-My main priority was to have as many franchises as possible and to put the characters that most people would recognize from them. That's the thing about Smash, is a big crossover, so there should be a lot of characters from across the board, admittedly, with a roster as big as Ultimate, I likely omitted a lot of unique guys
-Sora is represented by Lucas
-Greninja is there because he has been the Number 1 pokémon around the world in two different polls held by TPC
-Fighting game characters are the ones I enjoy using the most in Smash, so I had a lot of bias to keep them
-Ridley and K. Rool stay because honestly, it would be the most nonsensical thing to actually cut them for the next game, people have been begging to have them for ages ffs
-Yes, 15 third parties is too much, but that's frankly because of their pedigree, like, really, most third-parties in Smash dwarf Nintendo's own by a long run, and the fact that 3 out of 4 DLC newcomers in Smash 4 and 8 out of 12 in Ultimate were guests should be telling of how much drawing power they have