Trivia / ARMS

• Ascended Fanon: Official artwork of Mechanica◊ from early August 2017 gives her an outfit very closely resembling attire she's worn in a few◊ fanart drawings◊ of her without her Future Spandex.
• Creator's Favorite: In an interview with Kosuke Yabuki, he said that Min Min is his favorite fighter. This is partly the reason why she was selected for inclusion in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, according to Masahiro Sakurai.
• Colbert Bump: After two years of silent inactivity, the game got renewed interest after one of its fighters (who ultimately turned out to be Min Min, the winner of the final Party Crash Bash) was announced to become playable in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, with Nintendo organizing a new online open to celebrate the event.
• Development Hell: An ARMS graphic novel published by Dark Horse Comics and written by Ian Flynn was supposed to be released in the fall of 2018. Dark Horse even released a Free Comic Book Day prequel story to promote it. However, the release date was pushed to early 2019 before being delayed again with no explanation or new time frame for release. As of March 2021, according to the personal webpage of one of the writers of the graphic novel, it has been cancelled.
• Dueling Works: ARMS can be compared to Divekick in that ARMS is a fighting game that takes out the usual complexity involved with controls (most fighting games generally have a steep learning curve that prevents most people from picking them up). Also, the main characters in both games tend to focus on a single technique to fight (divekicking in Divekick, punching in ARMS). The comparisons became more pronounced after it was learned that players can configure ARMS to play with one-punch knockouts.
• Meme Acknowledgment: Picking up on the frequent comparisons to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, one of Nintendo's official Twitter accounts joined in. On top of that, Misango was designed to, along with a general Mayincatec theme, look like Star Platinum, to the point of further jokes.
• Missing Episode: Ian Flynn confirmed that the script for the ARMS graphic novel was fully finished before the project was officially cancelled.
• Stillborn Franchise: ARMS was clearly being set up to be a prospective major franchise for Nintendo like Splatoon before it, with the team behind Mario Kart developing it, containing Story Breadcrumbs and Sequel Hooks, and a planned graphic novel. Then it released to average reviews and over two million copies within its first year — which wasn't a flop by any means but Splatoon 2, released merely a month later, managed to reach said number in only three months and went on to sell over ten million copies. Nintendo thus decided to quietly pull the plug, cancelling the graphic novel and news pertaining to a potential sequel being small. The most that has been done with ARMS since then was a Sidelined Protagonist Crossover in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Earlier concepts had the characters with Robot Master-like names. Ninjara's concept◊, for example, calls him Ninja Man. It appears only Spring Man, Ribbon Girl, and Helix (in his Japanese incarnation) got to the final product with their working names unscathed.
  • While developed as a new, original IP from the start, the creators did briefly consider using characters from the Punch-Out!! series during development because of the obvious genre overlap, but ultimately decided against it due to not wanting to alienate or confuse fans of those games. Prior to that, they also experimented with using Nintendo characters in general as the combatants. For example, Link would dual-wield his Hookshot weapon, while Yoshi would use his tongue.

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