The most popular Smash Bros. characters chosen by players to fight as in the latest version of the brawler show that the Zelda fandom is quite the ravenous one.
In Ultimate, the first most popular Smash Bros. character is Cloud, coming as no surprise to anyone who understands the popularity of both Final Fantasy VII and the power of the limit-charging anime boy. In an interview with Japanese magazine Famitsu, series creator Masahiro Sakurai revealed this of the Smash Bros. characters: “all fighters fall within 40% and 54% win rates, and that those with a win rate of 45% or higher make up 90% of the total.” Popular or not, all characters have a chance in Ultimate.
There is a certain balance to Smash Ultimate that Sakurai and his team do not want to tinker around with too much. Even though Cloud is the most popular character in vanilla matches, the most popular Smash Bros. character in Elite matches is Ganondorf, a character not exactly known for being high on the tier lists. Sakurai seems to agree that this is a confusing result, seeing as “in said VIP [Elite in English versions of the game] matches Ganondorf’s win rate is only 47.9%, which puts him low in the battle rankings.”
This result of Ganondorf being the most popular fighter in Elite matches proves that although a character may have some weak matchups, there is less of a gap between tiers in the fast-paced Smash Ultimate.
If Sakurai had it his way, he’d leave the game as is, including the broken King K. Rool (who was somewhat nerfed in the latest patch). “However, if we don’t tweak things just a little bit,” writes Sakurai, “there are probably some people out there who are going to feel stressed out. So for now I’m waiting for opinions of the team in charge of adjustments.”
With five incoming DLC fighters that are bound to shake up the meta, count me in with said “stressed out” people. Smash Ultimate is available now for the Nintendo Switch, as is the first DLC fighter, the potted and surprisingly heavy Piranha Plant from the Super Mario series. Following Piranha Plant’s release will be the character Joker from the Persona series.