A few questions related to smash and its development time

So I'll start off kind of old school with my first question cause we are kind of getting into more programming and design. So back in the 90s, when a series was popular a lot of the times if the game followed a similar backdrop/setting/theme, the devs would often "reuse assets" or pretty much literally copy and paste sprites and certain objects from previous games into the current project to save time and money.

Square Enix was a massive offender of it. Castlevania games in the 90s and in the DS would often do the same with backgrounds as noted by the assistant director and producer of Symphony of the Night Koji Igarashi. HOWEVER, one of the primary reasons was really only due to pixel art being an extreme drag and really tough craft to work around. Koji also noted sometime ago in an interview around early June this year regarding why bloodstained wasn't pixel art or anything similar and he explained that very reason why. Much more time consuming and harder than working with unreal 4.

So now that I put you through all that bullshite, let's go back to Smash 4. The game was completed and released in September of 2014 in the states if I remember correctly. I personally thought it was a load of crap because of the amount of content you missed from whatever version you picked up primarily because of the Wii U's failing sales, but I digress. If Sakurai started developing Ultimate after it was released, then that would give this game 4 years of dev time in just about 3 months which I highly doubt is that cut and dry. I would say the development for the Switch did start to begin somewhere in 2015, which prompted the big guns upstairs to tell Sakurai or probably knowing him, start on his own Smash game.


I know it's just a fighting game, but it's a fighting game with a lot of damn content and if we're lucky maybe a story mode. This game is still huge from what it looks like and not something you give to Toby Fox to whip up in RPG maker. So tell me, how much is asset reuse in a title like this? Is that something you can even do?

One last thing. I forget where I saw it, but a journalist at e3 brought up a good point, wondering how many teams and resources they are pooling/pooled into this game to get it out by late this year. Yoshi was announced last year and it is absolutely NOWHERE to be found. No direct. No news. No comment from Nintendo. Would it be a reach to say they brought a few people from that team to join in and help with smash?