Mr. Game and Watch has lore?????
Yes, and I'm tired of pretending he doesn't.
Why I found this in the first place
So, I know a lot of people only know this goofball through Super Smash Brothers.
However, he had games in the 80s! He was literally Nintendo's first forray into gaming, and months older than Pac-Man.
Of course, being so old, the absolute impact he had on Nintendo as a company has been pretty forgotten.
Quickly said, Gunpei Yokoi was the inventor of the Game and Watch handhelds, but also the D-Pad, the Gameboy, and Nintendo's entire philosophy of "Make good games on slightly older technology", which has kept them afloat to this day.
So, realizing the actual impact, I decided to look into if there was any actual story there.
There wasn't.
Minigames. Only minigames. I own a few, and at first, it shocked me. I walked away from this, dissapointed.
Then, something incredible happened...
Wario Land 4
Stick with me. This will make sense, I swear.
Wario Land 4 has Wario commiting his normal smash-and-grab shenanigans, like the previous Wario Land games.
Now, in this one, he's grave robbing the tomb of a long-dead princess.
There's a strange inky cat that seems to follow him and help out, and the walls have GnW-shaped hieroglyphs. Not to mention the shopkeeper being a near-perfect lookalike.
Spoiler for a 20-year old game, but turns out the cat is the princess who's tomb you're raiding, and because the shopkeeper is the cat, that means the princess is GnW.
Yep: Mr. Game and Watch was a princess from the Mushroom kingdom.
Big claim there, buddy. Prove it!
I can, actually. In fact, every appearance of GnW ever can be explained.
So, the handhelds are most confusing, but it's best to start there.
At the end of Wario Land 4, GnW (Previous name, Princess Shokora, GnW for brevity) ascends into the sky and is never heard from again.
Now, this seems to only add to the claim, but explains many confusing things: What if GnW did not end up in an afterlife, but in a void?
In that case, preforming menial tasks to pass the time makes perfect sense.
And it has been confirmed that GnW is capable of self-cloning and shapeshifting (in the 2d context, source below). So, that explains the handhelds: "something to do in the infinite solitude ahead".
Game and Watch Galleries
These came out on the Gameboy consoles (heavily influenced in design by Gunpei Yokoi, same guy that made GnW originally).
These are ports of the minigames, but also showing a mirrored version with Mario characters.
Now, if you consider GnW as having originated from that world, it looks more like entangled worlds affecting each other in strange ways.
Just a thought.
MELEE!!!
Look, I know Smash doesn't affect most series's canon, but we don't have much to work with here, and seeing Smash Bros as a main series he resides is explainable.
[For those curious, it could be a OoT-style timesplit, going through Paper Mario (2D Mario, not super self-aware of being paper, also Vivian), Warioware (Wario gets repaid by learning the art of Microgames), and Smash Bros Melee]
So, GnW escaped the void. Now what?
He's a broken mess of a character, thats what.
GnW is a broken character in Melee. Not in a good way, in a "so unfinished that his hitbox goes past his shield" sort of way.
Makes sense after all that. But, GnW does get his redemption.
SUBSPACE!!!
Ok, Subspace has a suprising amount of stuff to go off of.
Mostly thanks to the Brawl Dojo, which is thankfully archived on archive.org.
So, on it, Sakurai states that:
Gnw is used as raw material to create characters cloned: (He is ground up as raw material. The purple dust when enemies are killed? Made of the same substance as GnW.)
Gnw "has no concept of good and evil": (I take this as "too depressed to care" in context, but its used to explain why GnW allows the above).
Game and Watch's cutscene
This, to me, is the "killer app" of this entire theory. Taking GnW as a long-forgotten, cursed, long-isolated Mushroom kingdom royal, the actions here make a heck of a lot more sense:
So, yea. That's the idea I've kept bottled up far too long.
I spread this because it is interesting, and because I really wanna see the 2d goofball get use again, outside of his current menial role.
(Insert Epic Mickey reference here. That plotline could work, but yknow.)