>>10829642Geno and Mallow and all of the OC characters from SMRPG were owned by Square, who had a VERY VERY public falling out with Nintendo when the game came out over Nintendo continuing to use cartridges for the N64. It's why Nintendo had to do a hard fucking reboot and create TWO replacement RPG series (Paper Mario and Mario+Luigi) that they own outright.
Any usage of the SMRPG characters has to be cleared through Square and deals made to split the profits. While the Wii VC and Mini-SNES had the game playable, Nintendo considers the franchise, due to these rights issues, too much of a hassle to deal with. Hence the lack of modern merch, why Mallow and Geno and the other OCs are off-limits for all later Mario games, and why they opted to just recreate the game from scratch than add it to the Switch Online front, since due to the money they have to pay Square, it would be more cost effective to do a remake in terms of money made to pay Square off.
