Smash Ultimate Fighter Pass 2 leak could be good news for Waluigi fans
There's hope for the purple villain.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate fans will receive a new fighter as part of the game’s DLC Fighter Pass 2 in June. Nintendo revealed that the new addition to the roster would be a character from the company’s wacky boxing franchise Arms. Now, an alleged leak has claimed to reveal the new character’s release date and provided new hope that, contrary to previous speculation, it's now possible that Waluigi could actually be added to Smash Ultimate as a playable character.
This newfound information comes from sketchy online forum 4chan, where an anonymous poster claimed that the first Fighter Pass 2 character would be released on June 16. These supposed leaks were posted to the site May 11 and didn’t come with any verifiable details, so they could prove to be nothing more than fan fiction. But all of the details are keeping in line with everything Nintendo has revealed thus far.
The now-deleted 4chan leak.
The post claims that the DLC character will be Spring Man, Arms’ poster boy, but the fighter's alternative skins would be seven other characters from the game instead of just Spring Man wearing different colors. Nintendo has done this with other Smash Ultimate fighters, namely Hero and Bowser Jr., so a character with a ton of varied skins like this is possible.
What would be surprising about Spring Man being added to the roster is that Spring Man is technically already in the game as an Assist Trophy.
What does Waluigi have to do with any of this?
The main reasoning behind why many fans previously lost hope that Waluigi would ever be added to Smash Ultimate is because the nasty purple boy was added to the game as an Assist Trophy. These items are nothing more than tools that playable fighters can use to battle on their behalf. They function similarly to Poké Balls in Smash Bros.
Nintendo has never added a character that’s already an Assist Trophy to the roster in Smash Bros. history. The addition of Spring Man would break that tradition and therefore beg the question:
Why can’t the maniacal, mustachioed Waluigi be a part of DLC Fighter Pass 2 as well?
Could it finally be Waluigi's time to shine in 'Smash Ultimate'?
The Inverse Analysis — While many Smash Ultimate rumors are so outlandish they’re almost impossible to believe, this one is a bit difficult to parse.
On one hand, it seems unlikely that Nintendo would break its tradition of not adding Assist Trophies as playable characters. Imagine playing as Spring Man and then summoning the Spring Man Assist Trophy. It would be difficult to tell which of the two lanky-armed boxers you’re controlling. Weird, right?
But on the other hand, could Nintendo even add an Arms representative to Smash Ultimate without making it Spring Man? After all he is the face of the franchise and is by far the most recognizable character out of the game’s 15 characters.
We’ve speculated before that the DLC character could be the menacing Dr. Coyle, since she was the latest character to be added to Arms during a December 2017 update. The addition of Byleth from Fire Emblem: Three Houses served as evidence that Nintendo uses Smash Ultimate to market its recent games, but it’s been years since Dr. Coyle was released, making that pick harder to justify than Byleth.
Could fans see an Assist Trophy-turn-playable-Smash-character for the first time in the game’s history? And does that mean that Waluigi could eventually make his long-awaited debut as a playable fighter? We’ll need to wait until Nintendo announces something to be sure, but there’s hope Waluigi stans ... there’s hope.
