What if Waluigi joined Super Smash Bros?

Surely, finally, mercifully, it has to be Waluigi’s time.

Some Smash requests feel like campaigns. Waluigi feels like a constitutional crisis.

For years, Nintendo’s lankiest purple nuisance has lived in the most agonising possible Smash position: visible, acknowledged, close enough to wave at, but never actually playable. He has appeared as an Assist Trophy since Super Smash Bros. Brawl, returning again and again in that same supporting role while the roster expanded around him. Every new Ultimate reveal sent Waluigi fans through the same ritual: hope, meme, despair. At this point, the snub itself has become part of the spectacle.

That might sound ridiculous, but it is also why the demand has never really gone away.

Waluigi first appeared in Mario Tennis for the Nintendo 64 in 2000, created as a doubles partner for Wario and a rival figure for Luigi. His name is commonly understood as playing on “warui”, the Japanese word for bad, making him not just Luigi’s opposite, but basically a walking playground insult with a moustache. Even his design feels like pure inversion, stretching Luigi’s tall frame into something sharper, stranger and far more pointy, with a purple cap marked by an upside-down L.

That tennis-court origin still defines him. Waluigi was not born from a mainline platformer, a villain plot or a grand Mushroom Kingdom mythos. He was created because Wario needed someone to stand next to him during doubles. Somehow, from that deeply practical beginning, he became one of the most recognisable recurring faces in Mario’s spin-off empire. If there is a Mario side activity that requires a long idiot to cheat, pose or scream “Wah”, Waluigi is probably nearby.

He is, in that sense, the Daisy of bad vibes.

Like Daisy before Ultimate, Waluigi is a character whose identity has been built less through mainline Mario storytelling and more through repeated spin-off presence. The difference is that Daisy eventually squeezed into Smash as Peach’s Echo Fighter. Waluigi is still outside the window, pressing his weird pointy nose against the glass, somehow both tragic and exactly where he would stand.

Smash Already Knows The Waluigi Argument

The case for Waluigi is not complicated. Waluigi is one of the loudest, strangest and most enduring Smash requests still without a playable slot.

That sentence feels almost too obvious to print, but it is the foundation of the whole thing. The internet is already drowning in Waluigi concepts, fake reveal trailers and fully animated victory-screen fantasies. He has been forced into Smash by fan projects so many times that the official series now feels like the one stubborn holdout. This article is not introducing a new idea to the room. It is entering a room where everyone is already wearing purple overalls and pretending this is normal behaviour.

More importantly, Waluigi’s popularity is not just ironic. He is incredibly memeable, obviously. Part of the appeal is that he looks like a haunted coat hanger who learned tennis out of spite. But the demand has lasted because there is a real character shape there. Waluigi is smug, theatrical and pathetic in exactly the right proportions. He is not cool. He is not heroic. He is not even especially competent half the time.

That is exactly why he works.

He would also bring a genuinely unusual body type to Smash. Ultimate did a brilliant job proving that strange silhouettes could work in motion. Ridley is all wings and menace. King K. Rool is a belly-first wrecking ball. Min Min turns her arms into half the stage. Waluigi would be different again: the strangest human-shaped fighter on the roster, all knees, elbows and misplaced confidence. He is a stretched-out nuisance with the build of someone assembled entirely from sharp angles and poor intentions.

And that is immediate readability, something Smash always benefits from. You would not need to explain Waluigi’s personality through dialogue, lore or an elaborate intro cutscene. The second he slides into frame, you know exactly what kind of problem has arrived. His moveset would have to capture that awkward reach, that slippery sports-game movement, and the sense that every pose is both a taunt and a cry for help.

Then there is the Assist Trophy issue, which is not really an impossible issue anymore. Waluigi has long been defined in Smash by that supporting role, but the series has already shown that Assist Trophy status does not have to be a permanent, franchise-wide lockout. Little Mac appeared as an Assist Trophy in Brawl before becoming playable later, while Dark Samus and Isabelle also made the jump to the fighter roster in Ultimate. Waluigi would not be breaking an impossible rule. He would be following a very funny precedent.

And honestly, the reveal trailer writes itself.

The next Smash game shows an Assist Trophy capsule. Waluigi bursts out. The internet groans. History repeats itself for half a second… and then he refuses to leave. He kicks the item away. The splash screen hits.

At last, it’s Waluigi Time.

Absolute cinema.

The Problem With Being Player Four

Of course, there is a reason Waluigi has been stuck in roster purgatory for this long.

He is a spin-off guy. That is the criticism, and it is not unfair. Waluigi has appeared across Mario’s party, kart, sports and crossover catalogue, but he has still never had a meaningful role in a mainline Mario platformer. He has not served as the major antagonist in a proper Mario adventure. He has not been the secondary threat, the surprise third-act nuisance or even the strange man lurking behind a castle wall with a bad plan. He has not starred in his own game.

Even his connection to Wario is oddly shallow when you look beyond the branding. Wario went from Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins in 1992 to starring in Wario Land and later WarioWare. Waluigi, despite being Wario’s usual partner, has never become a real fixture of either of those worlds. His most notable WarioWare connection is not proper representation, but an amiibo sketch gag in WarioWare Gold, where Wario can draw scanned amiibo characters. Funny? Absolutely. Character development? Not quite.

It creates a strange résumé for a Smash fighter. Most Mario representatives have some obvious pillar beneath them. Mario, Luigi, Peach and Bowser are foundational. Rosalina represents the Galaxy era. Bowser Jr. brings both himself and the Koopalings into the roster’s orbit. Daisy, even as an Echo Fighter, has Super Mario Land and decades of spin-off regularity behind her. Piranha Plant is bizarre, yes, but it is bizarre in a very mainline Mario way. A classic enemy. A pipe-dwelling hazard. A carnivorous houseplant that somehow became a playable celebrity.

Waluigi does not have that. What he has instead is stranger: a career built almost entirely from side modes, an infinitely memeable silhouette, and the kind of crowd support that somehow gets louder every time Nintendo ignores it.

There is also the wider Mario problem. Smash is already full of Mushroom Kingdom representation. The Mario series has Mario, Luigi, Peach, Daisy, Bowser, Dr. Mario, Rosalina & Luma, Bowser Jr. and Piranha Plant listed under its banner in Ultimate. That is before you even start counting neighbouring franchises like Donkey Kong, Yoshi and Wario, all of which grew out of Mario’s orbit but stand separately on the character select screen.

And there are still other Mario-adjacent names with strong claims. Toad is absurdly overdue, and deserves more than being Peach’s Neutral Special. Paper Mario could represent an entire RPG lineage with a visual identity Smash has barely touched. Geno remains the cult pick that would electrify one very specific corner of the internet, despite Square Enix licensing making everyone’s blood pressure rise slightly. You could argue that another Mario slot should go somewhere with more untapped franchise history rather than to the man whose most famous canon contribution is being tall near Wario.

That is the strongest case against Waluigi, and it deserves to be taken seriously. He is not missing because nobody has noticed him. He is missing because his importance sits at a strange angle to the rest of Mario history.

That Strange Angle Is Exactly The Point

Here is the thing, though. Mario spin-offs are not side dishes anymore. They are a massive part of what Mario is.

Mario Kart World launched exclusively for Nintendo Switch 2 on 5 June 2025, with Nintendo positioning it as a launch title for the system. Mario Tennis Fever, meanwhile, released for Nintendo Switch 2 on 12 February 2026, continuing the exact sub-series that introduced Waluigi in the first place.

These games are not minor curiosities living in the shadow of the next 3D platformer. They are some of the loudest, most reliable parts of modern Mario.

Then there is Mario Party, which has multiplied so many times that counting the entries begins to feel like one of its minigames. Karting, tennis and board-game mayhem are not obscure corners of Mario. For a lot of players, Mario is as much about blue shells and friendship-ending dice rolls as it is about flagpoles and Power Stars.

Smash barely represents that side of the franchise directly. It references it, certainly. Items, stages, music and animations nod to the broader Mario machine. But no fighter embodies the spin-off ecosystem itself quite like Waluigi could.

That turns his biggest weakness into the pitch. He is not a mainline Mario hero, and trying to pretend otherwise would be pointless. He is the avatar of Mario’s competitive nonsense. Tennis courts. Dice blocks. Karting grudges. A certain purple pinball landmark. That is his territory. A good Waluigi adaptation would not need to invent relevance for him. It would need to embrace the fact that his relevance comes from everywhere except the place people traditionally look.

That makes him more interesting than simply adding another familiar Mushroom Kingdom face. Waluigi would not be there to represent a single game, a single era or even a traditional character arc. He would be there to represent the Mario spin-off machine itself, with all its rackets, dice blocks, karting grudges and friendship-ending nonsense. For a character who has never really belonged anywhere, that is oddly perfect.

And let’s be honest, the standards shifted the moment Piranha Plant got a slot. Piranha Plant is a wonderful, outlandish, inspired addition, but it is still a slow-moving pipe hazard that spent most of its existence waiting for plumbers to jump at the wrong time. If Smash can turn that into a fighter, Waluigi’s lack of a mainline starring role starts to feel less like a disqualifier and more like a dare.

Daisy also matters here. Yes, she entered as an Echo Fighter, and yes, she had Super Mario Land long before she became the queen of spin-off rosters. But her inclusion still proved that Smash was willing to acknowledge characters whose modern identity is heavily built through Mario’s social calendar rather than its main adventure line. Waluigi is the same logic pushed further, louder and with significantly more elbow.

The noise around him now feels bigger than it does for plenty of characters already inside the Mushroom Kingdom’s Smash delegation. That is not the only thing that should decide a roster, but it should count for something. Smash is not built by Reddit petitions, thank God, but it has always understood spectacle. Waluigi would be spectacle before he even moved.

That is where the moveset matters. Not because Waluigi needs to prove he has enough random objects to swing around, because of course he does. The real challenge is proving that his weird career, weird body and weird popularity can become one coherent fighter. A fighter whose reach feels irritating, whose tennis roots actually matter, whose party-game nonsense has a competitive shape, and whose Waluigi Pinball reference feels earned rather than stapled on because everyone expected it.

It is the same kind of identity test that sits behind other Smash Speculation cases, whether that means avoiding the echo-fighter trap for Shadow the Hedgehog or making sure Crash Bandicoot feels like more than one famous move repeated forever. Waluigi’s version of that problem is stranger, because the joke, the silhouette and the source material are all tangled together.

So the brief is clear: Waluigi cannot just be Luigi with worse intentions, or Wario without a bike. He has to feel like the entire Mario spin-off circus crammed into one long, resentful body.