Most nerfed:
- Yes he's still usable but the nerfs are REAL here. He was once far and away the most dominant character of his game, having an advantage over every other character and ridiculous range and overly safe moves. A lot of his moves could be stringed together with no effort at all. Sure, Meta Knight isn't as BAD as other characters who were also nerfed, but you cannot deny he is one of the most nerfed characters, due to all of his most dominating features being removed. Many moves have some lag now, his best moves lost much of their ludicrous range, and his ability to shark and glide about has been stripped from him entirely.
- One of the best characters from Brawl, all of his best moves were hit pretty bad. Lasers are bad, dair is bad, you name it, he sucks at it now. He can't really combo at all because of the endlag and startup lag of various moves removing the potential to string anything together like he used to be able to. Like Meta Knight, he's still usable, but good luck accomplishing much with a character who lost all of his best traits.
- Just because he wasn't top tier, doesn't mean he was safe. For whatever reason, Game & Watch suffered a whole lot of problems moving from Brawl into Smash 4. He used to be an amazing character capable of hanging with the big shots but in this game, he's a shell of what he used to be capable of.
I would give honorable mentions to Marth and Olimar, but they are at least very usable. Olimar is a bit more offensive and the larger increase in size differences make him really hard to hit with certain characters' attacks. Marth's range was nerfed but he's still basically got most of his tools intact, so he didn't take a nerf gun as hard as the three I mentioned above.
Most buffed:
- Seriously. Jiggs was one of the worst characters without question but Smash 4 gave her back a lot of her best stuff. While not Melee levels of godly (in Melee it's arguable she's as good as 3rd best character, she just loses really hard to Fox pushing her down a bit), Jiggly is back to being a very threatening little balloon.
- THEY BROUGHT BACK THE KNEE!! Also in general basically anything good about the Cap from Melee was reinstated. He sucked hard in Brawl but he feels so much better now, and he really is a whole lot more effective. He can combo pretty well and he has ridiculous KO potential for someone so fast.
- Low tier as all hell in both Melee and Brawl, finally given what he needs to be a threat. He might not be the best character of the characters who got buffed, but he can be a pretty scary opponent and the rage mechanic makes his KO potential so scary on top of his survivability. While he still has a bit of the same troubles he's always had, he's a lot more capable of shaking it off.
Honorable mentions to
