Using Previous Smash Games to Predict the Smash Bros. Ultimate Tier List

Super Smash Bros Ultimate has been out for just about a month now, and we’ve had quite a few tournaments already, so everyone’s busy making their own tier lists. Whenever a new top player or community-polled tier list comes out we like to talk about their similarities and differences. Like why did ZeRo and Leffen rank Diddy Kong so differently on their tier lists? During these discussions someone asked whether or not there were certain attributes that made one character more inclined to be top tier or low tier. He was wondering if faster characters have a natural leg up or if heavy weights were at an objective disadvantage. This got me thinking, was there any precedent that certain character attributes were better than others?

So I went to Kurogane Hammer and looked at all the different in game stats they had for Ultimate. I then found all those stats for every character from every previous Smash game and compared them to see if there were any trends, not just within one installment, but across the series. Turns out, there are some stats that are more valuable than others.

*Disclaimer - Let me start off by saying that I did this project for fun. This is not to be considered an “official tier list.” This was just a new way of looking at it. On paper, these are where some of the characters should fit in, but there’s no such thing as a definitive tier list. For example, Lil Mac is in the 2nd tier on this list. He has good movement and a solid weight, so on paper he meets the necessary criteria. However, these stats don’t take into account his awful recovery and how easy he is to gimp. Again, don’t take this super seriously, it was just a fun project.*

And with that out of the way, let’s get into Smash 64

Smash 64 has the least amount of characters of any Smash game, so it was tough to draw any good comparisons with such sparse data. As you can see, the Green Points on these graphs are all the Top Tier characters and what they have in common. In Smash 64 light characters with fast air acceleration and air speed typically perform well. The run/walk speeds in this game are interesting because they actually have two things we can learn about them. Fast walk/run speeds are good, and slow speeds are bad. For the weight, there was no adverse relationship on one end or the other, but for the speeds, it looks last slow=bad.

Melee more than doubled the previous roster, so there’s a lot of good information to look at. There’s a clear grouping of “top tier” characters in all 6 categories. Fast characters with middle of the road weight are who you want to play as in melee. There’s an interesting correlation between a character’s air speed and their placement on the tier list. As a character’s air speed gets slower and slower, they go down the tier list. This is the first time where a definitive line can be seen between regarding any of the stats.

Brawl’s stats were by far the wackiest. A lot of these character attributes were all of the place and there weren’t many easily attainable conclusions looking at this data. Having said that, there was an obvious connection character weight and tier list placing. Most of the top 10 fall somewhere in the lower/middle weight range. There’s also a negative pattern with the walk/run speed again. But I think the relationship between Air Speed and tier placing is most interesting. Most of the low tier Brawl characters have pretty fast air speeds, which is the opposite of all other Smash games.

Smash 4 gave us the most characters of any game, so there’s a bunch of points to look at here. Like all the other games, fast walk/run/air acceleration/fall speed/air speed are all good. And like in Brawl, most of the top tier characters are on the heavier side. This is also the strongest correlation between run speeds and low tier list placements. There is an undeniable drop in tier list standings as the character’s run speed goes lower and lower.

With all of that data on the table let’s draw out conclusions. Here are our stats for a “good” characters.

Low to mid weight
Mid to high air acceleration
Mid to high run speed
Mid to high falling speed
Mid to high walk speed

And here is what makes a “bad” character

Low walk speed
Low run speed
Low air speed

So now that we’ve extrapolated all this information, what do we do with it? In theory, those characters that have good stats in all 5 of the first category, and no stats in the second category should be the best. And those characters that have no stats in the first grouping, and only stats in the second grouping should be the worst. What we decided to do is give every character 1 point if they have a stat in the first category, the “good stats,” and a -1 point for every stat they have in the “bad stats” category. This leaves us with a range from -3 to 5. All of the characters will fall somewhere in that range. We’ve sorted all of them out for you in a nice little tier list

So after looking at this list you can see some characters are off. Some think Snake should be higher, some think Snake suuuuucks. Piranha Plant is ranked, and he's not even out yet. Most think Inklings are top tier, and she's in the 3rd tier here.

However, our top 4 characters have already been shown to be strong contenders. Fox won Launch, a tournament with 166 entrants. Pichu won Super Splat Bros, a tournament with 153 entrants. Sheik came in 5th at Push the Limit, a tournament with 131 entrants. And Zero Suit Samus came in 2nd at the largest Ultimate tournament yet, Umebura SP. So maybe we're not completely off, who knows? Maybe we'll look back in a decade  and this whole list is wrong. Or maybe we look back in 20 years and the whole entire list is perfectly correct.

The game's only been out for a month, don't take any tier list too seriously.
Except ours.
This is the undeniable truth.
We have graphs.