A recent tweet from Smash Bros. Ultimate supervisor Shinya Kumazaki has given us a potential hint to who the next potential DLC character could be. The post reads “The Brave’s Shield,” captioning an image of Smash Bros. mascot Kirby next to Eldrick’s shield. Eldrick is one of the protagonists of Square Enix’s popular JRPG series, Dragon Quest.
However, this post does not necessarily guarantee anything for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is not necessarily Eldrick being added to Smash as this shield features across several Dragon Quest games. It is also equipable by many different characters from the games. Secondly, this is just a fun Instagram post and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Kumazaki has been known to post pictures of Kirby next to things in many of his posts including his food and places he has been to.
A post shared by Director_Kumazaki（熊崎信也） (@director_kumazaki_shinya)
It isn’t just this post though that suggests Dragon Quest will get official representation in Smash soon though. On Japanese textboard site 5Channel, an anonymous user claimed that the remaining four DLC characters for Smash Bros. Ultimate would be Ryu Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden, Steve from Minecraft, Doomguy from DOOM and Eldrick from Dragon Quest. Originally posted back in early December, the post has because more interesting since its prediction of Persona 5 R became true, being announced December 30th. The two characters already announced as DLC are Piranha Plant from Mario and Joker from Persona 5, the former of which is playable right now.
The final suggestion that all of this is leading up to a Dragon Quest character announcement comes from software engineer and data-miner jam1garner.
Ok so since the secret’s out, here’s confirmation. Params in Ultimate confirm the code names of 2 future characters, “jack” and “brave”.
The labels for these characters:fighter_kind_jackfighter_kind_bravefighter_kind_packu (piranha plant) pic.twitter.com/rCRRg8KR3W
— jam1garner (@jam1garner) January 3, 2019
The tweet shows code names for several DLC characters with “packu,” being Piranha Plant, “Jack,” likely referring to Joker and then “fighter_kind_brave.” This is interesting as the Dragon Quest class “Yuusha,” translates to Brave in English. Combine that with the obvious link to the Instagram post and there might just about be enough evidence to suggest Dragon Quest is coming to Smash soon.
