User:Toomai/On the order of things
It has recently occurred to me that some might see me as too biased towards my preferred order of listing things such as characters. So, I would like to provide some explanation as to how I developed my preferred order and why I believe it's superior to other possible orders.
Axioms
These are the basic principles I want the final order to adhere to, roughly in order of importance. If you disagree with these, then you probably won't agree with the order, and either one of us trying to argue is futile. Note that "keep characters of the same universe together" could be considered an axiom 0; I think it's too obvious to list.
- The relative order of two characters should not change between games.
- Strongly-related universes and characters should be grouped together.
- Third-party universes should always go last.
- Universes of starter characters should come before those of unlockable characters.
- Universes should go in the order first established in SSB64: series release date.
- Characters should be ordered such that the good guys come before the bad guys, and that the most important ones come first in those orders.
- Characters should be ordered so that the SSB64 guys come before the Melee guys (and so on).
- Characters should be listed in the order "starter", "easy to unlock", "hard to unlock".
Development
This is the basic thought process traversed upon creating the order.
Series
1. Order the universes of the Original 8 as presented in SSB64.
| File:MarioSymbol.png | File:DKSymbol.png | File:ZeldaSymbol.png | File:MetroidSymbol.png | File:YoshiSymbol.png | File:KirbySymbol.png | File:StarFoxSymbol.png | File:PokemonSymbol.png |
2. Move the Yoshi subuniverse to between Mario and DK. The Yoshi series is more connected to the Mario series than the DK series is.
| File:MarioSymbol.png | File:YoshiSymbol.png | File:DKSymbol.png | File:ZeldaSymbol.png | File:MetroidSymbol.png | File:KirbySymbol.png | File:StarFoxSymbol.png | File:PokemonSymbol.png |
3. Add in the unlockable characters' universes.
4. Add the universes introduced in Melee. Ice Climber goes first as it's represented by a starter character, while Game & Watch is after Fire Emblem because it's represented by a character that is almost certain to be the last unlocked (and the connotation that he's the surprise out-of-nowhere character).
5. Add the universes introduced in Brawl. Kid Icarus and Pikmin go first in that order for being starters and for Kid Icarus being older. Wario goes between Yoshi and DK: Wario is less connected to the Mario series than Yoshi, but more connected than DK.
6. Add the third-party universes. Sonic goes before Metal Gear because of the stronger Nintendo connection (more games on Nintendo systems in general, Mario sports crossovers).
Characters
1. Start with the following character order: "SSB64 starters", "SSB64 unlockables", "Melee starters", "Melee unlockables", "Brawl starters", "Brawl unlockables". Divided by universe, of course.
2. Make some changes to satisfy axioms:
- a) Move Dr. Mario to after Luigi. Grouping similar characters is more important than listing unlockables last.
- b) Move Young Link and Toon Link to after Link. Young Link for the reason stated above; Toon Link because while it breaks the idea of keeping games separated, it makes too much sense to put all three Links in a row. (Hence why Dr. Mario is not directly after Mario. If there were three different Marios (which there never should be), then maybe.)
- c) Reverse Peach and Bowser for axiom 6. The Brawl character selection screen did this, interestingly enough.
- d) Define an order for PT's Pokémon. Squirtle-Ivysaur-Charizard is decided because not only does it follow the stages of evolution, it happens to be how the Subspace Emissary operates. (The other likely order would be by Pokédex number, and having Ivysaur listed first seems unusual.)
Comparison to other orders
An extra warning that this is mostly based on the above opinionated axioms. If you have an order not listed here, list it on the talk page and provide some arguments.
Character selection screen order
This seems appropriate since it's based on arguably the most important menu in the game, right? But as it turns out they're actually pretty poor.
- Collectively: They break axiom 1.
- SSB64: Luigi comes first; this doesn't break any axioms, but it defies logic that Mario isn't first. Unlockables are on the ends and in the middle. Yoshi is separated from Mario.
- Melee: Dr. Mario comes first (see above); in fact 50% of the clones come before their originals. The middle row is objectively backwards, forced into being reversed so that Ganondorf is reasonably close to the other Zelda characters, meaning we need a special rule for reading the middle row right-to-left for things to flow as expected.
- Brawl: Must be read as columns instead of rows for universe grouping, unlike previous two games. Throws new one-character universes into soft spots in the middle without much regard for surroundings. It's certainly not as bad as the last two, but it's not particularly good either.
- Brawl's SSE: No. Just no. It does a pretty good job of organizing by game and unlockability, but it sacrifices universal groups for it, and that's a deal-breaker.
Alphabetical order
Just listing for completeness. Alphabetical order is a completely valid order in many cases and is probably the best choice in super-formal contexts. But when you want to list characters and not just their names, I think alphabetical order is too impersonal and stuffy.
