Is Bowser the new Meta Knight in Super Smash Bros. 4?

[Trentonater]

MTZehvor said:

Trentonater said:

MTZehvor said:

Trentonater said:

MTZehvor said:
Short Answer: No

Long Answer: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Longer Answer: No; large characters almost never end up top tier in any fighting game ever. The tournament isn't high level play for one, people are unfamiliar with the tweaks made to the cast and don't know the ins and outs of this particular version of Smash yet for two, and the game itself isn't released yet in the first place, meaning that there could very well be plenty of buffs and nerfs to come. It's also worth noting that Bowser is still very, very slow; he's faster than Brawl, but his moves still look horribly unsafe. Players will figure out how to punish unsafe moves.

I think a more apt comparison to a character from past games is Ike. Bowser may very well be the Ike of Smash 4: Everyone thinks he's broken during the first month or so of playing the game, then you figure out how to get around his moves and punish his attempts to get in, and he drops to low tier pretty quickly.

You should play more fighting games. Sagat and Balrog dominated Street Fighter 2 and continued to dominate many of the early versions of Street Fighter 4. Then there was of course the infamous Rufus.  Astaroth, Nightmare, and Darth Vader have all been very strong in various Soul Calibur games. True Ogre was the best character in Tekken 3 and was top tier in Tekken Tag Tournament 1. Ganryu was top tier in tekken 5 DR and the undisputed best character in tekken 6 was Bob. Taka-Arashi in Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown is so heavy you can't even juggle him. He is widely considered one of the best characters in the game.

Plus bowser has a divekick. Divekick=instant top tier.

To be fair, size is much less of a factor in games like Soul Calibur and Tekken than it is for something like SF or Marvel, where there is much less of a concern of your opponent getting behind you.

I can't vouch for SF 2, but Sagat and Balrog are mid tier at best in SF4. Fei Long, Akuma, and Cammy are arguably the top tier, and you'll note that none of these are large characters, all with good speed. This is back from the original SF4 as well, before it got released every other year with a new adjective appended to the front.

Can't vouch for Virtua Fighter either, but just by looking up the only tier list compiled by a professional for the game, the character you mentioned is only 14th out of what I believe was 19 characters. Can't say that strikes me as "widely considered" being one of the best characters in the game.

Here are the rankings for older versions of Street Fighter 4. http://www.eventhubs.com/guides/2012/mar/29/tier-rankings-super-street-fighter-4-and-older-versions/  The rankings you mentioned were from Arcade Edition 2012.

Virtua Fighter 5 FS gets its tier list from Arcadia magazine. this http://virtuafighter.com/threads/arcadia-magazines-latest-tier-list.15737/ is the latest version. There is also a list from american players http://wiki.shoryuken.com/Virtua_Fighter_5:_Final_Showdown#Tier-list.

Generally slowness even in a 2d fighting game isn't a problem as long as they have good reach, damage, and fancy tools. Everyone remembers Sentinel in Marvel vs Capcom 2 and the original marvel 3. Not to mention one of the characters currently dominating BlazBlue Chronophantasma is Azrael.

First off, the SF4 rankings that you listed are all extremely old and are within 2 years of the game's release, nowhere near enough time for a community to fully dissect characters and figure out how to deal with difficult MUs. 

I'd like to see some sources behind the tier lists for the Virtua Fighter 5 magazine, as in which professional players contributed to it. The chart I found (mentioned later on in the topic) suggested that Taka was average tier at best:

But I digress. Even if he was somehow amazing tier, and even if both SF4 and SF2 had good big guy characters, that's a paltry 3 games out of dozens of fighting games with notable exceptions of "good" big guy characters. And I'm not saying that it's impossible for any large characters to be good, just that they're almost never top tier.

Which none of these characters are. There's a difference between simply being good and being top tier; the character you mentioned in Virtua Fighter 5 is at best second tier on the sources you've linked, and even that's been somewhat controversial.

As for Sentinel in MvC3, he really was not that good. Again, similar to Ike, everyone thought he was good until players figured out how to beat him. By the time Ultimate rolled around, his usage in high level play had fallen off dramatically, and that was a mere year after vanilla released.

Keep in mind that the metagame in fighting games takes a long time to develop. I'll reference Marvel again; it took a while before people realized just how good Vergil was, for instance. People also thought Wesker was horribly broken for a while, and now he's not even in most people's top 3 characters in the game. Just because a character at one point was thought to be very good, doesn't mean they will stay that way long term.

I agree that the metagame for fighters takes a while to develop. That is why people assumed Jacky was bad at first in Final Showdown but now he is considered top tier  with Taka. Arcadia magazine does take input from all arcade players. This includes champions like Fuudo.  Your chart is mostly just the frequency of use for the characters and the skill of the players using them. Not a tier list. Even in Final Showdown, Akira is the hardest hitting character even though he is not physically large. he is still in the mid-heavyweight class. 

The reasons the tier lists changed in SF4 was not because of developing meta game. It was because of the constant patching and nerfs capcom was making. Sagat, Balrog, Honda, etc. were nerfed in later versions. What made them good before was no longer there. SF4, SSF4 ,SSF4AE ,SSF4AE 2012, and USF4 are all different games balence wise.

Sentinel was nerfed.

Though whatever. I give you definitive examples and then you try to downplay them even though they are real tier lists with examples of heavy top tier characters.