How Many Characters Are Viable in Melee?

[Music] the word viable comes up often in conversations about melee from veterans newer players spectators and even people who don't care much for the game at all something I see come up a lot with the last group in particular is the number of viable characters melee has six five four and even as low as three it seems that everyone has their own number of characters they'd consider tournament viable with some being less valid than others and as more and more people weigh in on the matter the number of arguments over the subject increase and the Reddit and Twitter replies get more and more angry the prospect of achieving a truly satisfactory list of viable characters seems further and further away so fuck it allow me to stoke the flames but in a video form [Music] first let's define viable Google defines viable as capable of working successfully feasible and what would working successfully be in a tournament setting ignoring improvement fun or other reasons for the sake of argument let's just say to work successfully in a tournament is to win well every character has won a tournament at some point counting locals of course but to say every character in melee is viable would not only be an unsatisfying answer but also disingenuous obviously locals on what people are talking about when discussing viable characters winning tournaments so let's narrow down the tournaments that we'll be looking at to only the top tournaments the tippy-top majors and super majors for the sake of this video will define Majors as tournaments with a few top 10 players and a larger amount of top 100 like smash summit shine and pound super majors will be defined as having many top 10 players many top 100 players and then some like Genesis Super Smash Khan and big house here's a list of all the characters that have worked successfully or won a relatively recent major or super major without the use of secondaries at the very least this amount of characters 7 should serve as an almost objective minimum to the amount of viable characters right here's where we reach the positive questions first roadblock and it's because of this yellow rat the first major of Pikachu ever placed first out was smash summit 8 in 2019 on his way to being crowned champion axe then ranked 10th in the world took out wizzrobe Zane mango and 11 your Smash summit eight champion however some would argue that Pikachu is still unviable why well because ax dodged his problem matchups of course those problem matchups specifically being hungry boxes Jigglypuff who acts has only been once in his entire career and Plouffe whose main Sheik has a notoriously favorable matchup against Pikachu their line of thinking goes like this if Pikachu didn't go through one or both of these players then acts just got lucky and as when as either a fluke doesn't matter or is only possible because of his fortuitous bracket and while I agree that acts did have a fantastic bracket to succeed in the event and I fully understand why some might have this line of thought let me explain why it's horribly horribly flawed the same year acts one smash summit-five wizzrobe a solo Captain Falcon main one the super major smash and splash 5 over the likes of leffen hamza and hungrybox twice this was the first super major a captain falcon main had won in over a decade and luckily for wizzrobe he didn't have to face mango who's falco has only lost to a captain falcon once ever and yet no one argues that captain falcon is enviable for this reason here's another example in january solo Marth mein Zayn won Genesis but there's one catch he didn't face acts who can probably count the number of times he's lost to Marth in the last 10 years on one hand and you guessed it Zayn has never beaten axe and when mango one get on my level that you're using only Falco he didn't face hunger boxes Jigglypuff who mango has since given up trying to beat with Falco in favor of Fox who historically does much better in the matchup do you see where I'm going with this regardless of which characters or players were dodged when a character wins a major super major the champion has to go through several of the world's best players to win anyway and a victory is a victory another odd claim I've heard toward people like axe is that because his characters success is largely only credited to one person their character isn't actually viable and to this I say what what makes a character good enough to win isn't the player playing them what allows axe to win extremely important tournaments are the tools Pikachu grants him tools that other characters like Bowser for instance just don't have insanely skilled players like axe just use what tools Pikachu has with incredible proficiency just like everyone else in the top ten does with their respective character anyone can pick up Pikachu like axe and given enough time dedication and hard work utilize those same tools that Pikachu gave axe to win with to win on their own Pikachu as a character always has the tools that axe use to win in short these seven characters are viable [Music] [Applause] now that we've established that let's take that definition of viable and throw it in the trash and make the trashcan explode now let's read Google the definition and this time closely inspect this first word it uses capable capable of working successfully capable implies potential not necessarily that it already has worked successfully having already won a tournament isn't what makes a character viable though that obviously proves they are in competitive video games people measure viability by their potential to win significant events this is why tier lists to work in a number of different tiers rather than just viable and unviable because though Pikachu can win prestigious events he doesn't have nearly as much potential as say Fox Jigglypuff and Marth this is also why Fox Jigglypuff and Marth are commonly placed right next to each other in tier lists currently even though they don't win the same amount of tournaments they're perceived as having close to the same potential here's an example though only a handful of characters out of its massive roster have actually won majors and super majors smash ultimate players will put characters that haven't won in the same tier as characters who have why because of their potential you can see this same thing happen in smash 64 brawl and smash 4 tier lists as such we'll be expanding our definition of viable to has already won a major super major or has shown demonstrable potential to given an exceptionally skilled character specialist so here's where you can choose to be optimistic or a bit more pragmatic as we go through the remaining characters and decide if they're viable or not luckily for melee we have a lot of past results to work with and we can easily choose a quantifiable method of determining viability beyond these seven characters so along with top player head-to-head let's start with an extremely difficult feat for any character at a major super major top eight championship Sunday we can use these two criteria to sort of simulate if a character can get to top eight and is beaten top players before there's a realistic chance they could win a major or super major when being played at top level using this metric the list of possibly viable characters greatly expands but their success varies Cheikh for example has never won a major or super major solo though plup a chic Maine has won several majors and super majors using Fox against hungrybox and chic for literally everyone else Hamzah a Yoshi mane has taken multiple sets from top players like hungrybox mango axe mew2king and plop and it's kind of surprising when he doesn't reach top eight and while Ganon has enjoyed a small amount of top eights at bigger tournaments he doesn't have much success beyond that [Applause] here I've roughly arranged the characters outside of these first seven Bible characters by their results operating under the principle that these seven are fully viable because of their victories where do we draw the line between viable and not viable for the rest someone with little faith would probably draw the line at about eight or nine viable characters while an optimist would say that more than half of the characters are viable and these characters without many results just need to be developed further I would make the cutoff here eleven viable characters Samus is really the last character here with fantastic top player wins and at least some top eight placements dr. Mario is definitely on the fringe of viability but it's a tough call considering the best dr. Mario player who is top ten in the world with the character at the time began Manning chic in 2014 these last two while clearly okay characters simply lack the placements and head-to-head results to be considered a viable major or super major champion at least currently no being viable doesn't mean these characters are equally as good and to know it doesn't mean they all have an equal chance of winning however the characters here all have at least some fantastic wins over the best of the best and a history of excellent placements given an amazing player these characters could realistically win a major or a super major these characters are capable of working successfully 11 characters just a little under half the cast seems good to me right now what do you think you you

Channel: AsumSaus

Views: 1,942,804

Keywords: smash bros, ssbm, super smash bros melee, smash melee, melee, smash bros melee, asumsaus, smash ultimate, viable, how many viable, viable melee, fox, falco, pikachu, captain falcon, jigglypuff, peach, samus, sheik, axe, yoshi, marth, viable characters, hungrybox, characters melee, viable smash bros

Id: YqZ0dsFFGfA

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 01 2020