Full thoughts on the Direct:
General character design (not the character models but rather the move set direction and ideas behind them) is going in the right direction. They aren't haphazardly creating moves and not thinking about how they will or should be used. Instead, they are actually thinking about how the moves should be used and what purpose they serve in their kit. This may not apply to every character but the changes they have made to characters like Zelda, ZSS, and Olimar (as examples) have clearly been well thought out.
The lot of you might think Olimar with 3 Pikmin significantly nerfs him, which is certainly a valid viewpoint. But if they keep all his Smash attacks the
exact same he'll still play the same way except with less Pikmin. The recovery change is to offset the loss of 6 Pikmin, because realistically his tether would be ass with only 3 Pikmin. And the removal of the random variables for what Pikmin color you got is also a good design decision because not only was it random in Brawl on its own but the
terrain type of a stage surface affected what Pikmin you got. That in and of itself was working against the Olimar player.
The newcomer stuff are also very thoughtful design decisions. They do take from some of those staple fighting game design choices and it's good to see that for once in a Smash game. Greninja looks like a really great addition to the roster. I don't care if we have 7 Pokemon reps this time (just a random number I picked off the top of my head), if all 7 of those Pokemon are just as unique as Greninja then what does it matter if a franchise has x amount of characters? It's still adding a unique playstyle and move set to the roster.
Separating transformation characters for good is a good decision. They didn't work in Brawl and if you fixed what was wrong with them (loading times) then they would be a nightmare to balance. I'm glad Pokemon Trainer is gone, he was a complete fuck-up in design decisions for a fighting game character. (It's why he was one of the worst characters in Brawl).
Items: Don't care about them but I don't see any that strike me as ridiculous as some of the things we had in Brawl (except I guess the X-Bomb).
Stages: Why the hell would they bring back Jungle Japes from Melee
a second time for the 3DS version? I don't get that choice. It's a terrible stage with the water changes they implemented in Brawl.
Other than that, the stage variety seems nice but I'm not a fan of the Yellow Devil element to the Mega Man stage. The vanilla version of that stage will surely focus on fighting the stage rather than the opponents and I'm generally not a fan of that. It's cool fanservice, but I don't like fanservice that interferes with the main gameplay or sacrifices actual interaction between players just to get something "cool" in it. It seems forced in just because.
FD skins of every stage could be really useful for competitive play but I don't expect the stage list to include every single FD-version. Especially if some of them have different blastzones and stage size (which they do by the looks of the footage we saw of the Mario Galaxy FD and Wily Castle FD). My complaint with doing stuff like this is that it takes away entire unique aspects of stages that aren't considered hazardous to competitive play (such as Wily Castle's platforms that appear, those could be really cool to mess with for movement and positioning -- the sad thing is those platforms are only available in the version that also has Yellow Devil). It's great that I have more options for FD-like stages but it would have been nice to have a middleground option too where you can just simply turn off stage hazards like Yellow Devil but keep the unique parts of the stage (mainly the platform layouts).
Online is shitty once again. Actually, no, random online VS is shitty. I don't think that should be a surprise to
anyone but apparently it is. No stock matches in random VS? Completely useless to me. Private sessions will be OK but that shouldn't be what an online community thrives on. Yeah, Brawl sort of did for the first year or two but it eventually began to lose steam (especially because of its awful netcode). Maybe Sakurai's team will hear the cries of having stocks in For Glory mode but I doubt it. Timed matches seem to be his go-to for whatever fucking reason despite how clearly broken it is for 2 minute matches on FD.
Custom move sets is what really interests me the most. It looks like it's only for special moves and most likely, they are pre-set choices. But the fact that he was actually aware of something like this being requested and is actually implementing it is nutso to me. It's like he heard of this being requested and saw all the crazy ass mods for Brawl (well... that second half is probably not true lol). Still, I'm really interested in how this will play out. It would be interesting for competitive play if the options for each character aren't blatantly broken. If everyone has access to the same options and it doesn't take forever to choose the changes then I could see this being allowed.
...I think that's about all I was thinking of needing to say. From the footage shown tonight it's still not clear whether hitstun can be canceled by an air dodge again which is concerning but I guess that's something we won't find out for sure about until the release of the 3DS version (yo, seriously, this is why I'm glad the 3DS version is coming out sooner simply because we get to test the gameplay systems out months in advance -- even if the physics
might be different between the versions).
I'll probably buy the 3DS version and let that help me decide if I want to get the Wii U one (meh, I'll probably get it anyway just because I'm a Smash fan at heart... I do have a Wii U and there's no other games for it really

).