Akuma in T7 was without a doubt the best character in the game pre console release, then he got nerfed and everyone thought he was low mid. Until, everybody realised that dispite any nerfs he'll ever get, he'll probably be the best character in the game for the rest of time.
We had the entire roster wrong in s1. We thought Jack, Drag, and Xiaoyu were top when those characters were mid tier at best knowing character strengths now.
It's crazy back in the old marvel days. I remember Wesker being a menace and then it was like something clicked for the entire community as a whole and you just never saw him ever again
as the game evolved it was just easier to see where he struggles. his main lvl 1 super is extremely hard/impossible to DHC out of or into without losing a bunch of damage from the super your cancelling from or into, and like was mentioned he struggled extremely hard with combo damage. you need glasses off and a dedicated assist to break the ~800k barrier with him, even off of an optimal touch. there were just point characters who could offer more without restricting the team so much at a super high level, and with how fast tech traveled during those days people were hella quick to catch-on. clearly, a handful of players still made him work. but when you compare high-level wesker teams to other high-level teams, they almost always fall short.
Something I think you missed with Goku Black: The game kinda changed out from under him. One of the things that made Goku Black special in the early days of DBFZ was the fact that he had a beam assist, and those were actually pretty rare... but with the advent of B (and later C) assists, basically everybody and their grandma has a beam assist now... making black even *less* desirable.
not realy even before the change Goku Black was not played anymore because the other beam assist SSJ Goku was just a way better Character with better buttons, zoning and more damage
@@ngdome7583 People moving over to SSJ Goku hurt a little, but he really didn't slide all the way down to bottom tier until beam assists stopped being special.
B and C assists both came out at the same time. It's really funny that people forget that though, it shows how awful they were on release. Needed two CDR buffs to even become an afterthought, and even now they aren't really used save in certain specific comps.
the only argument I could support would be the removal of his multi lvl 1 supers. other than that, if we go by season 1 standards SSJ had better damage and easier ways to cause hard knockdowns and plenty of assist were more valuable, such as Yamcha's and SSJVegeta.
It's funny cause right at the launch of strive I was playing Axl and this friend was playing Nago. As long as I could keep him away, it was free. But then there were rouds where he touched me once or twice and I was dead. I thought, "dude, this Nago must be really strong for some matchups right?" Turns out it was most matchups
Launch strive was genuinely wild where Sol was a legit boss character, Nago played a whole different game, Ram's disjoint J.H beating reversal DPs and May being a gorilla. Honourable mentions to Faust's J.2k being unusable trash
Jigglypuff, in smash melee, was considered low tier when the game first came out. Now she's so top tier that they talk about adding rules just to limit what she can do.
Vergil was kinda the flipside to Wesker turning out to not be good. When UMVC3 came out the general takeaway was "Vergil is fine, but anything he can do Wesker can do better". Lol.
Wesker is a perfect example of a solved character. It's not that he wasn't good, or low tier, but rather since everyone has seen what he has all the time, he had nothing that could really surprise anyone anymore. So he fell to the side when other characters with less honest and easier tech, or just broken tech were figured out.
The Nagoriyuki thing was a little bizarre for me because it low-key seemed like the vast majority of downplayers hadn't played a Guilty Gear game before. Maybe I'm wrong, but pretty much everything people were complaining about were either clear limiters to balance out his stupid normals, or that mechanic that's had very similar versions in past Guilty Gear games (e.g. Robo-Ky has been both very good and very mediocre in XX's lifespan).
Strive got the attention of a lot of new player who had no idea what guilty gear was like. Thats also the meme of strive does top much damage started when the entire series has always been like that lol...
A couple others that are funny in hindsight: - Cammy in MvC2 was considered high if not top tier in the VERY early days when Justin Wong was destroying everyone with her. - Sentinel also in MvC2 was considered an assist only character, especially before fly-unfly was discovered. - Nash in S1 SFV. He was still solid back then but people seem to be more lukewarm on him looking back. This lead to him getting nerfed (with his worst nerf being the fix to the 8frames of lag) and he hasn't really recovered since. To a lesser extent, I think S1 Ryu was the same way (could be wrong about that). - a lot of characters in vanilla MvC3 still had a lot of the same stuff, the really good stuff just hadn't been discovered until Ultimate. Morrigan being the biggest winner of flying under the radar. EDIT: - also noteworthy in a lot of those early USF4 tier lists: Rolento is mid to low tier. Lol, lmao even.
The thing about s1 Ryu is that fixing jumping LK was enough. It's ok for him to hit like a truck, he just doesn't need a disjointed jump in button, which is why in the final patch Ryu hits like a truck and it's fine.
@@voraminfantes5264 Yeah he wasn't SUPER strong in S1 imo. Like you said, only one change and he'd be fine. But this is also with hindsight. I still remember at the time agreeing he was arguably top 3/5 but now I'd say he was probably mid-high in S1 knowing what we know now.
Chun-Li's design aspect is so ahead of her time that a good Chun player will never be bad in any version of SF, she's the female Mike Tyson of fighting games.
I think a lot of the times this is generally due to a character's popularity. If a lot of people are playing a character, more stuff will be found and refined for them and may seem stronger at the beginning of a game's life, but if not a lot of people are playing the character then they're not going to have that discovery. The first two characters on this list I think are a perfect example of this.
People tend to rate characters that are easy to play who perform decently well as top tier. Most professional players don't look at strengths or weaknesses objectively because they only main 1 or 2 characters.
Huge agree. In Smash Ultimate, there are still a bunch of characters that are just giant question marks, because nobody has really picked them up to do anything with them. Some of them are for vague "this character probably has viability/outcompetition issues compared to other top tiers", like Lucario, but others are just "they're not obviously broken, and nobody likes them", like Corrin. And then there's the absurdly punishing skill floor, for mediocre skill ceiling characters like Duck Hunt, that maybe one person a year emerges from their time chamber to use, smashes a locals, then disappears into the night.
NRS examples: There was a short period post release where General Zod was considered fairly weak in Injustice 1, when in fact he was busted. And then history repeated itself a couple years later in almost the exact same fashion with Tremor in MKX, who went under the radar for quite a while after he came out before folks realized his true power. Also shoutouts to many people thinking Vergil was more trouble than he was worth in UMvC3 upon release.
Vergil is kind of unique too. If Shady K hadnt discovered the Round Trip glitch SO early on, we could have possibly seen Wesker anchor be popular for a lot longer ver
Elena is a weird case because she really wasn't that strong on paper. Her damage output was really low, and she had lower vitality, but she had long legs(buttons) and a stupid fast EX overhead. With her drawn out link combos and her ability to heal repeatedly, she could get a life lead and run out the clock. That timer is one of her greatest strengths.
Well I hate to be that guy. I played the 3series alot coming as a kid and Elena was bad on there specifically because Parry worked against her and other characters had more options than her. As soon as I saw she was coming to USF4 I said she she would be busted lmao, very easily one of the best characters if she had healing along with her safe specials she had in 3S. Like honestly if we are being honest the overall damage output that the cast gives off in USF4 is very pitter pat-ish anyhow so i dont see why Elena having *low* damage was a big deal. Mechanics is everything in my eyes and it makes or breaks character rosters in everything we play imho.
@@Melanatedhatervibez While high damage is a massive strength (Nagoriyuki, Vanilla Sagat), I fully agree that mechanics are more important. After all, a character who does 10,000,000 damage per opening but gets 0 openings does 0 damage. A character who does 1 damage per opening but gets 10,000,000 openings deals 10,000,000 damage.
patrick hoban (one of yugioh's goats) would literally play up decks at smaller tournaments to make them seem broken and then play what he actually thought was the strongest deck at higher stakes tournaments to bait people and punish them for blindly copycatting him, so I've become skeptical of even listening to them
I don't think pros are wrong card games are just more fluid, at least with MTG. Generally, good decks are created. Other decks are made to counter those decks. These decks are then weak to other decks because they were made to beat specific things. Original decks return because those counter decks are being beaten by decks that are weak to the original decks and so on.
@@Herodotus888 oop, reviving a dead comment thread, my bad! Just had some stuff to add here to help elaborate on this point. Edit: oh god didn’t realize how long this was until I dropped the comment LMAOO For those who didn’t follow the pokemon TCG in 2016, it was probably the biggest example of how a meta can develop on a whim in a card game. Pokemon’s 2016 worlds was probably the most memorable time for the competitive side as a whole imo, from wolfe glick winning worlds in VGC, pokken’s world tournament debut, and most importantly to me, the most jank top 8 in the history of the pokemon TCG. For context, I’ll write about some of the best decks in the format at the time, as far as I remember. -Night march: a deck that focused on using small pokemon to hit big numbers (with ~200+ being pretty normal from joltik and pumpkaboo, and 110+ being easy to hit with vespiquen) -Trevenant Item Lock: a deck about not letting the opponent play items at all (which typically took up around 30-50% of a deck at the time). -Mega Rayquaza: just like how mega rayquaza broke the VGC, it broke the TCG. A 220 HP colorless attacker that hit for 180-240 was unheard of at the time. In fact, those stats are STILL pretty decent. On top of that, it could evolve on turn 1 due to a bonus ability on it, and could run any other type of pokemon due to it being colorless, meaning it was EXTREMELY flexible with its tech options. -Volcanion EX: a deck that focused on doing consistently high damage every turn, and tried to outpace the enemy by just killing their attackers every turn by abusing all of its key traits: being a fire type meant it had access to a bunch of support for the typing, being a basic meant it could run fighting fury belt, and the fact that its damage boost ability stacked with itself. Now, these all seem like good decks, wanna know what won? A mega audino deck. Something that hadn’t been seen EVER ended up taking the biggest tournament of the year. In addition to this, the second place deck, Greninja BREAK was a rogue-tier deck at the time, and was falling out of favor due to being too slow. Now, you may be wondering: how did they end up taking the entire tournament with such weird decks? The answer is simple, they analyzed the meta, looked at their potential options to counter it, and put those counters into already anti-meta decks. -The Audino deck had ran several tech options to hard counter the meta. For instance, they ran a healing supporter card in order to force certain key pokemon to attack a third time in order to secure a KO (trevenant, vespiquen, etc). They also ran an Absol that could move 30 damage from one enemy to another, essentially giving you a free prize card against night march decks. The best part about the deck though? The damage lined up perfectly with the meta; 110 damage 2-hit all of the best EX pokemon at the time except for shaymin-EX, which it OHKO’d, and the 50 benched pokemon damage threatened to kill your main support pokemon in 2-4 turns. Meanwhile, against night march, you were typically bulky enough to tank 1 attack in the first 4-6 turns or so, and were able to take down 2 of their pokemon per attack in many situations. The deck was pretty good in hindsight, but only due to the fact that it was able to completely counter the meta at the time. Regardless, kudos to Shintaro Ito for the meta call of a lifetime. -Greninja BREAK (calling it gbreak from here on out, am lazy) was a known deck at the time, but wasn’t taken seriously when people discussed what decks were at the top when going into worlds. Yes, the deck was pretty powerful when it was able to set up, but considering you had to evolve your pokemon 2-3 times just to begin taking KOs wasn’t… great. The deck, however, had possibly the most powerful and disgusting endgame in the history of the game at that point. Basically, here’s how it worked: You used gbreak’s ability to discard a water energy and deal 60 damage to ANYTHING while in the active slot, then switched another one in to do it again, then maybe one more time for 30 damage from another greninja from an older set. ALL BEFORE ATTACKING. While this seemed like complete overkill against night march, the 2 top 8 gbreak players decided to take it even further: by including a temporary tool card to deal 60 damage to the enemy upon being attacked. Basically, this ensured that the game was over 1 turn after setting up. To really paint a picture as to how bad the matchup night march matchup was, basically if the gbreak player didn’t lose on turn 1, they won. In addition to the night march matchup, it also completely ran over the rest of the meta just due to its sheer damage numbers. But most of all, it hard countered maybe the best card ever printed, and one of the few currently banned cards: Shaymin-EX. Most decks at the time ran the card in order to draw unfair amounts of cards, to the point where it was a liability to NOT run one. It even warped deckbuilding to an extremely discard-heavy, item-dense meta. However, shaymin had 1 weakness, and that was the fact that it only had 110 HP, but still gave the opponent 2 prize cards when KO’d. Let’s do some quick math: 2 gbreak abilities = 60 + 60 which equals… 120 damage. 120 is in fact a larger number than 110. Therefore, 2 energies is 2 prize cards. Hmm, let’s try something else. 80 damage from vanilla greninja #1’s attack. 30 damage from vanilla greninja #2’s ability. 80 + 30 = 110. 110 = 110, therefore shaymin genocide is a valid strategy. For those who didn’t pick up on it yet, yes, that meant you could kill 2 full hp EX pokemon in a single turn. One more interesting thing about the greninja break decks that made it to worlds was the fact that they brought a new card: talonflame from the Steam Siege expansion. While this card saw some experimental play, this was its first real showing at a tournament. Basically, it was a stage 2 pokemon that, when in your starting hand, could be played in the active pokemon slot, and had an attack that dealt 40 damage, then searched for ANY 2 cards from your deck. This card solved its consistency issues, provided it with a way to make the night march matchup impossible to lose, and, most importantly, gave it a meat shield to hide behind. After worlds, gbreak saw a lot more play until meta shifts and set rotations made its matchups worse across the board. While this is less of an example of meta fluidity compared to mega audino due to the deck being a rogue contender at the time, I thought I’d include it here too just because they were from the same tournament!
I was also almost right on Nago. I knew that once people figure out his blood gauge, he's just gonna be high mid tier. Didn't expect him to go higher than that but here we are today.
@@juniperrodley9843 part of the good management was the buffs he got. Uppercut being a two parter meant that you were no longer forced to commit hard with upper cut> fukyo. SSS buff meant that normal sequence of special > fukyo > c.S/5k >SSS was even. The short range of the clone meant that clone + fukyo was a needless gamble, but the full screen it travels makes the full screen approach much more worth the cost. People playing Nago now would struggle much more in earlier versions even if their skill carried over.
melee Yoshi is a pretty good example I think Yoshi was considered bottom tier for over a decade, then amsa started showing up to tournaments outside of Japan around 2013/2014 the amount is meta development since then has been insane and Yoshi is now a solid uppermid/lower high tier
Same a Jigglypuff. It was carried over as the joke character from 64 to melee (g&w being the newest joke char), and when you wanted to embarass your opponent you bust out a jiggly or a pichu. Then, the back room released a tier list with jiggly as top tier as an april fools joke. Then, after MLG era mango pop out of nowhere and beat everyone with this april fool character to the point he had to switch because he wasn't having fun.
i'm reminded of when smash ultimate came out and everyone thought king k. rool was super good, but in reality he was just okay (probably even bad) and all the complaining got him nerfed to be even worse lol
One of the reason’s that he was broken, was his D-Throw, they nerfed it by changing the formula for it making it easier to escape at low to mid percents, and hard to escape at high to very high percents, other than that big nerf, he got a few buffs to his moves across several different patches, now he’s a okay super heavyweight with 2 projectiles, a counter/reflector, and belly armor on some of his moves.
Early Ultimate opinions were really silly. Inkling and Chrom were in contention for the best character in the game, Ike was winning majors, current highly regarded characters like Diddy, Mario, Sheik, Pac-Man, G&W, Samus, Sonic, Palutena, and Wolf were considered mediocre. Of course some of the changes in consensus simply came down to patches and DLC powercreep but a lot of it was just bad early game weirdness.
@@Slattsquatch well sheik on release definitely was not a good character, and is only good now due to the amount of buffs she got, and diddy was okay on release but became much better due to buffs as well
Nago was the first character I tried in strive I didn't realize how different he was from other characters. Even when I hit blood rage I noticed that I could stay back and hit people from half screen countering people who tried to rush me while my HP was draining. I never felt like he needed to be buffed.
One example of this I personally experienced was in Kirby Fighters 2, where everyone thought Staff was top tier, winning the game’s first tourney. Staff never won a tourney again, and just got worse as we realized how bad Staff’s hitboxes and frame data was. To top it off, there’s a bug where if you get grabbed while crouching, you get a permanent crouching hitbox. Staff is the only character you can reliably get this against, as grab is one of their 2 unreactable moves that aren’t crouchable, and the other one is a massive risk if the opponent is grounded.
@@shadou1234567 if it's a competitive game then people will be playing competitively. It might not be at evo, but somewhere sometime there will be a tournament
@@shawnallenlott yeah i know, i used to play puyo puyo tetris competitive; But i thought kirby fighters had online too bad to have such a dedicated fanbase. Panel de pon and magical drop have a pretty small comunity, but they are trying
I think I read a comment somewhere that some people initially wrote off Jin in Tekken 4 back when it was new in arcades. For those that never played Tekken 4, Jin's considered by far THE best character in the game, bar none, and a big reason that game is despised by the tournament scene.
I think a large part of that was that they completely changed Jin's moveset between T3 and T4 for story reasons. So all the people who played Jin in T3 (where he was also top tier) suddenly didn't know how to play him anymore and instead of learning how his new moveset worked they just decided he sucked and moved to other characters.
Jigglypuff in melee might be the biggest example ever. Everyone assumed she was low mid tier in the first tier list because of her selection of useless moves and terrible ground speed and no weight. Fast forward to hungry box being the best player in all of melee for consecutive years exclusively playing the character and having one evo with them. Melee is full of characters that people write off but boy was that the biggest example of dropping the ball.
melee puff is definitely really good, but i think people downplay her difficulty at top level. hbox is the only solo puff main I've heard of, maybe there's more now, im not super into melee anymore tbh
I saw someone mention once, and if this is true it is one of the funniest things in the world to me, that Metaknight was seen as mid tier in the very early days of Brawl. That guy who ended up being the definition of the Brawl meta was seen as mid tier in the old days. Part of me wants that to be true, but I have my doubts considering it's _Meta Knight._
Broooooo I remember that Nago video you made! I remember being so glad you made it, because I felt like Nago was super strong yet everyone kept telling me how bad he was. I felt like I was going insane lmao
The Nago switch up was especially crazy for me because I was actively paying attention when it happened. People were so down on him, and then like a month or two later he was at the top of most tier lists. At the time I didn’t have the game so I was like, “Wait I thought he was bad”
One thing to note about Wesker as well, and tbh my memory might be failing me, but Wesker could also DHC Glitch in Vanilla since you could DHC into counter super to trigger the glitch. TBH I don't exactly remember how many characters had DHC-glitchable supers but I do remember the Wesker DHC glitch quite well.
Marvel 2 has a lot of interesting cases like this given how much the game evolved. Ice Man immediately comes to mind as someone people thought was broken at first
25:32 I agree, that feeling is nuts; I remember back when USF4 wasn't out yet that I started using Rose because I thought she was really slept on when everyone were just using Yun. Months later Rose won EVO and fans wanted her nerfed because she was a nightmare to play against, it was hilarious.
Rose being considered top tier after evo is one of the most frustrating examples of revisionist history for me. Rose was considered extremely strong long before Luffy's win at evo. Him winning just cemented what was already known.
I still play inkling when I occasionally go back to the game with friends. I think that game has so many characters nobody really should've been judging the characters for at least a couple months. There's enough matchups to keep everyone busy for years honestly.
@@bageltoo I think that everyone was looking through Ultimate for the next Brawl Meta-Knight or Bayonetta. I think that Smash Bros. games have a reputation for being unbalanced, so after two consecutive Smash games with incredibly broken characters people were expecting, and searching for, the character that would be busted.
Reminds me of Anonym in ABK, specifically in the western scene. For years people thought she was low tier, then after some new people joined the scene in 2019 we realized the character was completely busted and top tier
Man, the amount of dollars I would have if I always thought a character felt weak as a kid. I'd be a really happy man. Little did I know that 3S Chun Li was a problem. We only find out those things 300 or even 3000 matches later. We don't know what is a problem until way later. Or until the grand finals is filled with only one or two characters.
Well you were a kid... Also with some characters and the games that feature them you don't need to fight an actual player all the time. For example Chun-Li's pressure was apparent against CPU characters that just insisted on blocking instead of parry most times.
I remember in T7 after the nightmare that was Leroy getting 7 of the 8 spots at Evo Japan alot of people where saying Fahkumram was balanced and fun on release. I stopped playing for a couple months due to covid and just wanting to try other games. Come back and everybody is calling for his head on nerfs and saying how he's unbeatable.
I'm surprised you didn't mention that Nago's sword normals also deal chip damage, which improves depending on the level of Blood Gauge you have, so he deals damage to you even when you block him. So that forces the opponent to Faultless Defend and spend meter to avoid chip damage. Dude's scary even when you're blocking him, which makes up for his specials being limited by Blood Gauge.
Getting Healing as an Ultra is really what pushed Elena over the edge. She fundamentally really doesn't have much else going for her beyond what she has in every other game, and she's never been top tier outside of that appearance. If Healing was her Super and she only had damaging Ultras she'd be mid tier at best. I'm guessing everyone that thought she was bad just didn't understand the full ramifications of having a healing ability on a move that is based around taking damage.
@@HellecticMojo She's always had very ambiguous moves, great poke, strong EX options, ect. I'm not saying Elena is a bad character, she's my favorite to play in 3rd Strike, but I'm saying that she's not egregiously strong compared to her usual kits outside of Healing as an Ultra. She has all her past stuff, a little better off than in SF3 but not tremendously, AND an insane Ultra that blends incredibly well with her safe footsie options to aim for a timeout win.
Soul Calibur 4 Hildegarde, during the Beta the top players were saying that she was kinda weak, and might be mid at best. Then a few months into release people found the 'Doom Combo' combined with the fact she had the best evasive step in the game.
Hilde's strength is overplayed mostly because of a few tricks and the doom combo. Without her doom combo she would not be that high and even with it the absolute top players didn't really struggle vs her. The problem is she was poison to the rest of the playerbase the rough 95% majority who weren't serious evo contestants did struggle against her and she kind of killed the game.
Steve in Smash Ultimate was considered the absolute worst character in the game by very respected guide creators and players. But as the tech developed, it was found out that not only his recovery was way better than what people thought, but that he is bonkers. His minecart wasn't just a noob killer, it was an actual threat in high-level play, his normals are stubby but really strong, blocks were more than just a gimmick and started being used for combos (some of which were TODs) and insane ledgetrap setups (in FG terms, he had insane corner pressure and oki) and it is a really hard MU to learn because every high-level Steve player had their own set of gimmicks. It was an entire 180º on the character's perception.
One of the conclusions people jumped to about Elena was she had no plus on block buttons. No plus on block buttons (except for crouch LP) means you're not good right? People tend to get character tiers for vs games wrong also because they focus too much on the solo power of a character instead of how they work with a team
Alot of people thought Nago would be bad like potemkin with slow movement and no dash which is huge in an anime fighter. add on the blood gauge and people were thinking this was gonna be terrible. However most of Nago's specials are either very slightly minus or 0 on block and do a large amount of damage. the one we call "beyblade" is even slightly disjointed so you can't hit it with a low. ever since Nago has been a hassle with him getting one hit and almost deleting your health bar with a string of specials. One thing I will add is that even though blood rage is terrible, players like Hotashi showed that you can ignore it if you are smart about it. He also has a command grab that lowers the gauge and if you get hit by that you likely aren't gonna win
I feel the same way u do about nago but with zato, in the beginning most ppl put him in the lower part of the roster despite me playing him and thinking he's not that bad and as I as I was starting to play the game less and less I saw him rise through the ranks. I don't play anymore so idk if any recent buffs were major but seeing him in that list as A+ makes me smile a bit.
It's no surprise it happened to Zato. Puppet characters tend to work like that, they generally have more potential so it takes awhile to learn them. People were expecting Zato to get higher into lists down the road, but the game was still too early to decide.
I can think of a lot of smash characters that could fit this, but smash 4 Bayonetta is a great example. People thought she sucked after the nerfs, but not long afterwards they realized she was still one of the best characters in the game. I definitely agree on your opinion that people overreact to buffs and nerfs, thinking it’s always a major change when it’s usually not.
YES. I was there with you jmcrofts on Nagoriyuki. I felt like I was losing my mind thinking he had great potential while everyone said he was trash. Plus he always had perfect looping strike/throw mix, huge buttons, great health, massive damage, he's always been juicy.
Akuma from tekken 7 People put him in buttom 5 for 2 years He has been nerfed despite of that every season. After 5 seasons around 7 years of tekken of constant nerfs while everyone else getting buffed to the moon, he is best character in the game. Just tells you how much people were wrong about him
Idk about the goku black one, there were a couple pretty hefty nerfs they made to his god slicer very early on. The projectiles he shoots from far out used to be beams for one. Then it was nerfed a second time to give his hand a smaller hitbox. Indirectly, these nerfs also made it so god slicer was reflectable when vanished where on release it would true string. Tbh I don't think any buffs he's received have anywhere near made up for these nerfs, so I really don't think he fits the criteria here lol.
As much as those buffs did affect things early on, I don't think they're the reason that people cite him as bad. They're just salt added to the wound. A majority of his problems stemmed from the fact that other characters could do the same things he did, but better (Mostly SSJ Goku). The beam assist was his biggest benefit and his damage wasn't anything to sneeze at, but he was severely lacking in ways to get a consistent knockdown (and still is). Slicer was definitely a great move early on, but even if you reverted those back to the way they were, he would barely move at all tier-wise. A majority of his movement was due to the meta changing and getting powercrept.
First off just wanna say you are my favorite list or short form fighting game theory content maker. I never got the chance to play the old games as much and i’m currently learning 3S and i have always wanted to know: Out of the original SF2 turbo cast, what fighting game is each character best in? including all versions of all SF games and crossover games or cameo appearances. it would be really cool to see which game each character does best in, like i know Blanka is insanely good in CVS2 which is funny cause he’s usually pretty bad if i’m not mistaken. but beyond that it would be cool to see a video about this. You could also do one about which game each original SF character is worst in :D
Smash has King K. Rool as ours. Everyone pegged him as the best heavy in Ultimate and was just crushing locally. Turns out he’s just a pub stomp character who follows a strict neutral flowchart that once you can beat you essentially never lose to the character.
take everything with a grain of salt, there will always be that one player that will exploit something that is overlooked no matter what. fighting games are always evolving.
I found your channel as an old Nago player who SWORE that we just needed to unlock the character and he would be godlike. I'm happy to see you and us few believers got ours in the end. Also I've been watching ever since, good stuff.
Cant believe people clowned on Nago so hard. I dont even play Strive but I read about him on dustloop and soon as I read about how the blood meter works and how the key to playing him is to keep your blood high but not let it overflow, I knew that he was one of those characters who's gonna be insane in the hands of someone who can handle that management. And people are surprised about his damage? Hes literally labeled "One-Shot"-type by the game itself.
I remember no one was touching Morrigan in UMvC3 until soul spam was discovered. People weren't playing Vergil as much early until they realized his X-factor was broken. It's hard to put single characters in 'tiers' in vs. fighting games because it's more about team synergy. Even Strider. I remember when people saw that Ouroboros was level 3 super and not level 1 like in MvC/MvC2 he wouldn't be that good. Also he could die quickly, but people made him viable with X-factor because he was a mix-up machine. Dr. Strange wasn't as popular upon until people figured out Impact Palm loops and Nova/Spencer/Strange synergy. I think it was Nemo who first rocked that team in a tournament and was bodying people.
Hot off the results of The Big House 10, Yoshi in Smash Melee counts now. Lowest ranking in the tier list he's ever gotten was 22nd (out of a total of 26 characters). Then 1 player (aMSa) pushes his meta so hard that he singlehandedly moved him up the tier list. Most people would probably put him at around 10 nowadays. And Yoshi is one of the few characters who has now won a supermajor solo. (afaik, Fox, Falco, Marth, Jigglypuff, Peach, Captain Falcon, Pikachu, and most recently Yoshi are the only characters who have ever achieved this in over 20 years of competition. Also worth noting that Smash Melee tier lists are really unbalanced if you're moving across tiers; if you're bottom tier, you're generally considered worthless)
I like how during the Black segment, we can see that Gotenks was also extremely underrated at the time. I don't think it was until after Evo that everyone realized how strong he was. And like Elena, he was actually nerfed before that. So we never got to see Gotenks at the apex of his strength.
Staying in UMvC3, everybody keeps telling me Sentinal is garbage but his usage rate is through the roof Dude's been all over major top 8s and even evo champion teams. Sentinel adds so much value to a team at any position that his flaws are more than made up for
He's good, but no longer one of the four gods like in MvC2. People overreacted and he got nerfed. Then people underreacted until pros learned how to use him.
@@jdrmanmusiqking he has one of the best assists in the game. This is primarily the reason why a lot of people use him. But he's not that impressive by himself. He's not bad outside of his assist. Just middling.
Funny how Happy Chaos in GGST got the same treatment as Nago IN THE SAME GAME. Everyone thought he was just a weird novelty with too many meters to manage until people started quickscope zoning and building crazy combos with gunshot. Now everyone says he "doesn't play Guilty Gear" (whatever that means) and should be removed from the game entirely.
I was a day 1 Nago main and I was on a similar page to you about him. I picked him cause I liked his aesthetic and he fits the "archetype" of fighting game characters that I like the most, there's no name for it but big slow characters who rely on medium range normals (onimaru from fantasy strike is another example). Over the course of the games development I watched Nago slowly climb the ranks in pro players tier lists, people didn't suddenly realise he was top tier it was a gradual climb, but with the benefit of maining him I was generally ahead of the curve, when people were saying he was bottom tier I thought he was mid, and when they were saying he was mid I thought he was high. I miss the early days though cause these days Nago is one of those characters people love to hate, and I just mained him cause I thought he was cool, so its kind of a downer for me when people hate on him.
Excellent video. All these newcomers that are used to seasonal balance patches that basically start begging for nerfs and buffs the instant a game launches or even during a beta like with SF6 have this really clinical approach to fighting games where there's only one truth and one way to play when in reality a small discovery can, and often does change the entire game. Just outside this video the comment section is full of examples of how someone that's considered either broken or busted turns out to be something entirely different as the game develops and new players find new tech. One of my favorite examples was how Akuma, one the few banned characters in SF history, used to be a tournament viable character in HD Remix before Damdai made it clear how the balances didn't really matter. And it's not just about what's broken and what's not, sometimes people just get really efficient with characters and teams that aren't much utilized whether it's Xian with Gen, Gamerbee with Adon or Kusoru with a Viewtiful Joe/Rocket Raccoon/Frank team in UMV3. Characters or players that surprise everyone with something new or just by being played so well. Just let people play the game or try to overcome hurdles before throwing in the mitts and requesting a complete overhaul, especially if the game hasn't even launched yet. Playing a game for three days and already whinging for a balance patch just screams giving up.
I'm surprised you didn't mentioned Phoenix from MVC3, it took her a month or two to become top tier, but at first nobody thought it was worth saving your meter just so that she could transform into dark phoenix, especially cuz her life got drained on her own and she even needed to waste bar to get that life back and have a decent chance of surviving, it wasn't until a girl (can't recall her name) went to a local tournament and started winning matches by literally X-factor and mashing crouching light her way to victory.
Akuma in Tekken 7 deserves the num 1 spot and it's not even funny. He got nerfed in one of the earlier seasons and everyone said he was trash. Every pro player put him in low tier on tier lists until Super Akouma started doing the crazy optimal touch of death combos in tournament that he's now known for. An honorable mention is Yamazaki in CVS2. Beforehand most tier lists always listed him on the lower end of mid tier. But now the best player in CVS2 actually has him in his main team.
It was crazy to me that people thought Nago was bad. He gets to do whatever he wants into a billion damage and the penalty for that is you get full screen normals. Shoot, I wasn't going to say anything because I wouldn't have minded the coolest character getting a buff but I'm glad people caught on so we get to see Nago all the time. I mean, even if he was bad my dude is a vampire samurai and that's just badass.
This is why I hate developers that freak out at the Reddit hive mind and swift patch games the first week they're out. Multiversus did this with taz cause the children who played that game couldn't figure out what "spacing" was or wait an "active hitbox" is and just they nerfed him to the ground for no reason.
It happens all the time, a game comes out and people think XYZ character is broken till people figure the game out and it turns out they're not that good once you know how to work around em.
Melee has a whole lot of this. Some examples comparing the first tier list in 2002 to a tier list made by PG Stats from asking top players in 2021: Jigglypuff started at a 17-18 tie with Ness. PG put it at 3rd, and it's commonly in contention for 2nd Zelda dropped from 6th to 24th Mario dropped from 5th to 15th Zelda dropped from 6th to 24th Yoshi rose from a 19-20 tie with DK to 10th (and thanks to amsa has recently received a major win) Falcon rose from a 15-16th tie with Young Link to 6th Even with the first tier list to put Fox at the top, you still get some weird stuff like Pikachu in 18th as opposed to the 9th it's at at present. I don't think Ultimate has it nearly as insane, there were definitely characters hyped up prerelease like Rool and MK, but people very quickly realized they weren't anything special. The only real exception is Inkling, who got hyped up for a while but kinda just vanished eventually. They're not bad or anything, generally still considered good, but not the top tier people expected. They don't really show up that often.
The Akuma Tekken 7 situation was amazing as a spectator ... both top players from Japan and Korea played T7 for 2 whole seasons (not even counting the arcade run) and thought 2D characters were mid tier at best ... nobody in the west played Geese seriously and the only constant player was Super Akuma who everybody thought was an exception (like eyemusician for Yoshi) not playing the top tier just knowledge checking and winning games ... and then the Pakistanis invaded with Arslan's Geese (and Kazumi) and almost everybody had a pocket Akuma (shoutout Awais Honey for demonstrating how broken Akuma was and how dangerous it was in a tournament setting) and the pros were in shambles ... the tears never stopped since (well they did at launch Leroy but lets just forget that)
And Wesker WAS nerfed. Hard. Almost all his changes were buffs, but the one big nerf they gave him radically changed his gameplan and made him way less of a threat full screen.
I was right about Nago too, people thought blood gauge made him useless, but I knew he'd be fine even before I learned normal attacks put his meter down
The moment I saw what this list was for, I said Goku Black. I had friends who were calling him OP and I kept telling them he had virtually nothing outside of big normals.
Some Smash examples in additions to the ones posted: -Mr. Game & Watch in Ultimate, early on he was considered terrible (he lost the dthrow->up air confirm from Smash 4 that was his main way of getting KOs; all his windboxes were removed; his forward air change meant approaching was more difficult; his new forward air was very finicky and seemingly inconsistent) but gradually, Maister showed that he could actually get pretty good results. He's often considered top 20 or 15 now -Very famously, Yoshi in Melee, considered low tier until some guy did really well with him -Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but Palutena (Ultimate) kinda fell off after a couple years, she was considered top tier early on but people gradually found counterplay to some of her stuff I think. (She's not low tier though, just placed lower than before)
- Between Smash 4 and Ult: GnW lost dthrow -> uair, but got dthrow -> upB instead which is probably a net positive. That, combined with the buffs to his Smash attacks was enough to push him into that top 20 range. - aMSa is the primary Yoshi player that proved his viability in Melee. - Palutena is still top tier in Ult, just on the lower end. Received many small nerfs over the years, but still a very fundamentally solid character.
That Yoshi player's name is aMSa, and he actually just won his first supermajor at The Big House 10, beating out the likes of even Hungrybox and Mango. Kinda wild for a character that was once considered to be bottom ten for much of the game's life-even hitting as low as bottom five at some points.
@@Fitsi2Thanks for the corrections For G&W I see dthrow->nair and upthrow->upB used more often than dthrow->upB, but either way his juggling is much better now. Just took people a while to see it I guess
I knew nago was strong but blood management was a bit rougher than I enjoyed until we got the far slash blood recovery buff where it basically doubled how much it recovered. once that happened i was like oh yeah i super lover this char,
I had a feeling Nago was going to turn out to be practically broken once people learned to manage his blood rage properly. Someone actually straight told me I was retarded for saying it lol
Noob from MK9 should get an honorable mention. Every player swore he was the most busted thing to ever happen to Mortal Kombat and after a year and a half he was trash tier.
The same Pros also said Cammy was super OP in SFV. She wasn’t, and never won a big tourney. What players don’t understand is that Pro players are just players and they can be biased. They don’t program the game, don’t design the art, go into long meetings on character designs, etc. Players just need to make their own assumptions.
To be fair, a just as large portion of the players defended nago, including many pro players and we said that "he's only bad if you don't know how to control blood, stop unga-ing and start thinking". i was with you back then, i always said he was a strong character and that blood was just an attempt to hold his brokeness back... which back then i likewise thought was enough... it wasn't, it never was
An episode on ugly ducklings would be pretty fun, characters that started out being weak and ignored but then found themselves to be absolute monsters with some buffs, like goldlewis.
I remember the moment I realized Nagoriyuki was top tier was about 2 weeks in when I examined the Potemkin vs Nagoriyuki matchup and noticed that Nago did basically everything Pot did, but better. His big buttons were bigger and lead to actual reward, his command grab gave good oki, his defensive buttons were better, his roundstart was amazing, and he could convert in situations where most characters couldn't. He couldn't abuse meter as well as Pot could pre PRC OS nerf, but that was about it. No one believed me until Hotashi won EVO with him.
Wow... the Chun Li/Morrigan/Phoenix team strategy reminds me of League of Legends' hyper funneling. Toxic A.F.. I wouldn't be surprised if people got into fist fights for using that stuff lol
Nagoriyuki's Bloodsucking Universe/Purple-RC option select on the launch patch was absolutely miserable to play against. It felt like he was a huge reason for the throw RC changes afterwards; the OS was available to everyone, but he had disproportionately more reward.
@@gamelord12 You can still PRC it if you whiff, but it's not an OS like it was on launch. The OS would allow you to PRC Bloodsucking Universe only on whiff, without messing up your Bloodsucking Universe on hit, which it would now.
honestly, when Kim was first revealed in the leaked art... she was the only character I disked, immediately, and I don't even know why. but since seeing her perform in the Beta, she has fast become my favorite new addition to the SF franchise
Ganondorf in Smash Ultimate is another one that comes to mind. For the first few months people thought he was actually decent for once, but as people learned the game and other would-be low tiers got buffed more than he did, he's pretty much universally considered the worst character in the game.
Pulling up the receipts with the Japanese tier list with Elena was *chefs kiss*
Love your videos Brian
Brian 😀
Brine
Do you play OW2 at all?
Akuma in T7 was without a doubt the best character in the game pre console release, then he got nerfed and everyone thought he was low mid. Until, everybody realised that dispite any nerfs he'll ever get, he'll probably be the best character in the game for the rest of time.
We had the entire roster wrong in s1. We thought Jack, Drag, and Xiaoyu were top when those characters were mid tier at best knowing character strengths now.
Remember how Julia was the only one to contend with Leroy?
@@Saiche1337 old drag would be top 15 or higher, it's not that anyone was wrong about him he's just been nerfed.
It'll be a cold day in hell when people stop severely downplaying Akuma, no matter the game
@@xijinping3529 He still wasn't that good compared to Geese, Akuma, DVJ, and Steve. He wasn't nerfed very hard.
The Nagoryuki downplaying “-3 on breathing” f’in killed me
It's crazy back in the old marvel days. I remember Wesker being a menace and then it was like something clicked for the entire community as a whole and you just never saw him ever again
Wasn't that just that UMVC3 came out and everyone switched to Vergil?
@@retromancer that and I'm pretty sure he was nerfed between vanilla and Ultimate.
@@BronzeAgePepper He got lightweight buffed. But, Vergil is Vergil.
as the game evolved it was just easier to see where he struggles. his main lvl 1 super is extremely hard/impossible to DHC out of or into without losing a bunch of damage from the super your cancelling from or into, and like was mentioned he struggled extremely hard with combo damage. you need glasses off and a dedicated assist to break the ~800k barrier with him, even off of an optimal touch. there were just point characters who could offer more without restricting the team so much at a super high level, and with how fast tech traveled during those days people were hella quick to catch-on.
clearly, a handful of players still made him work. but when you compare high-level wesker teams to other high-level teams, they almost always fall short.
@@retromancer no he was very popular start of ultimate
Something I think you missed with Goku Black: The game kinda changed out from under him. One of the things that made Goku Black special in the early days of DBFZ was the fact that he had a beam assist, and those were actually pretty rare... but with the advent of B (and later C) assists, basically everybody and their grandma has a beam assist now... making black even *less* desirable.
not realy even before the change Goku Black was not played anymore because the other beam assist SSJ Goku was just a way better Character with better buttons, zoning and more damage
@@ngdome7583 People moving over to SSJ Goku hurt a little, but he really didn't slide all the way down to bottom tier until beam assists stopped being special.
The KnowKami "that was all he had" clip is from the beginning of season 2
B and C assists both came out at the same time. It's really funny that people forget that though, it shows how awful they were on release. Needed two CDR buffs to even become an afterthought, and even now they aren't really used save in certain specific comps.
the only argument I could support would be the removal of his multi lvl 1 supers. other than that, if we go by season 1 standards SSJ had better damage and easier ways to cause hard knockdowns and plenty of assist were more valuable, such as Yamcha's and SSJVegeta.
It's funny cause right at the launch of strive I was playing Axl and this friend was playing Nago. As long as I could keep him away, it was free. But then there were rouds where he touched me once or twice and I was dead. I thought, "dude, this Nago must be really strong for some matchups right?"
Turns out it was most matchups
this nago wildin
Launch strive was genuinely wild where Sol was a legit boss character, Nago played a whole different game, Ram's disjoint J.H beating reversal DPs and May being a gorilla. Honourable mentions to Faust's J.2k being unusable trash
Jigglypuff, in smash melee, was considered low tier when the game first came out. Now she's so top tier that they talk about adding rules just to limit what she can do.
Ice Climbers were considered mid tier at best in both melee and brawl
Yoshi is even more crazy I feel like, going from a bottom tier to being good enough to win a major is pretty nuts.
for a game that's not a fighter:
Splatoon 2 everyone slept on Tentamissles for most of the game now people want them gone from Splatoon 3
No just a dumbass wants them banned
@@Ducking69 I mean, they do have a few banned tech in the game like Sing Stalling
Vergil was kinda the flipside to Wesker turning out to not be good. When UMVC3 came out the general takeaway was "Vergil is fine, but anything he can do Wesker can do better". Lol.
"Pfft, Vergil = Dante - Guns, why would I ever switch?" oh, early UMvC3...
Wesker is a perfect example of a solved character. It's not that he wasn't good, or low tier, but rather since everyone has seen what he has all the time, he had nothing that could really surprise anyone anymore. So he fell to the side when other characters with less honest and easier tech, or just broken tech were figured out.
The Nagoriyuki thing was a little bizarre for me because it low-key seemed like the vast majority of downplayers hadn't played a Guilty Gear game before. Maybe I'm wrong, but pretty much everything people were complaining about were either clear limiters to balance out his stupid normals, or that mechanic that's had very similar versions in past Guilty Gear games (e.g. Robo-Ky has been both very good and very mediocre in XX's lifespan).
His normals get buffed by Blood Gauge, tho
It's there cause his specials are even more braindead strong
Strive got the attention of a lot of new player who had no idea what guilty gear was like. Thats also the meme of strive does top much damage started when the entire series has always been like that lol...
A couple others that are funny in hindsight:
- Cammy in MvC2 was considered high if not top tier in the VERY early days when Justin Wong was destroying everyone with her.
- Sentinel also in MvC2 was considered an assist only character, especially before fly-unfly was discovered.
- Nash in S1 SFV. He was still solid back then but people seem to be more lukewarm on him looking back. This lead to him getting nerfed (with his worst nerf being the fix to the 8frames of lag) and he hasn't really recovered since. To a lesser extent, I think S1 Ryu was the same way (could be wrong about that).
- a lot of characters in vanilla MvC3 still had a lot of the same stuff, the really good stuff just hadn't been discovered until Ultimate. Morrigan being the biggest winner of flying under the radar.
EDIT:
- also noteworthy in a lot of those early USF4 tier lists: Rolento is mid to low tier. Lol, lmao even.
The thing about s1 Ryu is that fixing jumping LK was enough. It's ok for him to hit like a truck, he just doesn't need a disjointed jump in button, which is why in the final patch Ryu hits like a truck and it's fine.
@@voraminfantes5264 Yeah he wasn't SUPER strong in S1 imo. Like you said, only one change and he'd be fine. But this is also with hindsight. I still remember at the time agreeing he was arguably top 3/5 but now I'd say he was probably mid-high in S1 knowing what we know now.
I also remember very early on in MvC2 it was assumed that Iceman was very high tier
@@Gettles Oh yeah definitely him too. Completely forgot about that.
C Viper was considered pretty meh until pro's started to figure out how strong she was with right execution. Now in right hands she's a combo machine.
Chun-Li's design aspect is so ahead of her time that a good Chun player will never be bad in any version of SF, she's the female Mike Tyson of fighting games.
I think a lot of the times this is generally due to a character's popularity. If a lot of people are playing a character, more stuff will be found and refined for them and may seem stronger at the beginning of a game's life, but if not a lot of people are playing the character then they're not going to have that discovery. The first two characters on this list I think are a perfect example of this.
People tend to rate characters that are easy to play who perform decently well as top tier. Most professional players don't look at strengths or weaknesses objectively because they only main 1 or 2 characters.
Huge agree.
In Smash Ultimate, there are still a bunch of characters that are just giant question marks, because nobody has really picked them up to do anything with them.
Some of them are for vague "this character probably has viability/outcompetition issues compared to other top tiers", like Lucario, but others are just "they're not obviously broken, and nobody likes them", like Corrin.
And then there's the absurdly punishing skill floor, for mediocre skill ceiling characters like Duck Hunt, that maybe one person a year emerges from their time chamber to use, smashes a locals, then disappears into the night.
@@aprinnyonbreak1290 that corrin take aged like a fine wine given the character's emergence
NRS examples: There was a short period post release where General Zod was considered fairly weak in Injustice 1, when in fact he was busted. And then history repeated itself a couple years later in almost the exact same fashion with Tremor in MKX, who went under the radar for quite a while after he came out before folks realized his true power.
Also shoutouts to many people thinking Vergil was more trouble than he was worth in UMvC3 upon release.
same with mileena she wasn’t played too much until foxy started playing the piercing variation and everyone saw how good she was
Vergil is kind of unique too. If Shady K hadnt discovered the Round Trip glitch SO early on, we could have possibly seen Wesker anchor be popular for a lot longer
ver
Yeah
Gotta love how people went from thinking Tremor was just a decent character, to realizing he was straight up the best character in the game
Elena is a weird case because she really wasn't that strong on paper. Her damage output was really low, and she had lower vitality, but she had long legs(buttons) and a stupid fast EX overhead. With her drawn out link combos and her ability to heal repeatedly, she could get a life lead and run out the clock. That timer is one of her greatest strengths.
No one think she is strong until gamerbee reach top 8 and go on
Well I hate to be that guy. I played the 3series alot coming as a kid and Elena was bad on there specifically because Parry worked against her and other characters had more options than her. As soon as I saw she was coming to USF4 I said she she would be busted lmao, very easily one of the best characters if she had healing along with her safe specials she had in 3S. Like honestly if we are being honest the overall damage output that the cast gives off in USF4 is very pitter pat-ish anyhow so i dont see why Elena having *low* damage was a big deal. Mechanics is everything in my eyes and it makes or breaks character rosters in everything we play imho.
@@Melanatedhatervibez While high damage is a massive strength (Nagoriyuki, Vanilla Sagat), I fully agree that mechanics are more important. After all, a character who does 10,000,000 damage per opening but gets 0 openings does 0 damage. A character who does 1 damage per opening but gets 10,000,000 openings deals 10,000,000 damage.
@@juniperrodley9843 Damn I like that quote
@@Melanatedhatervibez thanks lol
Everyone who plays card games absolutely knows the community and even the pros are wrong like 99% of the time.
patrick hoban (one of yugioh's goats) would literally play up decks at smaller tournaments to make them seem broken and then play what he actually thought was the strongest deck at higher stakes tournaments to bait people and punish them for blindly copycatting him, so I've become skeptical of even listening to them
I don't think pros are wrong card games are just more fluid, at least with MTG. Generally, good decks are created. Other decks are made to counter those decks. These decks are then weak to other decks because they were made to beat specific things. Original decks return because those counter decks are being beaten by decks that are weak to the original decks and so on.
@@Herodotus888 oop, reviving a dead comment thread, my bad! Just had some stuff to add here to help elaborate on this point.
Edit: oh god didn’t realize how long this was until I dropped the comment LMAOO
For those who didn’t follow the pokemon TCG in 2016, it was probably the biggest example of how a meta can develop on a whim in a card game.
Pokemon’s 2016 worlds was probably the most memorable time for the competitive side as a whole imo, from wolfe glick winning worlds in VGC, pokken’s world tournament debut, and most importantly to me, the most jank top 8 in the history of the pokemon TCG. For context, I’ll write about some of the best decks in the format at the time, as far as I remember.
-Night march: a deck that focused on using small pokemon to hit big numbers (with ~200+ being pretty normal from joltik and pumpkaboo, and 110+ being easy to hit with vespiquen)
-Trevenant Item Lock: a deck about not letting the opponent play items at all (which typically took up around 30-50% of a deck at the time).
-Mega Rayquaza: just like how mega rayquaza broke the VGC, it broke the TCG. A 220 HP colorless attacker that hit for 180-240 was unheard of at the time. In fact, those stats are STILL pretty decent. On top of that, it could evolve on turn 1 due to a bonus ability on it, and could run any other type of pokemon due to it being colorless, meaning it was EXTREMELY flexible with its tech options.
-Volcanion EX: a deck that focused on doing consistently high damage every turn, and tried to outpace the enemy by just killing their attackers every turn by abusing all of its key traits: being a fire type meant it had access to a bunch of support for the typing, being a basic meant it could run fighting fury belt, and the fact that its damage boost ability stacked with itself.
Now, these all seem like good decks, wanna know what won? A mega audino deck. Something that hadn’t been seen EVER ended up taking the biggest tournament of the year. In addition to this, the second place deck, Greninja BREAK was a rogue-tier deck at the time, and was falling out of favor due to being too slow. Now, you may be wondering: how did they end up taking the entire tournament with such weird decks? The answer is simple, they analyzed the meta, looked at their potential options to counter it, and put those counters into already anti-meta decks.
-The Audino deck had ran several tech options to hard counter the meta. For instance, they ran a healing supporter card in order to force certain key pokemon to attack a third time in order to secure a KO (trevenant, vespiquen, etc). They also ran an Absol that could move 30 damage from one enemy to another, essentially giving you a free prize card against night march decks. The best part about the deck though? The damage lined up perfectly with the meta; 110 damage 2-hit all of the best EX pokemon at the time except for shaymin-EX, which it OHKO’d, and the 50 benched pokemon damage threatened to kill your main support pokemon in 2-4 turns. Meanwhile, against night march, you were typically bulky enough to tank 1 attack in the first 4-6 turns or so, and were able to take down 2 of their pokemon per attack in many situations. The deck was pretty good in hindsight, but only due to the fact that it was able to completely counter the meta at the time. Regardless, kudos to Shintaro Ito for the meta call of a lifetime.
-Greninja BREAK (calling it gbreak from here on out, am lazy) was a known deck at the time, but wasn’t taken seriously when people discussed what decks were at the top when going into worlds. Yes, the deck was pretty powerful when it was able to set up, but considering you had to evolve your pokemon 2-3 times just to begin taking KOs wasn’t… great. The deck, however, had possibly the most powerful and disgusting endgame in the history of the game at that point. Basically, here’s how it worked: You used gbreak’s ability to discard a water energy and deal 60 damage to ANYTHING while in the active slot, then switched another one in to do it again, then maybe one more time for 30 damage from another greninja from an older set. ALL BEFORE ATTACKING. While this seemed like complete overkill against night march, the 2 top 8 gbreak players decided to take it even further: by including a temporary tool card to deal 60 damage to the enemy upon being attacked. Basically, this ensured that the game was over 1 turn after setting up. To really paint a picture as to how bad the matchup night march matchup was, basically if the gbreak player didn’t lose on turn 1, they won. In addition to the night march matchup, it also completely ran over the rest of the meta just due to its sheer damage numbers. But most of all, it hard countered maybe the best card ever printed, and one of the few currently banned cards: Shaymin-EX. Most decks at the time ran the card in order to draw unfair amounts of cards, to the point where it was a liability to NOT run one. It even warped deckbuilding to an extremely discard-heavy, item-dense meta. However, shaymin had 1 weakness, and that was the fact that it only had 110 HP, but still gave the opponent 2 prize cards when KO’d. Let’s do some quick math: 2 gbreak abilities = 60 + 60 which equals… 120 damage. 120 is in fact a larger number than 110. Therefore, 2 energies is 2 prize cards. Hmm, let’s try something else. 80 damage from vanilla greninja #1’s attack. 30 damage from vanilla greninja #2’s ability. 80 + 30 = 110. 110 = 110, therefore shaymin genocide is a valid strategy. For those who didn’t pick up on it yet, yes, that meant you could kill 2 full hp EX pokemon in a single turn. One more interesting thing about the greninja break decks that made it to worlds was the fact that they brought a new card: talonflame from the Steam Siege expansion. While this card saw some experimental play, this was its first real showing at a tournament. Basically, it was a stage 2 pokemon that, when in your starting hand, could be played in the active pokemon slot, and had an attack that dealt 40 damage, then searched for ANY 2 cards from your deck. This card solved its consistency issues, provided it with a way to make the night march matchup impossible to lose, and, most importantly, gave it a meat shield to hide behind. After worlds, gbreak saw a lot more play until meta shifts and set rotations made its matchups worse across the board. While this is less of an example of meta fluidity compared to mega audino due to the deck being a rogue contender at the time, I thought I’d include it here too just because they were from the same tournament!
@@ellachino4799 the trickster lol
Yeah the story of Nagoriyuki reminds me of Solemn Judgment in Yugioh
I was also almost right on Nago. I knew that once people figure out his blood gauge, he's just gonna be high mid tier. Didn't expect him to go higher than that but here we are today.
It's because he's gotten continuous buffs while his worst matchups were weak/nerfed.
@@HellecticMojo +people getting good at blood management was just an insane boost for him, cause his specials are freaky strong
@@juniperrodley9843 part of the good management was the buffs he got. Uppercut being a two parter meant that you were no longer forced to commit hard with upper cut> fukyo. SSS buff meant that normal sequence of special > fukyo > c.S/5k >SSS was even. The short range of the clone meant that clone + fukyo was a needless gamble, but the full screen it travels makes the full screen approach much more worth the cost.
People playing Nago now would struggle much more in earlier versions even if their skill carried over.
@@HellecticMojo all true yeah
melee Yoshi is a pretty good example I think
Yoshi was considered bottom tier for over a decade, then amsa started showing up to tournaments outside of Japan around 2013/2014
the amount is meta development since then has been insane and Yoshi is now a solid uppermid/lower high tier
Same a Jigglypuff. It was carried over as the joke character from 64 to melee (g&w being the newest joke char), and when you wanted to embarass your opponent you bust out a jiggly or a pichu.
Then, the back room released a tier list with jiggly as top tier as an april fools joke.
Then, after MLG era mango pop out of nowhere and beat everyone with this april fool character to the point he had to switch because he wasn't having fun.
And yoshi just took the first supermajor in melee history, crazy
@@Scorpio7500 um…where can I watch this 😳
@@bartdude82 look up Big House 10, it just happened
i'm reminded of when smash ultimate came out and everyone thought king k. rool was super good, but in reality he was just okay (probably even bad) and all the complaining got him nerfed to be even worse lol
One of the reason’s that he was broken, was his D-Throw, they nerfed it by changing the formula for it making it easier to escape at low to mid percents, and hard to escape at high to very high percents, other than that big nerf, he got a few buffs to his moves across several different patches, now he’s a okay super heavyweight with 2 projectiles, a counter/reflector, and belly armor on some of his moves.
Early Ultimate opinions were really silly. Inkling and Chrom were in contention for the best character in the game, Ike was winning majors, current highly regarded characters like Diddy, Mario, Sheik, Pac-Man, G&W, Samus, Sonic, Palutena, and Wolf were considered mediocre. Of course some of the changes in consensus simply came down to patches and DLC powercreep but a lot of it was just bad early game weirdness.
@@schindlerteejay94 He was never broken, people were just new to the game. His down throw nerf did not change a god-tier to optimistically average.
Seeing people's opinion on Ganon slip from "No way he's a mid-tier now :0" to "oh nvm, business as usual" was kinda sad to see.
@@Slattsquatch well sheik on release definitely was not a good character, and is only good now due to the amount of buffs she got, and diddy was okay on release but became much better due to buffs as well
Nago was the first character I tried in strive I didn't realize how different he was from other characters. Even when I hit blood rage I noticed that I could stay back and hit people from half screen countering people who tried to rush me while my HP was draining. I never felt like he needed to be buffed.
One example of this I personally experienced was in Kirby Fighters 2, where everyone thought Staff was top tier, winning the game’s first tourney. Staff never won a tourney again, and just got worse as we realized how bad Staff’s hitboxes and frame data was. To top it off, there’s a bug where if you get grabbed while crouching, you get a permanent crouching hitbox. Staff is the only character you can reliably get this against, as grab is one of their 2 unreactable moves that aren’t crouchable, and the other one is a massive risk if the opponent is grounded.
didn´t knew people played this competitively
@@shadou1234567 i'm also shocked
@@infamoussns me too
@@shadou1234567 if it's a competitive game then people will be playing competitively. It might not be at evo, but somewhere sometime there will be a tournament
@@shawnallenlott yeah i know, i used to play puyo puyo tetris competitive; But i thought kirby fighters had online too bad to have such a dedicated fanbase. Panel de pon and magical drop have a pretty small comunity, but they are trying
I think I read a comment somewhere that some people initially wrote off Jin in Tekken 4 back when it was new in arcades. For those that never played Tekken 4, Jin's considered by far THE best character in the game, bar none, and a big reason that game is despised by the tournament scene.
I think a large part of that was that they completely changed Jin's moveset between T3 and T4 for story reasons. So all the people who played Jin in T3 (where he was also top tier) suddenly didn't know how to play him anymore and instead of learning how his new moveset worked they just decided he sucked and moved to other characters.
Jigglypuff in melee might be the biggest example ever. Everyone assumed she was low mid tier in the first tier list because of her selection of useless moves and terrible ground speed and no weight. Fast forward to hungry box being the best player in all of melee for consecutive years exclusively playing the character and having one evo with them. Melee is full of characters that people write off but boy was that the biggest example of dropping the ball.
melee puff is definitely really good, but i think people downplay her difficulty at top level. hbox is the only solo puff main I've heard of, maybe there's more now, im not super into melee anymore tbh
Yoshi in Melee is also a great example
@@MrDrumStikz peach too
that ball then proceeded to mid-air jump up and B-air them in the face.
@@MrDrumStikz tbf yoshi is still mid tier, Amsa is just that good.
I saw someone mention once, and if this is true it is one of the funniest things in the world to me, that Metaknight was seen as mid tier in the very early days of Brawl.
That guy who ended up being the definition of the Brawl meta was seen as mid tier in the old days.
Part of me wants that to be true, but I have my doubts considering it's _Meta Knight._
Broooooo I remember that Nago video you made! I remember being so glad you made it, because I felt like Nago was super strong yet everyone kept telling me how bad he was. I felt like I was going insane lmao
The Nago switch up was especially crazy for me because I was actively paying attention when it happened.
People were so down on him, and then like a month or two later he was at the top of most tier lists.
At the time I didn’t have the game so I was like, “Wait I thought he was bad”
One thing to note about Wesker as well, and tbh my memory might be failing me, but Wesker could also DHC Glitch in Vanilla since you could DHC into counter super to trigger the glitch. TBH I don't exactly remember how many characters had DHC-glitchable supers but I do remember the Wesker DHC glitch quite well.
Marvel 2 has a lot of interesting cases like this given how much the game evolved. Ice Man immediately comes to mind as someone people thought was broken at first
25:32 I agree, that feeling is nuts; I remember back when USF4 wasn't out yet that I started using Rose because I thought she was really slept on when everyone were just using Yun.
Months later Rose won EVO and fans wanted her nerfed because she was a nightmare to play against, it was hilarious.
Rose being considered top tier after evo is one of the most frustrating examples of revisionist history for me. Rose was considered extremely strong long before Luffy's win at evo. Him winning just cemented what was already known.
Same with Pepe's El fuerte too
Inkling in ultimate was considered top tier in the beginning. Now nobody uses them and they've been outclassed. They're too honest
Oh yes, I picked her up because people said she was the new hoo hah Diddy Kong for ultimate
I remember when KRool was “busted” at launch too. I think people just overreacted at playstyles they never saw before.
I still play inkling when I occasionally go back to the game with friends. I think that game has so many characters nobody really should've been judging the characters for at least a couple months. There's enough matchups to keep everyone busy for years honestly.
@@bageltoo I think that everyone was looking through Ultimate for the next Brawl Meta-Knight or Bayonetta. I think that Smash Bros. games have a reputation for being unbalanced, so after two consecutive Smash games with incredibly broken characters people were expecting, and searching for, the character that would be busted.
Good, fuck Splatoon
Reminds me of Anonym in ABK, specifically in the western scene. For years people thought she was low tier, then after some new people joined the scene in 2019 we realized the character was completely busted and top tier
Man, the amount of dollars I would have if I always thought a character felt weak as a kid. I'd be a really happy man. Little did I know that 3S Chun Li was a problem. We only find out those things 300 or even 3000 matches later. We don't know what is a problem until way later. Or until the grand finals is filled with only one or two characters.
Or until we see someone who actually knows their shit. As a kid, fireballs made a character instantly top tier. But hey, I was right about Sagat tho.
Well you were a kid...
Also with some characters and the games that feature them you don't need to fight an actual player all the time. For example Chun-Li's pressure was apparent against CPU characters that just insisted on blocking instead of parry most times.
I remember in T7 after the nightmare that was Leroy getting 7 of the 8 spots at Evo Japan alot of people where saying Fahkumram was balanced and fun on release. I stopped playing for a couple months due to covid and just wanting to try other games. Come back and everybody is calling for his head on nerfs and saying how he's unbeatable.
I'm surprised you didn't mention that Nago's sword normals also deal chip damage, which improves depending on the level of Blood Gauge you have, so he deals damage to you even when you block him. So that forces the opponent to Faultless Defend and spend meter to avoid chip damage. Dude's scary even when you're blocking him, which makes up for his specials being limited by Blood Gauge.
Until they set up oki for when they pop and hit u with guard break into super
Getting Healing as an Ultra is really what pushed Elena over the edge. She fundamentally really doesn't have much else going for her beyond what she has in every other game, and she's never been top tier outside of that appearance. If Healing was her Super and she only had damaging Ultras she'd be mid tier at best. I'm guessing everyone that thought she was bad just didn't understand the full ramifications of having a healing ability on a move that is based around taking damage.
Nah, Baffael's video show how much ambiguity she had on her mixup. She definitely had more merit than healing.
@@HellecticMojo She's always had very ambiguous moves, great poke, strong EX options, ect. I'm not saying Elena is a bad character, she's my favorite to play in 3rd Strike, but I'm saying that she's not egregiously strong compared to her usual kits outside of Healing as an Ultra. She has all her past stuff, a little better off than in SF3 but not tremendously, AND an insane Ultra that blends incredibly well with her safe footsie options to aim for a timeout win.
“Buff ken” LMAO
Soul Calibur 4 Hildegarde, during the Beta the top players were saying that she was kinda weak, and might be mid at best. Then a few months into release people found the 'Doom Combo' combined with the fact she had the best evasive step in the game.
Hilde's strength is overplayed mostly because of a few tricks and the doom combo. Without her doom combo she would not be that high and even with it the absolute top players didn't really struggle vs her. The problem is she was poison to the rest of the playerbase the rough 95% majority who weren't serious evo contestants did struggle against her and she kind of killed the game.
Steve in Smash Ultimate was considered the absolute worst character in the game by very respected guide creators and players. But as the tech developed, it was found out that not only his recovery was way better than what people thought, but that he is bonkers. His minecart wasn't just a noob killer, it was an actual threat in high-level play, his normals are stubby but really strong, blocks were more than just a gimmick and started being used for combos (some of which were TODs) and insane ledgetrap setups (in FG terms, he had insane corner pressure and oki) and it is a really hard MU to learn because every high-level Steve player had their own set of gimmicks. It was an entire 180º on the character's perception.
One of the conclusions people jumped to about Elena was she had no plus on block buttons. No plus on block buttons (except for crouch LP) means you're not good right? People tend to get character tiers for vs games wrong also because they focus too much on the solo power of a character instead of how they work with a team
team in sf?
Alot of people thought Nago would be bad like potemkin with slow movement and no dash which is huge in an anime fighter. add on the blood gauge and people were thinking this was gonna be terrible. However most of Nago's specials are either very slightly minus or 0 on block and do a large amount of damage. the one we call "beyblade" is even slightly disjointed so you can't hit it with a low. ever since Nago has been a hassle with him getting one hit and almost deleting your health bar with a string of specials. One thing I will add is that even though blood rage is terrible, players like Hotashi showed that you can ignore it if you are smart about it. He also has a command grab that lowers the gauge and if you get hit by that you likely aren't gonna win
I feel the same way u do about nago but with zato, in the beginning most ppl put him in the lower part of the roster despite me playing him and thinking he's not that bad and as I as I was starting to play the game less and less I saw him rise through the ranks. I don't play anymore so idk if any recent buffs were major but seeing him in that list as A+ makes me smile a bit.
It's no surprise it happened to Zato. Puppet characters tend to work like that, they generally have more potential so it takes awhile to learn them. People were expecting Zato to get higher into lists down the road, but the game was still too early to decide.
Chun in UMVC3 I'm pretty sure has infinites, too. Really hard to input, though.
I can think of a lot of smash characters that could fit this, but smash 4 Bayonetta is a great example. People thought she sucked after the nerfs, but not long afterwards they realized she was still one of the best characters in the game. I definitely agree on your opinion that people overreact to buffs and nerfs, thinking it’s always a major change when it’s usually not.
YES. I was there with you jmcrofts on Nagoriyuki. I felt like I was losing my mind thinking he had great potential while everyone said he was trash. Plus he always had perfect looping strike/throw mix, huge buttons, great health, massive damage, he's always been juicy.
Akuma from tekken 7
People put him in buttom 5 for 2 years
He has been nerfed despite of that every season.
After 5 seasons around 7 years of tekken of constant nerfs while everyone else getting buffed to the moon, he is best character in the game.
Just tells you how much people were wrong about him
200BC Tier lists are my favorite.
Yeah, remember people sleeping on the Messiah, but when the game actually launched and he had all the miracles and a resurrection...
@@Felipera_ and honestly Gill stole his whole swag
Idk about the goku black one, there were a couple pretty hefty nerfs they made to his god slicer very early on. The projectiles he shoots from far out used to be beams for one. Then it was nerfed a second time to give his hand a smaller hitbox. Indirectly, these nerfs also made it so god slicer was reflectable when vanished where on release it would true string. Tbh I don't think any buffs he's received have anywhere near made up for these nerfs, so I really don't think he fits the criteria here lol.
As much as those buffs did affect things early on, I don't think they're the reason that people cite him as bad. They're just salt added to the wound. A majority of his problems stemmed from the fact that other characters could do the same things he did, but better (Mostly SSJ Goku). The beam assist was his biggest benefit and his damage wasn't anything to sneeze at, but he was severely lacking in ways to get a consistent knockdown (and still is). Slicer was definitely a great move early on, but even if you reverted those back to the way they were, he would barely move at all tier-wise. A majority of his movement was due to the meta changing and getting powercrept.
First off just wanna say you are my favorite list or short form fighting game theory content maker. I never got the chance to play the old games as much and i’m currently learning 3S and i have always wanted to know: Out of the original SF2 turbo cast, what fighting game is each character best in? including all versions of all SF games and crossover games or cameo appearances. it would be really cool to see which game each character does best in, like i know Blanka is insanely good in CVS2 which is funny cause he’s usually pretty bad if i’m not mistaken. but beyond that it would be cool to see a video about this. You could also do one about which game each original SF character is worst in :D
Smash has King K. Rool as ours. Everyone pegged him as the best heavy in Ultimate and was just crushing locally. Turns out he’s just a pub stomp character who follows a strict neutral flowchart that once you can beat you essentially never lose to the character.
take everything with a grain of salt, there will always be that one player that will exploit something that is overlooked no matter what. fighting games are always evolving.
Oh yes, good old infiltration with his pocket Hakan.
I found your channel as an old Nago player who SWORE that we just needed to unlock the character and he would be godlike. I'm happy to see you and us few believers got ours in the end. Also I've been watching ever since, good stuff.
To be fair Goku black got nerfed 3 times. Knowkami even said he lost a huge set up you used to have. Remember jmcrofts." NOOOO THATS ALL HE HAD!"
That’s why I love marvel 3 so much. With the right team configuration, pretty much any character is viable even in high level play.
Yeah I'm glad you mentioned Nago. I remember the downplaying when he came out
Cant believe people clowned on Nago so hard. I dont even play Strive but I read about him on dustloop and soon as I read about how the blood meter works and how the key to playing him is to keep your blood high but not let it overflow, I knew that he was one of those characters who's gonna be insane in the hands of someone who can handle that management. And people are surprised about his damage? Hes literally labeled "One-Shot"-type by the game itself.
I remember no one was touching Morrigan in UMvC3 until soul spam was discovered.
People weren't playing Vergil as much early until they realized his X-factor was broken. It's hard to put single characters in 'tiers' in vs. fighting games because it's more about team synergy.
Even Strider. I remember when people saw that Ouroboros was level 3 super and not level 1 like in MvC/MvC2 he wouldn't be that good. Also he could die quickly, but people made him viable with X-factor because he was a mix-up machine.
Dr. Strange wasn't as popular upon until people figured out Impact Palm loops and Nova/Spencer/Strange synergy. I think it was Nemo who first rocked that team in a tournament and was bodying people.
Never trust these people after Nagoriyuki. Anybody with half a brain could see he was insane day one.
Hot off the results of The Big House 10, Yoshi in Smash Melee counts now. Lowest ranking in the tier list he's ever gotten was 22nd (out of a total of 26 characters). Then 1 player (aMSa) pushes his meta so hard that he singlehandedly moved him up the tier list. Most people would probably put him at around 10 nowadays. And Yoshi is one of the few characters who has now won a supermajor solo.
(afaik, Fox, Falco, Marth, Jigglypuff, Peach, Captain Falcon, Pikachu, and most recently Yoshi are the only characters who have ever achieved this in over 20 years of competition. Also worth noting that Smash Melee tier lists are really unbalanced if you're moving across tiers; if you're bottom tier, you're generally considered worthless)
I like how during the Black segment, we can see that Gotenks was also extremely underrated at the time. I don't think it was until after Evo that everyone realized how strong he was.
And like Elena, he was actually nerfed before that. So we never got to see Gotenks at the apex of his strength.
Staying in UMvC3, everybody keeps telling me Sentinal is garbage but his usage rate is through the roof
Dude's been all over major top 8s and even evo champion teams. Sentinel adds so much value to a team at any position that his flaws are more than made up for
He's good, but no longer one of the four gods like in MvC2. People overreacted and he got nerfed. Then people underreacted until pros learned how to use him.
@@Chadius pretty much this
@@jdrmanmusiqking he has one of the best assists in the game. This is primarily the reason why a lot of people use him. But he's not that impressive by himself. He's not bad outside of his assist. Just middling.
Funny how Happy Chaos in GGST got the same treatment as Nago IN THE SAME GAME. Everyone thought he was just a weird novelty with too many meters to manage until people started quickscope zoning and building crazy combos with gunshot. Now everyone says he "doesn't play Guilty Gear" (whatever that means) and should be removed from the game entirely.
I was a day 1 Nago main and I was on a similar page to you about him. I picked him cause I liked his aesthetic and he fits the "archetype" of fighting game characters that I like the most, there's no name for it but big slow characters who rely on medium range normals (onimaru from fantasy strike is another example). Over the course of the games development I watched Nago slowly climb the ranks in pro players tier lists, people didn't suddenly realise he was top tier it was a gradual climb, but with the benefit of maining him I was generally ahead of the curve, when people were saying he was bottom tier I thought he was mid, and when they were saying he was mid I thought he was high.
I miss the early days though cause these days Nago is one of those characters people love to hate, and I just mained him cause I thought he was cool, so its kind of a downer for me when people hate on him.
22:30 "minus on breathing" is fucking hilarious
Excellent video. All these newcomers that are used to seasonal balance patches that basically start begging for nerfs and buffs the instant a game launches or even during a beta like with SF6 have this really clinical approach to fighting games where there's only one truth and one way to play when in reality a small discovery can, and often does change the entire game. Just outside this video the comment section is full of examples of how someone that's considered either broken or busted turns out to be something entirely different as the game develops and new players find new tech. One of my favorite examples was how Akuma, one the few banned characters in SF history, used to be a tournament viable character in HD Remix before Damdai made it clear how the balances didn't really matter.
And it's not just about what's broken and what's not, sometimes people just get really efficient with characters and teams that aren't much utilized whether it's Xian with Gen, Gamerbee with Adon or Kusoru with a Viewtiful Joe/Rocket Raccoon/Frank team in UMV3. Characters or players that surprise everyone with something new or just by being played so well. Just let people play the game or try to overcome hurdles before throwing in the mitts and requesting a complete overhaul, especially if the game hasn't even launched yet. Playing a game for three days and already whinging for a balance patch just screams giving up.
I'm surprised you didn't mentioned Phoenix from MVC3, it took her a month or two to become top tier, but at first nobody thought it was worth saving your meter just so that she could transform into dark phoenix, especially cuz her life got drained on her own and she even needed to waste bar to get that life back and have a decent chance of surviving, it wasn't until a girl (can't recall her name) went to a local tournament and started winning matches by literally X-factor and mashing crouching light her way to victory.
Akuma in Tekken 7 deserves the num 1 spot and it's not even funny. He got nerfed in one of the earlier seasons and everyone said he was trash. Every pro player put him in low tier on tier lists until Super Akouma started doing the crazy optimal touch of death combos in tournament that he's now known for.
An honorable mention is Yamazaki in CVS2. Beforehand most tier lists always listed him on the lower end of mid tier. But now the best player in CVS2 actually has him in his main team.
It was crazy to me that people thought Nago was bad. He gets to do whatever he wants into a billion damage and the penalty for that is you get full screen normals. Shoot, I wasn't going to say anything because I wouldn't have minded the coolest character getting a buff but I'm glad people caught on so we get to see Nago all the time. I mean, even if he was bad my dude is a vampire samurai and that's just badass.
This is why I hate developers that freak out at the Reddit hive mind and swift patch games the first week they're out.
Multiversus did this with taz cause the children who played that game couldn't figure out what "spacing" was or wait an "active hitbox" is and just they nerfed him to the ground for no reason.
It happens all the time, a game comes out and people think XYZ character is broken till people figure the game out and it turns out they're not that good once you know how to work around em.
Melee has a whole lot of this. Some examples comparing the first tier list in 2002 to a tier list made by PG Stats from asking top players in 2021:
Jigglypuff started at a 17-18 tie with Ness. PG put it at 3rd, and it's commonly in contention for 2nd
Zelda dropped from 6th to 24th
Mario dropped from 5th to 15th
Zelda dropped from 6th to 24th
Yoshi rose from a 19-20 tie with DK to 10th (and thanks to amsa has recently received a major win)
Falcon rose from a 15-16th tie with Young Link to 6th
Even with the first tier list to put Fox at the top, you still get some weird stuff like Pikachu in 18th as opposed to the 9th it's at at present.
I don't think Ultimate has it nearly as insane, there were definitely characters hyped up prerelease like Rool and MK, but people very quickly realized they weren't anything special. The only real exception is Inkling, who got hyped up for a while but kinda just vanished eventually. They're not bad or anything, generally still considered good, but not the top tier people expected. They don't really show up that often.
Wesker could also teleport hit confirm off the gun shot too
The Akuma Tekken 7 situation was amazing as a spectator ... both top players from Japan and Korea played T7 for 2 whole seasons (not even counting the arcade run) and thought 2D characters were mid tier at best ... nobody in the west played Geese seriously and the only constant player was Super Akuma who everybody thought was an exception (like eyemusician for Yoshi) not playing the top tier just knowledge checking and winning games ... and then the Pakistanis invaded with Arslan's Geese (and Kazumi) and almost everybody had a pocket Akuma (shoutout Awais Honey for demonstrating how broken Akuma was and how dangerous it was in a tournament setting) and the pros were in shambles ... the tears never stopped since (well they did at launch Leroy but lets just forget that)
And Wesker WAS nerfed. Hard. Almost all his changes were buffs, but the one big nerf they gave him radically changed his gameplan and made him way less of a threat full screen.
I was right about Nago too, people thought blood gauge made him useless, but I knew he'd be fine even before I learned normal attacks put his meter down
The moment I saw what this list was for, I said Goku Black. I had friends who were calling him OP and I kept telling them he had virtually nothing outside of big normals.
I thought Gen in sf4 would make the list a lot of people thought he was low tier the same patch he won evo
Thank you! At least someone else is paying attention in here!
Forgot Akuma in tekken 7, almost Every one was saying he was mid tier at best when he was way more broken than he is now.
I would love a whole series about "playing effectively with the worst meta team/characters"
Some Smash examples in additions to the ones posted:
-Mr. Game & Watch in Ultimate, early on he was considered terrible (he lost the dthrow->up air confirm from Smash 4 that was his main way of getting KOs; all his windboxes were removed; his forward air change meant approaching was more difficult; his new forward air was very finicky and seemingly inconsistent) but gradually, Maister showed that he could actually get pretty good results. He's often considered top 20 or 15 now
-Very famously, Yoshi in Melee, considered low tier until some guy did really well with him
-Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but Palutena (Ultimate) kinda fell off after a couple years, she was considered top tier early on but people gradually found counterplay to some of her stuff I think. (She's not low tier though, just placed lower than before)
- Between Smash 4 and Ult: GnW lost dthrow -> uair, but got dthrow -> upB instead which is probably a net positive. That, combined with the buffs to his Smash attacks was enough to push him into that top 20 range.
- aMSa is the primary Yoshi player that proved his viability in Melee.
- Palutena is still top tier in Ult, just on the lower end. Received many small nerfs over the years, but still a very fundamentally solid character.
That Yoshi player's name is aMSa, and he actually just won his first supermajor at The Big House 10, beating out the likes of even Hungrybox and Mango. Kinda wild for a character that was once considered to be bottom ten for much of the game's life-even hitting as low as bottom five at some points.
@@Fitsi2Thanks for the corrections
For G&W I see dthrow->nair and upthrow->upB used more often than dthrow->upB, but either way his juggling is much better now. Just took people a while to see it I guess
11 months later and i feel like they balanced the release version based entirely on the first 15 seconds of this video
I dont really play Fighting games but I am an admirer and I love these kind of videos.
I knew nago was strong but blood management was a bit rougher than I enjoyed until we got the far slash blood recovery buff where it basically doubled how much it recovered. once that happened i was like oh yeah i super lover this char,
I had a feeling Nago was going to turn out to be practically broken once people learned to manage his blood rage properly.
Someone actually straight told me I was retarded for saying it lol
Noob from MK9 should get an honorable mention. Every player swore he was the most busted thing to ever happen to Mortal Kombat and after a year and a half he was trash tier.
The same Pros also said Cammy was super OP in SFV. She wasn’t, and never won a big tourney. What players don’t understand is that Pro players are just players and they can be biased. They don’t program the game, don’t design the art, go into long meetings on character designs, etc. Players just need to make their own assumptions.
This isn't true ...Xaoihai Cammy won like 4 majors and got top 2 in at least another 5 the first 2 years of SFV.
Wesker's sequencing/combos need a ground bounce assist and a good team super after the gun OTG like okami shuffle or parabolic legion arrow.
What a great video topic. I've already seen a few videos from you, but this is the one that made subscribe to your channel.
Characters the FGC got wrong. Ken and Kimberly from SF6, 10 months ago 😂
To be fair, a just as large portion of the players defended nago, including many pro players and we said that "he's only bad if you don't know how to control blood, stop unga-ing and start thinking". i was with you back then, i always said he was a strong character and that blood was just an attempt to hold his brokeness back... which back then i likewise thought was enough... it wasn't, it never was
Wtf the like button even got like a rainbow effect around it at 1:25
MASTA CJ one of the notable dorm players in this games lifespan, love to see old marvel players get referenced!
An episode on ugly ducklings would be pretty fun, characters that started out being weak and ignored but then found themselves to be absolute monsters with some buffs, like goldlewis.
Well with Wesker in MvC3 there was the DHC Glitch which they removed in UMvC3 which did indeed NERFED Wesker.
They also removed most of the hitstun on his gunshot. He could full screen gunshot teleport for a full combo.
His counter super also lost all invincibility making is basically useless
@@Jmunkholm yea I’m sure if jmcroft looked into it deep enough 😂
Please do more videos on this subject. Very interesting and enlightening.
I remember the moment I realized Nagoriyuki was top tier was about 2 weeks in when I examined the Potemkin vs Nagoriyuki matchup and noticed that Nago did basically everything Pot did, but better. His big buttons were bigger and lead to actual reward, his command grab gave good oki, his defensive buttons were better, his roundstart was amazing, and he could convert in situations where most characters couldn't. He couldn't abuse meter as well as Pot could pre PRC OS nerf, but that was about it.
No one believed me until Hotashi won EVO with him.
Wow... the Chun Li/Morrigan/Phoenix team strategy reminds me of League of Legends' hyper funneling. Toxic A.F.. I wouldn't be surprised if people got into fist fights for using that stuff lol
Nagoriyuki's Bloodsucking Universe/Purple-RC option select on the launch patch was absolutely miserable to play against.
It felt like he was a huge reason for the throw RC changes afterwards; the OS was available to everyone, but he had disproportionately more reward.
Did they change it? I never noticed that it couldn't be RCed, but I suppose I can't think of an instance of it being PRCed.
@@gamelord12 You can still PRC it if you whiff, but it's not an OS like it was on launch. The OS would allow you to PRC Bloodsucking Universe only on whiff, without messing up your Bloodsucking Universe on hit, which it would now.
Remember when people thought Happy Chaos wasn't very strong?
honestly, when Kim was first revealed in the leaked art... she was the only character I disked, immediately, and I don't even know why.
but since seeing her perform in the Beta, she has fast become my favorite new addition to the SF franchise
Ganondorf in Smash Ultimate is another one that comes to mind. For the first few months people thought he was actually decent for once, but as people learned the game and other would-be low tiers got buffed more than he did, he's pretty much universally considered the worst character in the game.