Considering Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has been out for eight years at this point and the last post-launch character came out more than four years ago, you’d think that the tier list placements would be pretty much set in stone at this point.
While that is certainly true for some contenders (looking at you, Steve) there are also a lot of others who see their positions shifting and in this new collaborative tier list from two of the top five ranked Super Smash Bros. Ultimate players in the world and in fact Japan’s top two, Acola and Miya, we’re definitely seeing some changes from previous lists.
Probably the biggest shift is seen by Pyra/Mythra, once hailed as one of the top three fighters in the game due to their relative ease of use and overall stability, they’ve fallen out of favor ever so slightly with each released tier list and now, in Acola and Miya’s list, find themselves dropping all the way out of the top 15, landing at 17th place.
Meanwhile, another character who was generally considered as a solid mid tier early on has been rising through the ranks instead and we now see Luigi reaching as high as 9th place, firmly joining the top 10 according to Japan’s powerhouses.
Another character which might surprise some to see so high is Yoshi in 6th place, though this is undoubtedly in no small part due to one of Japan’s strongest players, Yoshidora, being an extremely accomplished Yoshi main and obviously often playing against the tier list makers.
Something that will seem like a shock to anyone who’s more of a Super Smash Bros. Melee fan is the fact that one of Melee’s classic top tier monsters, Marth, seems himself at the absolute bottom in 82nd place, below even Ganondorf who often finds himself sitting alone at the bottom.
The tier list discussion was conducted on Japanese Super Smash Bros. player Shogun’s YouTube channel and can be found here, though unsurprisingly the discussion took place in Japanese.
You can see a snapshot of the final tier list below with all of the placings and tier divisions intact.
Click images for larger versions
One thing worth noting about the list is that it was made in a somewhat different fashion than tier lists usually are, which was by pitting characters directly against each other and then deciding which of the two was better, to see which one went further up and which one went further down.
That said, the final result looks about right for how the tournament meta for the game feels.
At the end of the day, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is still an impressively well-balanced game, especially considering the gargantuan size of its roster and while there are definitely discrepancies between power levels, most characters can do just fine and will show up even at the later stages of tournament brackets from time to time.