Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in competitive play
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's competitive scene is still rather young.
2018: Rapid Growth
Similar to Super Smash Bros. 4, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's competitive scene started before the game was released with the Super Smash Bros. Invitational 2018, an invitational tournament hosted by Nintendo at E3 2018 on June 12th, 2018. Similar to the last invitational, professional Smashers were invited to compete against each other, however this time only eight players were invited, four of them being top SSB4 players while the other four were top Melee players. The only invitee who participated in the previous tournament was ZeRo, who managed to defend his previous title and defeated MkLeo, winning his first Ultimate tournament.
When Ultimate was released on December 7th, 2018, many tournaments started hosting the game, with a good amount of them having over 100 attendees. By the end of the year, Ultimate's largest tournament, Umebura SP, had hosted 746 players, over 7 times more entrants than Smash 4's largest tournament in the same period of time.
2019: A Growing Meta
2019 started off with a bang, with over 2,000 Smashers participating in GENESIS 6. This tournament saw the first international appearance of Zackray, a 15-year-old from Japan who was a top player in SSB4. Despite being his first time in a tournament outside of Japan, Zackray made an impressive run by placing 5th and defeating top players such as K9sbruce and Light. MkLeo, a young Smash 4 prodigy, was also able to prove that he was still a top player by winning the whole tournament and double eliminating VoiD.
The Panda Global Rankings return for Ultimate, having almost the same mechanics as the previous season with some minor changes. The biggest change was the international multiplier, which counts entrants from tournaments outside of the continental US as 1.25 entrants, allowing more tournaments to have representation on the PGR. The season officially started with GENESIS 6 and and ended with Albion 4.
Despite the term "Echo Fighter" being heavily marketed as a new method of branding clone characters, players quickly noticed that the term was loosely inconsistent. While the term was used on all clones with little to no differences, a few other Echo Fighters had noticeable differences. Ken, Chrom and Lucina have all been seen as different enough from Ryu, Roy and Marth respectively to warrant being ranked separately from each other. Conversely, Daisy, Richter, and Dark Samus are commonly merged with their base fighters when ranking them, as they have minimal gameplay differences - or nonexistent in Daisy's case - from their parent characters. Dark Pit has been argued to fit in both categories, since while his only differences lie in his side special, neutral special, and Final Smash (the latter of which is not used in competitive play), his differences in those moves are fairly notable.
Final Smash Meters also became a topic of discussion, as despite having toned-down versions of Final Smashes, they were deemed too powerful and unbalanced to be accepted in competitive play early on, even with the randomness out of the picture. For example, Zelda's Final Smash, the Triforce of Wisdom, has been deemed extremely broken, while Jigglypuff's Final Smash, Puff Up, has been deemed as useless.
Character viability
During this period of time, many characters deemed unviable or barely viable in past iterations rose in popularity, including Palutena, Pichu, Wario, Shulk, R.O.B., Roy, and most infamously Wolf, whose potent neutral game and incredibly versatile moveset allowed him to have a huge playerbase that included players such as Zackray and MkLeo. Some characters, while being less viable than the aforementioned, have been noted as significant improvements over past iterations, such as Ganondorf, Falco, Jigglypuff, King Dedede, Zelda, and Mii Swordfighter. Olimar became a controversial character because of the perceived brokenness of his Pikmin moves; this is most evident with players such as Shuton, Myran, and Dabuz gathering great results with said character; this in turn has caused many players to call out Olimar players for being campy. Lucina, who was considered a downgrade from Marth in SSB4, is now considered much better than her counterpart, as she benefits significantly more from Ultimate's engine changes than Marth does. Ivysaur, once considered the worst of Pokémon Trainer's party, has been significantly buffed to the point of widely being considered the best. Other perceived top-tier characters included Peach (and her echo Daisy), Fox, Pikachu, Inkling, Greninja, and Snake.
Conversely, many characters who were top- or high-tier in their previous iterations have been heavily nerfed to the point where they have had limited or even nonexistent results in the early metagame. This includes Diddy Kong, Sheik, Marth, the Ice Climbers, Rosalina & Luma, Sonic, Ryu and most notably Bayonetta, who had been drastically nerfed as a result of her controversial dominance in SSB4. Other perceived low- or bottom-tier characters included Kirby, King K. Rool, Piranha Plant, Isabelle, Bowser Jr., and Little Mac; Little Mac especially has been considered by many as the worst character in the game, as the game's engine changes have severely harmed his SSB4 advantages.
Updates have changed certain characters for the better or worse. Notably, Mii Brawler, Captain Falcon, Mewtwo, Lucario, Corrin, Diddy Kong, Ryu and Ken were considered mediocre to terrible at launch, but were given significant buffs in updates that allowed them to become more viable in the eyes of many people. However, Peach, Pichu, Olimar and to a lesser extent Lucina and Wolf have received nerfs from game updates due to their notorious effectiveness; Pichu and Olimar have been affected the most by these nerfs so far.
Following Joker's release, he has become an extremely popular character among players, and MkLeo has since been maining him, becoming the best Joker player in the process and continuing to achieve excellent results with the character. As a result, Joker is generally regarded as a top-tier character.
Effects on other competitive scenes
Similarly to Brawl's competitive community when SSB4 was released, most SSB4 players transitioned to Ultimate when the game was released, causing the SSB4 scene to significantly decrease, if not completely disappear.
Unlike SSB4, Melee players have mostly praised Ultimate's engine, liking how some Melee techniques such as directional airdodges have made a return, as well as an increase in speed compared to the previous game. However, a few players noted that Ultimate's wavedashing is far less useful than it was in Melee, and the speed was still slightly below that of Melee. Although Melee tournaments still exist, many top Melee players such as Leffen and Mango have stated their interests in participating in Ultimate tournaments.
Ultimate was the only Smash Bros. game in EVO's lineup at EVO 2019, while Melee was relegated to a side event. How this affects Melee's competitive scene remains to be seen.
