So much is made out of the dominance of Melee's top tier. Fox, Marth, Sheik, and Falco are, indeed, rather brutal in differing ways.
However, the case can be made that the four High Tier characters in Melee are still usable. Jigglypuff, Peach, Capt. Falcon, and the Ice Climbers are all solid choices and tend to hold their own against the Top Tier.
I'm just going to set a boundary here. I'm willing to guess that there is no one here that thinks that Diddy Kong is unviable in tournament play. Actually, a lot of people believe that he is very viable and someone who uses Diddy Kong would have no problem winning a tourney provided they had the skill to do it.
A tier list would show what characters were the best and therefore which ones would stand a good chance in a tourney. Now, recognize that there are 10 characters above Diddy Kong in the tier list. I could actually go down the tier list until probably the Ice Climbers and people would probably agree that they could do well. That's a lot of characters. Sliq can even place well with Bowser, as a Bowser secondary, it doesn't even seem like it would be much harder than using any other character.
Notice a trend? Only Sheik even approaches the kind of character you can "pick and play" and do well with, and even she's tough to get down. The other seven have tons of technical skill that you need to get down to use well.
Actually, I'm pretty sure the easiest is Marth.
Match-ups are also rather interesting. Sheik destroys lower tiers but has trouble against the top tiers. Falco and Fox are both just good characters, but those that can exploit their recoveries tend to handle them fairly well (even godawful Pichu and Mewtwo weren't utterly slain by them). Marth...I don't really know what his bad match-ups are, but he doesn't have that many.
Metaknight has trouble against Snake, Falco, a couple high tiers, Bowser, and Yoshi of all things. Falco and Fox sound like Snake, correct. Where Snake is an extremely good character, but every character with a meteor isn't afraid of him. Captain Falcon isn't slain by Snake, he has faster air and ground speed than MK, which helps him avoid his camp game better. He has much better aerial finishers against Snake and a meteor (Snake's most exploitable weaknesses.) Captain Falcon does better in both aspects, considering MK's amazing predictable Shuttle Loop doesn't stand up against all of CF's aerial finishers and MK doesn't even have a meteor. Snake definitely has bad match-ups, as DK I have the easiest time beating Snake than any other character in the game. Bair>bair>dair, gg Snake he can't do anything about it and DK screws him over in almost all the other parts of his game.
I know the argument is clichéd. But Meta Knight is outright brutal. He has no disadvantageous match-ups at the present, and every Melee character had at least one. I believe he has five neutral match-ups: Snake, Bowser, Donkey Kong, and Yoshi at 55:45, and Falco at maybe 50:50.
(I may be missing one, I'll freely admit. Sue me.)
Diddy Kong
(instert over-used video of NinjaLink vs. M2K here)
Plus there are Marth, Wario, Fox, Wolf, ROB, and Game and Watch who don't seem to care about going against him at all. Sonic can punish everything and I recall hearing more than one Link main say they didn't have a problem with him.
The rest of his match-ups aren't as dominating as Melee Sheik had over some of the cast...lots of 60:40 and 65:35 matches, but they are still advantages at any rate.
If MK wins against a lot of low tiers, but his advantages arn't significant, and he goes even and loses against to some of the characters around him, I don't see how he is more of a problem than Melee Shiek who screwed over plenty of other characters.
He's winning over 50% of his tournaments, and that doesn't appear to change. You tell me that's not imbalanced
Last time I checked it was 33.5% or something and Melee Marth won 55% of significant tournaments.
Marth's match-ups are almost as ugly, but with more outright neutrals and one disadvantage (Meta Knight).
I don't get what you mean here.
Dedede single-handedly makes five characters impossible to use without a secondary (including Donkey Kong)
I have to agree here, he does.
and chaingrabs most of the cast to hell
The normal chain-grab doesn't make match-ups with it extremely hard. It is dependent on how much space is left on the stage as well when he can get the grab (which I admit is very often considering his large grab range.)
and Falco has a chaingrab on all but a couple of characters that puts them in a hole to begin with (add the spike, and it's lights-out).
Excessive chain-grabbing certainly isn't Brawl exclusive. Even Falco's only will go to like 40% on DK. Then it's fair game from there, once again he would also have to get the grab earlier than the percent the chaingrab stops on. After the spike the characters can survive other than a couple of them 3 from what I remember and some characters can put Falco in a disadvantaged position of they get spiked too early for it to be effective, like Captain Falcon. Captain Falcon's ability to edgehog and edgeguard people trying to edgeguard him is the reason I will never play Fox against a good Captain Falcon. I completely gave up because I got edgehogged every single time even after a successful drill shine OFFSTAGE.
Snake, Mr. Game & Watch, and R.O.B. fill the role of the "good" characters that are up there because they don't really have flaws (or fewer flaws than anyone else).
Sounds like a typically top-tier, plus they have undeniable weaknesses.
Some of the High Tier (and presently Middle Tier) characters are still usable. Lucario, Olimar, Ice Climbers, Pikachu, Marth, Wario, Peach, Diddy Kong, Donkey Kong, Toon Link, ZSS, and Kirby are all decent characters, but each one has a match-up where they literally get eaten alive in that almost necessitates a secondary. Usually, though, it's against one of the six top-tier characters.
The only character I recognize who would need is a secondary is Olimar, Donkey Kong, or ZSS. With DK needing one for Dedede, Olimar possibly needing one for Peach (low mid), and ZSS needing one for Wario? I don't know much about ZSS.
Of the low-tier characters, I feel that only Yoshi stands a chance on a routine basis in tournament play, but he also has some really ugly match-ups where a secondary is helpful.
If we're having a low tier stand a chance then it seems to be working against you considering everyone below like Ganondorf totally sucked.
What's the trend here? Meta Knight is the easiest character to "pick and play". Imagine that, the best character is the easiest to use.
Sounds like Marth who is tied for first with Fox, with Fox being comparable to Snake, who is among one of the hardest to use effectively in Brawl. Snake was the best until Chillin''s tier list came out making a majority of other people think other wise because it was the most credible of it's time.
In all honesty, Melee has more characters where you can main without needing back-up...all of High Tier (excluding the Ice Climbers, who are utterly mauled by Peach) and Top Tier, arguably. That's 7 out of 26.
Needing a secondary does not make the game unbalanced, if all characters needed a secondary it would make them even in that regard, correct?
Brawl has Meta Knight, Falco, King Dedede, Marth, and maybe Lucario, Snake, Olimar, Kirby, and Zero Suit Samus. If we count them all, that's 9 out of 37. I may be missing a couple, but no more than that, and I may be overestimating a couple.
What is this a list of?
7/26 is greater than 9/37. A greater percentage of Melee's cast is usable on their own and can hold their own without a back-up character.
Percentage wouldn't matter, the number of usable characters would be the only thing to make it better. For example if we went into Brawl or Melee and deleted all characters but one, it would be more balanced, but useless to discuss because it would have no value.
Personally I believe Brawl is more balanced. I mained Peach and Mario in Melee, and I used Pichu as my third character a whole lot. I stopped using him against my friends though because I knew from experience and his spot on the tier list that he was terrible. As a result I would only play with him against computers, and I would play Mario and Peach against my friends. The reason being is that I knew that if I used Pichu my friends probably wouldn't try as hard against me because it would be too easy to win and I didn't want to play a completely terrible character against my friends despite him being my third favorite character.
Next I tried playing as Bowser and admittedly I only used him against computers while I was testing him, but I felt completely overwhelmed and useless by the lvl. 9 Fox computer compared to when I used Mario or Peach that I didn't want to play with him anymore. I will play as the worst character in the game provided that the extent I can play with them will never be considered a joke.
In Brawl this is never the case, I have no problem winning against anyone using any character as Captain Falcon. Every one of my friends uses Captain Falcon as a secondary and the matches between our secondaries go even, and when I used Fox I felt I could never win against my friend's Falcon, so I counter-picked Mario. I knew all the tools Captain Falcon had and that he beat even Metaknight in a lot of aspects. From watching my friend, watching videos of Rebaz, Falcon combo videos, reading the boards and such I learned how to do a lot of things and I couldn't understand how people could think he sucked. Priority was the only thing that my mind wasn't changed on. I used to think his recovery was bad, then I watched a video of captain Falcon making it under Battle Field with his recovery. So I watched my friend manipulate it better than I could and I got better with it.
So I played with him, I used jab cancels, and the flubbed knee to uair combo offstage (that is an insane edgeguard by the way), I learned the timing for his knee, I could bait airdodges after a dthrow, and I learned how to psuedo-chaingrab with his fthrow, how to DI MK's tornado and punish it with a Falcon Kick through the top of it and how to grab release MK to an upsmash. I couldn't understand how CF was anything less than mid-tier against top-tier level in Melee while playing against MK and how it was even easier against Snake because his cypher was easy mode for CF's aerial finishers, then how CF actually seemed to be better at ground combo'ing than air combo'ing and that his ground game could be linked to his aerials that could kill well. Playing against people I knew or them playing against me using Captain Falcon, we all go as hard as we can against eachother because we all know that we can't just go easy on any character in Brawl and win.
Now on the reverse end there's MK who a lot of people want banned. He isn't even that good, his Mach Tornado is punishable (even after being caught in it), his Shuttle Loop is punishable and his supposedly best move, his down smash is punishable too. His down smash isn't even as good as Luigi's nair.
Luigi's nair
-comes out in 3 frames
-kills early
-hits all around him
-it's Wolf's shine power at getting out of chains, I'm convinced that it's impossible to chain Luigi in the air.
-easier to place because it can be used anywhere in the air
-Kills off the top (harder to DI)
MK's downsmash
-Front hits on frame 5, back on frame 10
-front hit has bad knock-back
-back hit has good knock-back, but comes out much slower
-leaves him vulnerable from above
-can't be used from the air, while Luigi's can be jumped from the ground.
-kills off the sides (easier to DI)
MK only has one reliable kill move, which is only is reliable in the back. His other moves can only gimp in the right situation. MK's air speed is slow, he has really bad shield stun, like you can just shield anything he does and counter right after, he sucks on Green Greens and FD, his vertical recovery is definitely not among the best in the game, SDI can get you out of some of his moves, he is not strong and only has one reliable kill move.
If Dedede's infinite wasn't here I could get some more credit for this.