>>49856980>revealed for Sm4sh in early April 2014, and was already popular at that point>Sakurai himself confirmed that he was shown the Kalos starters pre-release and chose to add Greninja to Sm4sh because he liked it more than the other two>Ash's Frogadier didn't evolve into Greninja until December 2015But sure, that brief flashback to a Greninja in XY017 (JP airdate: February 20th 2014) totally made its popularity explode.
