Fans demand Daisy after seeing Mario Striker: Battle League's 10-character roster

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The Mario Strikers series is losing its other princess

Mario Strikers: Battle League roster
(Image credit: Nintendo)

After a new gameplay trailer for Mario Strikers: Battle League confirmed the game's 10-character roster, fans are disappointed to see that Daisy didn't make the cut.

The new overview trailer confirms that the roster will feature Mario, Luigi, Bowser, Peach, Rosalina, Toad, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, Wario, and Waluigi. It seemed like that would be the final roster when Nintendo UK tweeted art for all those characters earlier this week, and the newly revealed character select screen effectively confirms it.

10 playable characters is not out of line with the roster size of previous Mario Strikers games, but those games had you choosing a captain who would lead a team of identical Toads or Koopas onto the field. Now you've got to populate most of your team with those 10 characters, and with eight of them on the field at a time (Boom Booms serve as generic goalies on both sides) there's not a lot of room for variety.

It's possible that additional characters could appear in the game as unlockables or DLC, but fans have been disappointed to see old favorites missing. "Everything about this looks so good...except for the roster," one commenter says on Reddit. "Not only is Daisy and Bowser Jr missing, but so are mob characters like Dry Bones, Hammer Bro, and Shy Guy which means teams are going to feel more repetitive over time."

"No Daisy and only 10 characters so you can add 'more' in DLC next year? Gonna pass," another says on Twitter.

Nintendo's recent sports games, like Mario Golf: Super Rush and Mario Tennis Aces, have been broadly well-received, but they've also been criticized for their lack of content at launch. That's an issue Nintendo has tended to correct with a series of free DLC updates after release, but some fans are hoping for more out of Battle League on day one.

You can watch that trailer on Nintendo's North American YouTube channel here. Or you can see it over on the Nintendo UK channel if you want to hear the exact same voiceover actor say "football" instead of "soccer."

Mario Strikers: Battle League is due to hit Nintendo Switch on June 10.

If you're looking for the best Switch exclusives, you know where to click.

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.