SMASH 150 - 139 - GENO

Geno, of the genus genie, carrier of the genius genome.

Geno in Smash
Including Geno in my last project: professorfandango.deviantart.c… was due to the large demand from fans for him to make an appearance.
Amazingly, a Geno outfit did show up for Mii characters which was about as good an acknowledgement as you could get.

I do still love Super Mario RPG and I do think he'd be fun to use but with one game from twenty years ago and not belonging to Nintendo, what are the chances?

Geno in Super Mario RPG
The cast of Super Mario RPG exists in a strange Limbo since they were created by and belong to Squaresoft but they were design for a Mario game so are technically Mario characters. Mario characters not owned by Nintendo. Weird. But Square have made a number of spin-off Mario games recently and their other games are being released on Nintendo consoles too, so why have we not seen these characters again?

My guess is because Nintendo won't let them. They've been tightening the rope on third-party designed RPG characters and I reckon they don't want these characters to continue to be seen as proper Mario cast members. However, they're taking more of a risk with some of their properties in the most recent console generation so who knows what might be next?

With a remake of Final Fantasy VII on the way, Squaresoft are conscious of the popularity of their 1990s games. So what might the chances be of a remake of Super Mario RPG for Switch? Or perhaps a sequel? I think there is the glimmer of a possibility there. Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi are still running their course so I don't think it's completely unreasonable to consider another game from the third Mario RPG series (or more accurately, the first.)