who's the strongest (and weakest) characters across all the smash games?

 I've had the spreadsheet for this project set up for a few months but have held off on writing the article because I heard rumors of a new Smash Ultimate tier list. Then last week LumiRank released a new official tier list based on the opinions of 61 top players. With that, I figured it was about time to talk about the best characters across all the Smash games.

How We Get Here

I've seen some reddit posts trying to figure out the same thing, and while a lot of them are good starting points, they don't necessarily get you all the way. What you can't do is just take the average of all of the characters' tier placements and call it a day. Being ranked first in a cast of 89 characters is arguably more impressive than being ranked first in cast of only 12. It also doesn't take into effect how close characters are to one another. Let's say someone was ranked second on the tier list, simply saying they're number two doesn't tell us much. Were they a strong/dominant number two like Brawl Ice Climbers or were they more of a volatile/disputed number two like Melee Marth? 

What this project does is take every character's score from their tier lists and compares them. For the all of the games, outside of Ultimate, the tier lists were voted on the same way, you rank the characters from one, being the best, to 12/26/38/54 being the worst. Smash Ultimate, for whatever the reason, flipped this on it's head. For the newest tier list, the best character has a score of 10.5 and the worst character has a score close to one. So, the first thing we have to do is scale all these numbers so they're compatible. I decided to make everything fit the new 10.5 system, I just found this easier to work with. Every character's score is the exact same as the one on their respective game's tier list with the exception of the Brawl cast. I had to make one little tweak to their values because Brawl has such a wonky roster.  

Everyone knows that Brawl Meta Knight was busted, but what some of the newer smash fans might not remember is that the Ice Climbers were also really fucking good. So good in fact, that some top players have recently been putting ICs #1 over Meta Knight (quick aside, we will not be using the "Post-Brawl Tier List" where this opinion is reflected. Although some people might considered this an updated Brawl tier list, this was never the intention, and is considered an "unofficial" update. More on that reasoning can be read here). Because Meta Knight was the unanimous best to better represent the other characters, all of their scores have been reduced by one. So ICs went from 2.344 to 1.344, Ganondorf went from 36. 844 to 35.855, and so on. This is mostly to remove the outlier that is Meta Knight from skewing the rest of the roster's scores.

The last thing of note on the methodology is that once I had everyone's adjusted scores I used the same tiering method as the most recent Melee and Ultimate tier lists. Using K-Means Clustering, this accurately shows how close all of the groups were for tiers as compared to having arbitrary cut offs like "Everyone with a score over 95 is S+." This gave us 6 tiers and 15 sub-tiers to work with.

The Actual Tier List

I know it might be hard to see who's who in this picture. The difference between Wii U Dedede and Ultimate Dedede is negligible on tiermaker.com. So if anyone would prefer to see it in text form, all of the information can be found here. So what does this list actually tell us? Not much that we already don't know. Brawl is wildly unbalanced with both the best character of the entire series, Meta Knight, and the worst character in the entire series, Ganondorf, coming from the same entry. What else can we see? 20XX isn't as dominating as we thought. Melee's best character, Fox, is the weakest of all the games' best characters. Two games, Brawl and Ultimate, have their top two characters ranked about Melee Fox. On the flipside, if we look at the bottom ten characters, Ganondorf, Jigglypuff, and Zelda all appear multiple times.

Fox vs Pikachu - Who's the Best Across All the Games

I think most people realize that the best single character across all the Smash games is one of these two. Pikachu's the best in 64, Fox is the best in Melee, and they've both been considered top tiers in subsequent games. But which of these two reigns supreme? It's close, but Fox takes the slight lead with this. Fox has an average score of 8.68 and Pikachu has an average score of 8.34. They're both comfortably above Captain Falcon, who's next in line of characters who have appeared in every Smash title, and only has an average score of 6.36.

I Thought You Said ALL Smash Games? Where's Project+?

Don't worry, I didn't forget the most bad ass and punk rock group in out community. You can see the tier list with P+ characters added in right below. The only change in the top 10 is that P+ Meta Knight lands in between Ultimate Sonic and Melee Fox. The inclusion of P+ also doesn't change the Fox vs Pikachu debate, in fact, it widens the gap between the two. Fox's average score barely changes but Pikachu's average score drops to 7.62.

Conclusions

Is this the perfect tier list? No, of course not. All of the Smash games are just too different to compare at a 1:1 level. Was this a silly little project that gives us an idea or an excuse to talk about this topic more? Yea, definitely. The Smash community loves lists, and I've had this conversation in person at Smash tournaments a non-zero number of times, so I figured someone might find this interesting or useful. With all that said, Brawl Meta Knight is busted, and go support your locals.