms. The game. Arms. The fighting game about characters who actually don't have arms. Nintendo is weird. So, why arms of all games? Well, with this reveal, the question is not so much, why a character from arms? The real question is, why didn't this character appear sooner? Masahiro Sakurai has spoken before about including a fighter from this game in Super Smash Bros. Apparently, the team had strongly considered putting arms in Smash, but the timing wasn't right until recently. Arms debuted a full year before Super Smash Ultimate, but even so, it was too late to be included in the crossover fighting game. Early work on Ultimate commenced with Sora Limited in late 2015, while finishing touches were still being put on Smash for the 3DS and Wii U. Once these games shipped, Masahiro and his team began narrowing down a core list of fighters in earnest. They considered everything, drawing on existing Nintendo titles, fan favourite requests, and even in development games that hadn't yet been released. In order to include the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild in the game, Masahiro Sakurai had to play an early build of the game as quickly as he could, running around a few areas and then skipping to the end, to get a sense of the game's world and characters. Meanwhile, a team at Nintendo were working on a very different project. Arms started an attempt to see whether a third person view could create a compelling fighting game, in contrast to Smash's 2D design. Producer Yosuke Yabuki described the goal with Arms thusly. Let's talk about a game I know very well, Mario Kart. Something appears in the distance and you steer in relation to that. That's the basic structure of the game. Work on Arms progressed, but unfortunately, by the time its core gameplay was in place and its characters were designed, Smash Ultimate was already a significant way through its development. Masahiro and the rest of his team strongly considered putting a character from Arms into Smash, as well as throwing in someone from Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Unfortunately, this just didn't fit their schedule. Said Masahiro, looking at how things are now, it may seem like a strange omission that there aren't any new fighters from Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and Arms. However, this is because they needed to be included from the very beginning at the planning stages. It's not possible to decide to include one or two more characters when you're in the thick of development. So the Arms character idea was parked on the shelf, and there it stayed for a little while. Clearly, someone at Nintendo really wanted to get Arms into Smash. The new DLC fighters were chosen by the higher-ups within the company, rather than anyone at Sora Limited. At their insistence, Masahiro's team dusted off their ideas for an Arms fighter and began to put it into development. Then, something unexpected happened. Side note, we really didn't want to bring up this subject on the channel, but it's relevant, so it can't be avoided. At the start of 2020, cases of the novel COVID-19 Coronavirus began appearing in Japan. Soon, in an effort to curb infection, many offices were shut down entirely. This significantly affected development on Smash Bros DLC. Many staff members weren't able to continue work, and crucially, Masahiro wasn't able to communicate with another publisher that the team was working with. Said Masahiro, restrictions are also being put on business travel. It's particularly difficult to meet with partners who are far away. For example, Nintendo is headquartered in Kyoto, right? In this regard, it's quite difficult for us to visit other companies. In my case specifically, I was scheduled to give a presentation to a publisher on our plans for a certain new fighter. However, the key parties were not able to get together, so it's been postponed indefinitely. From Masahiro's comments, it seems that this mystery publisher might be someone outside of Nintendo, but it's unclear how far into development this was at the time. Regardless, it's likely due to the spread of Coronavirus that Nintendo hasn't been able to fully unveil the new arms fighter just yet. We know it's somebody from the game, we just don't know who. It seems that whoever this fighter is, they're perpetually the victim of poor timing. Perhaps that's the moral of the story. If you're desperate for something, if you really want to achieve a dream, but it's not quite happening yet, maybe it's simply not the right time. Maybe, with patience, you can overcome your challenges. Playing the waiting game is never fun, but just as an arms character is finally on the way to smash, if you don't lose hope, you can still get where you're going in the end.