On the whole, I don't really mind that characters were removed. It's something that is bound to happen and there is likely a reason. What that is, I cannot say for certain. I'm not Nintendo obviously, so I can't speak for why decisions were made. Perhaps the characters in question weren't popular enough. Maybe they were removed because they were trying to make room for more characters. A game disc can only hold so much data.

I am glad they kept in Charizard (I didn't like Ivysaur or Squirtle that much), but I wouldn't have cared if he was removed entirely. I would rather focus on the characters they do have instead of lament on the ones that they don't have.

Also, there is some advantage to having characters removed. It gives the older games more replay value. Think about it. By not having, say, Ivysaur in this game, it will give you more of a reason to play the older game so you can play as Ivysaur. And this goes for any character that you miss. If you have the previous games that utilize characters not seen in later games, you can play it again and enjoy that character once more.

As much as it can be annoying when a favorite character is cut, doing so can help make the older games special in their own way. It can help entice people to play not just the newer games, but the older ones as well. So I can see positive benefit from cutting characters, not just the negative.

I do want to try to play the game sometime. I don't have the system, though, so I'll have to get that first. Might not be for a long time.

I would have agreed with you at one point, but there's the thing, the 3DS version has the same number of characters as the Wii-U version. So I was expecting a whole new plethora of new characters for the bigger version. They couldn't even have included some of the good stages from the 3DS version, but that's besides the point. I feel that they only included a whole lot more music in the version but that's not a lot to ask for since most of those songs feel weird if they're not in their original stages, but then again that's just me nit-picking.

I love Smash 4 mechanically, but overall I'm pretty disappointed by it. Sakurai's favoritism definitely bled through this time. I currently only have the 3DS version but I probably won't get the WiiU version until my friends bother me about it. I can only hope that Lucas, Wolf, Ivysaur, Squirtle, and Ice Climber/s are DLC after Mewtwo gets released. I don't think Snake has a chance, although I'd like to see him again too.

Yeah. I feel exactly the same. There were so many Fire Emblem characters bled into this game. And Shulk sort of comes close.

The only FE character that bothers me is Lucina. Shulk doesn't bother me at all.

That's cool. Just using as an example.

Yeah! Tell me about it. X3