Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
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Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in competitive play

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Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's competitive scene is still rather young.

2018: Rapid Growth

Similar to Super Smash Bros. 4, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's competitive scene started before the game was released with the Super Smash Bros. Invitational 2018, an invitational tournament hosted by Nintendo at E3 2018 on June 12th, 2018. Similar to the last invitational, professional Smashers were invited to compete against each other, however this time only eight players were invited, four who were top Smash 4 players and four who were top Melee players. The only invitee who participated in the previous tournament was ZeRo, who managed to defend his previous title and defeated MkLeo, winning his first Ultimate tournament.

When Ultimate was released on December 7th, 2018, many tournaments started hosting the game, with a good amount of them having over 100 attendees. By the end of the year, Ultimate's largest tournament, Umebura SP, had hosted 746 players, over 7 times more entrants than Smash 4's largest tournament in the same period of time.

2019: A Growing Meta

2019 started off with a bang, with over 2,000 Smashers participating in GENESIS 6. This tournament saw the first international appearance of Zackray, a 15-year old from Japan who was a top player in Smash 4. Despite being his first time in a tournament outside of Japan, Zackray made an impressive run by placing 5th and defeating top players such as K9sbruce and Light. MkLeo, a young Smash 4 prodigy, was also able to prove that he was still a top player by winning the whole tournament and double eliminating VoiD.

The Panda Global Rankings return for Ultimate, having almost the same mechanics as the previous season with some minor changes. The biggest change was the international multiplier, which counts entrants from tournaments outside of the continental US as 1.25 entrants, allowing more tournaments to have representation on the PGR. The season officially started with GENESIS 6 and and ended with Albion 4.

Despite the term “Echo Fighter” being heavily marketed as a new method of branding clone characters, players quickly noticed that the term was loosely inconsistent. While the term was used on all clones with little to no differences, a few other Echo Fighters had noticeable differences. Ken, Chrom, and Lucina have all been seen as different enough from Ryu, Roy, and Marth to warrant being ranked separately from each other. Conversely, Daisy, Richter, and Dark Samus are commonly merged with their base fighters when ranking them, as they have minimal differences from their parent characters. Dark Pit has been argued to fit in both categories, since while his only differences lie in his side special, neutral special, and Final Smash (the latter of which is not used in competitive play), his differences in those moves are fairly notable.

Final Smash Meters also became a topic of discussion, as despite having toned-down versions of Final Smashes, they were deemed too powerful and unbalanced to be accepted in competitive play early on, even with the randomness out of the picture. For example, Zelda’s Final Smash, the Triforce of Wisdom, has been deemed extremely broken, while Jigglypuff’s Final Smash, Puff Up, has been deemed as useless.

Character viability

During this period of time, many characters deemed unviable or barely viable in past iterations rose in popularity, including Palutena, Pichu, Wario, Roy, and most infamously Wolf, whose strong KO options and combo game allowed him to have a huge playerbase that included players such as Zackray and MkLeo. Some characters, while being less viable than the aforementioned, have been noted as significant improvements over past iterations, such as Ganondorf, Jigglypuff, King Dedede, Zelda, and Mii Swordfighter. Olimar became a controversial character because of the perceived brokenness of his Pikmin moves; this is most evident with players such as Shuton, Myran, and Dabuz gathering great results with said character; this in turn has caused many players to call out Olimar players for being campy. Lucina, who was considered a downgrade from Marth in SSB4, is now considered much better than her counterpart due to the change in physics for Ultimate. Ivysaur, once considered the worst of Pokémon Trainer’s party, has been significantly buffed to widely being considered the best. Other perceived top tier characters included Peach and her echo Daisy, Pikachu, Inkling, Greninja, and Snake.

Conversely, many characters who were top-tier in their previous iteration have been heavily nerfed to the point where they have barely any notable results in the early meta game. This includes Diddy Kong, Sheik, Cloud, and most notably Bayonetta, who had been drastically nerfed as a result of her controversial dominance in Smash 4. Other perceived low-tier characters included Kirby, King K. Rool, Piranha Plant, Isabelle, Bowser Jr., and Little Mac; Little Mac especially has been considered by many as the worst character in the game, as the game's engine severely harmed his Smash 4 advantages.

Updates have changed certain characters for better or worse. Notably, Mii Brawler, Captain Falcon, Mewtwo, Lucario, Corrin, Ryu, and Ken were considered mediocre to terrible at launch, but were given significant buffs in updates that allowed them to become more viable in the eyes of many people.

Effects on other competitive scenes

Similar to Brawl's competitive community when Smash 4 was released, most Smash 4 players transitioned to Ultimate when the game was released, causing the Smash 4 scene to significantly decrease, if not completely disappear.

Unlike Smash 4, Melee players have mostly praised Ultimate's engine, liking how some Melee techniques such as directional airdodges have made a return, as well as an increase in speed compared to the previous game. However, a few players noted that Ultimate's wavedashing is far less useful than it was in Melee, and the speed was still slightly below that of Melee‘s. Although Melee tournaments still exist, many top Melee players such as Leffen and Mango have stated their interests in participating in Ultimate tournaments.

Ultimate was the only Smash game in EVO's lineup at EVO 2019, while Melee was relegated to a side event. How this affects Melee's competitive scene remains to be seen.

See also


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