Dorayaki
King Bowser
This topic indicates either new faces that just appeared in the movie, or existed game characters that haven't been in games for long while before their most recent movie appearances.
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As we know, early media adaption including Super Show series and the notorious 1993 movie were entirely handled by the plot writers with litte intervention from Nintendo, so it makes sense for most of the OCs or original contents to not become recurring in the franchise. But for the Illumination movie, all the plot and characters are strictly handled by Nintendo, which means the characters' participation are officially acknowledged.
But at this point with first movie hitting the market for three years and the second movie coming, despite we've gone through a couple of new games, we barely see any character whose last time appearance be the movie gets to reappear in later games. So this makes question: do the movies really expand the Super Mario franchise with characters (re)introduction, or they don't work so?
Among the cases, we get Chunky and Spike who've done major roles in games before, while Penguin King and General Koopa have proven that they can take playable roles in games via their companions.
Mario's family members are sure not likely gonna get as much important roles as Mario bros, but I do think they would do a decent supporting job in specific occasions like memories or prologues. Especially Mario&Luigi RPG series could be the best place to have the family involve to explain why Mario bros have such strong bond and how their fighting skills came from.
One realistic assumption is that despite of acknowledge, Nintendo cannot directly copy-past the renders from the Illumination into thier games, and they might not feel motivated enough to re-create all the in-game renders and movesets, since the core main cast is still more important than movie characters. But I may be wrong if Nintendo actually think it's easy to do.
Still, overall I think it's a letdown for the movies and characters to not get pay or further acknowledgement despite of their effort in helping Super Mario brand become more famous. I think this could also bring potentially negative impact on future sequels since we don't know if future movie stories and characters will be well acknowledged or just end up overlooked. You can say the 1986 movie was overlooked because it's a lackluster, but the 2023 one? Absloutely not.
Do you think the movies and characters are overlooked? Or you believe Nintendo do have some unrevealed plans?
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