Nintendo’s ‘Arms’ reveal briefly teased four new characters for final lineup

By Jon Martindale April 13, 2017

Four New ARMS Fighters Leaked by Nintendo | ARMS for Nintendo Switch

Nintendo’s recent Direct stream may have shown more than it meant to about its upcoming Switch beat’em up, Arms. Although it debuted one new character deliberately, eagle-eyed fans also noticed some hints at four new characters within the game that have yet to be announced.

The Arms showing during the direct told us quite a lot about the game. It showed off the new, noodle-themed character, Min Min; gave the franchise’s face, Spring Man, a little more screen time, and told us that the game would officially release in June. But it is the hint of four other new characters that have people excited.

Spotted initially by Redditors who managed to screencap the very moment that the hinted additional characters appeared, Nintendo fans have since been speculating about who they might be and what they could bring to the game.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Unfortunately, we don’t have a whole lot to go on, just the hint of the character’s faces, but we can make a few educated guesses based off of that. As NintendoLife points out, it os likely that at least two of the characters shown are robots, which could put them at the larger end of the character spectrum, dishing out more damage, but offering less mobility.

One character seems likely to be female, based on the eyelashes and lipstick, but it is anyone’s guess what the white and seemingly armored character is about. The eye suggests a non-robotic character, but the armor could go either way.

Although some have suggested this may be a deliberate leak by Nintendo, not everyone is so sure. Nintendo has made several mistakes with character reveals in the past, revealing Ganondorf as a playable character in Super Smash Bros. on the Wii U during a trailer. The Switch’s developer menu system was also famously leaked prior to the console’s release.

For now, we will simply need to speculate, but we won’t have long to find out for sure, even if we wait until the final release to see these potentially unannounced characters. Thanks to the Nintendo Direct, we now know that Arms is set to launch on June 16.

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It makes basic financial sense for Nintendo to ask for a little bit more for a game it knows will be one of the biggest releases of 2023. But what factors in the game industry and world's economy at large caused Nintendo to make this decision?
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For more than a decade, people got comfortable with AAA video games being priced at $60. Of course, there were occasional exceptions to this rule, but it was seen as an industry standard until the dawn of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Publisher 2K was one of the first to announce a price increase, and companies like EA, Sony, and Microsoft have all followed suit. Jijiashvili chalks this up to inflation-related pressure on game publishers.
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Jijiashvili provided us with a graphic created by Omdia that "shows what the typical price points for each generation would look like if you adjusted for inflation." As you can see, the inflation-adjusted prices are only exponentially growing, and the big game pricing shifts the graph highlights were all technically not even enough to keep up with inflation when they happened.

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