The results are pretty balanced.
Masahiro Sakurai, game director of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, has revealed some interesting data from the game’s online mode, including victory rates and which characters are used the most.
Via a translation by Nintendo Everything, Sakurai published a column in Famitsu talking about how Nintendo gave him permission to talk about the previously mentioned data that was collected over one week – from December 30, 2018 – January 5, 2019.
The first data discussed was 1-on-1 victory rates, where he confirmed that “no fighter is lower than 40% and no fighter exceeds 60%,” in terms of winning percentage.
For the Elite players of smash, who have received a high enough GSP level, “the character with the lowest percentage sits at 43.7%, while the character with the highest win rate is at 56.8%.”
Considering there were 74 characters available during that time frame, and now there are 75 with the addition of Piranha Plant, that signifies a pretty balanced roster.
Sakurai also mentioned that “player-created estimation of each character’s strength…differ pretty greatly from our records.”
For fighters like King K. Rool, who is listed as High Tier on our ranking of Smash characters by votes from people the r/SmashBros community, Sakurai revealed that “his victory rate was 51.9%, and in Elite Smash it was 48.9%,” so he doesn’t really see a need to adjust him.
As far as character usage, the most used was Cloud, with Ganondorf being the top choice for Elite Smash, even though his “win-rate was only around 47.9%, which is on the lower end of the rankings.”
In regards to echo fighters, Peach and Daisy are the “most similar,” although Peach has a win rate of 54.4% and Daisy has one of 50.9%.
As it stands, Sakurai thinks “it’s fair to say that no fighter is too overpowered or underpowered – it’s up to the player’s skill.”
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, since its launch on December 7, 2018, has surpassed 12 million units sold and was the top selling video game in the entire month of December.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN who loves Cloud and still can’t believe he’s in this game. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst.
