Just so we're clear, the same people wanting "unambiguously black characters" in Smash were the ones shitting their pants over that one guy from Final Fantasy 7, right? I mean, he was pretty "unambiguously black".
See, that's actually a REALLY good point. I keep wondering how many studios don't add a black character to their game because they're afraid of the impossibly high standards they'd be held to. Doing a black character wrong is probably scarier than not having a black character at all.
And to be fair, FF7 Remake's Barrett does look kinda white, due to the Japanese artists' lack of experience in making black characters. But how do they fix that? Oversized lips? A wide nose? A thicker, more primitive brow? Sounds like stereotypes, right? I wouldn't be surprised if Square Enix were afraid too.
Ironically if these people stopped terrorizing developers, they might actually start to get black characters they liked.
So outside of Twintelle from ARMS has anyone made any real arguments for a black video game character than could have been subbed for any of the other VASTLY MORE POPULAR/ICONIC or the very least Nintendo owned characters in the pass? I can't speak for the popularity of the Xenoblade characters and I understand that the last couple of Fire Emblem characters were pushed on Sakurai by Nintendo.
To the people on Resetera this is just solid evidence that the lack of notable black video game characters is an industry-wide problem and that there should be a larger pool of black characters to draw from in general. And if you don't think much about it, there's a certain logic there.
But it isn't true when you look at the big picture. There ARE black characters in the video game industry. They're not as numerous as the white or "ambiguously Japanese" characters, but they exist and there's even good ones. And while the game industry can decide whether or not black characters get to exist, they have no control over which ones get
popular. If the black lady from the game Sunset didn't get popular and become iconic, that isn't Nintendo's fault.
I really like the Demoman from TF2. But putting him into Smash Bros. in lieu of more iconic characters from that same game would have been weird. For Resetera to get their black Smash Bros. character, the character doesn't just need to be black, but
good, and eventually
iconic. But most of today's crop of progressive developers don't know how to make a good character. They think making them black makes them good.