I'll note that one alternative to consider for the purposes of "emeralds doing something" is to make all characters share the same save file.
There is a potential complication of some players running up against a path split before they've learned how character pathing works, but the benefits would be two-fold:
* It preserves character "identity" for the one or two characters we want to be super while making their super bonuses a little more accessible
* It circumvents the need to do the special stages six times in order to get the emeralds as each character, and also makes it so that collecting all emeralds is still rewarding to the player, even if the current character they are playing as cannot go super.
I'd argue we should do this regardless of whether or not we want everybody to be super, since this also has the benefit of making emblems much easier to collect, as you are no longer reliant on multiple save files to find character-specific emblems.
There is a potential complication of some players running up against a path split before they've learned how character pathing works, but the benefits would be two-fold:
* It preserves character "identity" for the one or two characters we want to be super while making their super bonuses a little more accessible
* It circumvents the need to do the special stages six times in order to get the emeralds as each character, and also makes it so that collecting all emeralds is still rewarding to the player, even if the current character they are playing as cannot go super.
I'd argue we should do this regardless of whether or not we want everybody to be super, since this also has the benefit of making emblems much easier to collect, as you are no longer reliant on multiple save files to find character-specific emblems.