Be honest, can all characters succeed at the HIGHEST LEVEL OF PLAY?

[Deleted member]

I never really cared for tier lists or banning characters from tournaments. No one has the answer.

 

[BuffThePuff08]

I think everyone has a fair shot. (Except for Little Mac, he's hopeless in a game dominated by characters with good aerials.)

 

[DeDeDIke]

You literally only need to throw Mac offstage, then hit him with a single fair, and he's dead. Even some of the low tiers beat him pretty badly XD

 

[LightLV]

No. Character choice is just as important as skill.

Some people can make certain disadvantages work, but they're always outliers

 

[Doc Monocle]

As I shall expound in my yet to be completed "Character Utility Formula" Project (still yet to be completed due to motivational sluggishness and a work-it-as-you-work-it approach to its progression), I believe that unless a character is deliberately made to be inferior, or there was simply no effort to making the character competent, they will indubitably be given certain edges in battle that render them, overall, just as viable as the next, PROVIDED THEY ARE IN THE HANDS OF A PLAYER WHO UNDERSTANDS THEIR FULL POTENTIAL AND LIMITATION, and this provision, if you ask me, would be so uncommonly observed that there would be a generated illusion of some characters just being 'bad.'

By the way, I shall insert the link to this project once it is complete, or close to complete.

 

[Linkmain-maybe]

No. Characters like Dk, Mac, Ganon, and Kirby often need exceptional players to get them any representation. Even then, they usually lose to other prominent top tier players because their characters just don’t have the tools to deal with a top player and a top tier.

 

[Hippieslayer]

Absolutely not, and the people who say otherwise are just engaging in toxic positivity.

 

[Linkmain-maybe]

Absolutely not, and the people who say otherwise are just engaging in toxic positivity.

This right here is absolutely correct.

 

[StrangeKitten]

Well, that depends on what your measure of success is. Win a supermajor? Top 8, 16, 32? I could see the low tiers getting top 32, but it's been ages since we've even had a supermajor. Have any of the post-quarantine tournaments even counted as a supermajor? If so, I don't think there have been many, so it has been a looooong time since we've seen low tier mains show off what their characters can do. And that's important, because that's an awful lot of improvement we've been missing out on.

That said, I think any placings above the 17-32 range are gonna be tough to get, and rare when they happen. I think a player needs at least a mid tier character to succeed above that with consistency. And probably a high or top tier, unless they're as cracked as players such as Akakikusu and MkLeo (and even then, it's hard to say whether their characters, Hero and Byleth, respectively, are truly mid tier or if they don't actually belong in high tier).

 

[Ssbunbalanced]

Spoilers: Still waiting until the day I finally get the game from my father.

Now, I know that skill is more important at low, mid, and even high levels of play sometimes. A bad player using Wolf will still lose to a good player using someone considered low tier like Bowser Jr. or Piranha Plant. But what about the absolute highest level? The level where we see top players compete like ESAM, MVD, Zackray, Nairo, Samsora, and more. Top tier characters like Peach and Pichu have the advantages of better options than almost everyone and almost limitless room for them to be optimized further. We have characters like Wolf, Lucina, and Lady Palutena who may not have that same optimization, but are just blessed with super strong options that keep them relevant while also being easy characters. (Wolf is an easy character right?)
Now, our perceived mid/low tier characters right now like Corrin, Robin, Zelda, Little Mac and my boy Pit suffer from things like weaker options or not much optimization left. The people pIaying these type of characters don't have a super top player to look up to like all the aforementioned characters. I know Nairo brought out Ganon at Collision and reverse 3-0'd Light, but Nairo doesn't play Ganon that seriously. Has he ever brought out Ganon in a big tournament again since Prime Saga? He didn't do it at Pound 2019. He hasn't done it at GOML 2019 so far and I doubt he'll do it again today in Top 16. Each of these characters might have hidden potential that no one has seen yet, but even if they are pushed to their limits, can they go toe-to-toe with the best characters when literal gods of Smash are playing? Can a character really limit your skills and results? If you have great talent, are you wasting it by playing a weaker character? Plus, it's gonna be hard to find the skill-ceiling for a character if we have no one yearning for it.
I'm asking this as someone who dreams of becoming a top-level player one day. I've always been mediocre at best when it comes to Smash, but I still dream big.

EDIT: After taking into consideration the questions I've been asked and the advice I've been given in this thread already, I did some more research concerning what it means to be a top player and the results of tournaments. I also thought about my own skill and how I see myself having fun with the game. I've decided to set more realistic goals for myself and focus on just becoming a good player you can't sleep on rather than one of the very best.
EDIT #2: I'll be more specific with what I think succeeding. Succeeding in my opinion means a character getting at least Top 16 at major/supermajor tournaments. They may have a secondary for a few really bad matchups, but can manage fine against most of the higher-tiered characters on their own. They need to able to beat some top highly-skilled players who are using these really good characters. Example: LeoN's Bowser defeating Cosmos' Inkling at Smash n' Splash 5 in Top 16 and forcing Cosmos to counterpick.

let me chime in here. Skill will NOT save a villager vs a competent pythra. Skill will not help a kirby overcome a pythra or sephiroth.

villager is so weak and slow and has weak out of shield options. Good at ledgeguarding. Bad at everything else you can not compete against the best with a villager

some characters have such strong hits, small end lag and startuplag, great out of shield options, better abilities and mainly disjointed attacks like swords that with proper spacing overcome most characters.

look at what tweak did when he switched from bowser jr to cloud. We need to realize this game is not balanced and needs to be re-worked from the groundup.

 

[Icetea_45]

In my opinion, no. If we are talking about absolute top-level play, that is where character choice starts to matter at all in the first place. There is a reason why players such as Riddles switched from playing mid and high tiers (Belmonts and Shotos) to now playing a top tier (Kazuya). Same thing with Tweek in Smash 4. Went from being an extremely good Bowser Jr. to one of the best in the world after switching to Cloud. It's because when you get to those levels, every little interaction and mind game matters so much and some characters just don't have the tools to deal with every situation. Peanut is a once-in-a-generation player, but as long as he plays Little Mac he will never win a major. Aklo is constantly pushing Link in Melee, but he will always switch to Fox when it gets too tough. That's just how metas and competition work at a professional level. That's not to say that every character shouldn't be pushed, but sometimes you have to know when to jump ship to really start winning.

 

[KneeOfJustice99]

I think this kind of depends what you consider the "highest level of play".

If we're talking actual human players, then I do think there's a little more leeway in the question. It would, theoretically, be possible for like, Little Mac or Ganondorf to win a major. Likely? Hell no, and it probably wouldn't happen, but it is possible. Like, once-in-a-lifetime possible to the point where careers would be ruined in a single tournament, but possible. That isn't to say they'd attain consistent success - but "success" of any form is absolutely plausible if we consider it to be an extreme outlier.

That said, if we're taking the approach of either a CPU/AI that's a "perfect" Ultimate player - with frame-perfect accuracy, never making a single mistake or error, always absolutely ideal - which is then matched up against itself (or the theoretical equivalent being sufficiently trained human players, albeit unrealistic), then characters with objectively better toolkits at dealing with both the stage and the opponent are likely to succeed given it removes the human element. Obviously there'd need to be testing to work out the statistics behind this, but then the winner of the most matches would arguably end up being the most objectively powerful character, and would thus "succeed" the most at "the highest level of play".