When I first started working on this I thought I would come up with a scientific approach to character rankings. That was foolish of me. It's the ineffability of tier lists that makes them fun to discuss! Some characters are stronger than others, but the precise order is unknowable. Good news is that a simple name change was enough to keep the ship afloat:
Blanka Diagram and Tourney Trends
Below I juxtapose players' rankings with real-world tourney results. This is offered as an academic curiosity; I want to stress that I make no claim about a relationship between the two sets of figures.
UPDATE 3/20/12: AFO sent some updated match-up assessments.
Part One: Blanka Diagram
In this table I've compiled character ranking information for Blanka from a wide variety of sources.
Internet
I was going to include the numbers from this wiki but it's broken at the moment.
T.Akiba
Super Diagram Turbo
Average of all rows and columns. Also see that link for a basic explanation of the character ranking diagram concept.
Huekie Saver
Individual Players
Real Decoy and Kareeeeem are new for this post. Thank you, brothers. The other ranks are older — all from before the Arcadia chart.
Magazines
Gamest - 1994
Arcadia - 2008
Real Results
The percentages from part two below rounded to the nearest five with the decimal point moved one place. Again, I make no claim about what this means.
| Char. | RY | KE | EH | CH | ZA | GU | DH | TH | CA | FE | DJ | BX | CL | SG | DI | +/- | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Internet | 3 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 8 | 6 | 4 | 8 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 7 | -3 | T.Akiba |
| 3.5 | 4 | 4 | 3.5 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 2.5 | 3 | 4 | 2.5 | 5 | -9 | Super Diagram Turbo | |
| 3 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 8 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 5 | 6 | 5 | -2 | Huekie Saver | |
| Players | 5 | 5 | 4.5 | 5.5 | 7 | 7.5 | 6 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 4.5 | 2.5 | 3.5 | 3 | 5.5 | +0.5 | Decoy |
| 3 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 7 | 5 | 3 | 8 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 6 | -15 | Kareeeeem | |
| 3 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 6 | -17 | AFO | |
| 4 | 5 | 2 | 5 | 6 | 6 | 3 | 7 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 5 | 3 | -14 | AR2-CNA | |
| 4 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 6.5 | 5 | 4.5 | 8 | 5 | 4.5 | 3.5 | 3 | 4.5 | 4 | 6 | -3.5 | Shinryu | |
| Magazines | 5 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 7 | 6 | 4 | 7 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 0 | Gamest |
| 2.5 | 5 | 2.5 | 3 | 6 | 4 | 2 | 7 | 4 | 3.5 | 2.5 | 2.5 | 3.5 | 2 | 6.5 | -18.5 | Arcadia | |
| Results | 4.5 | 5 | 2.5 | 4 | 5.5 | 5.5 | 3.5 | 7 | 6 | 4.5 | 5 | 2.5 | 3.5 | 5.5 | 4.5 | -6 | All Matches |
| 3.5 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 5.5 | 5.5 | 2.5 | 7 | - | 4.5 | 3 | 1.5 | 4.5 | - | 5.5 | -9 | Top Players |
Part Two: Tourney Trends
These two charts show Blanka players' wins and losses going back to 2000. Results come from Japanese tournaments in various formats. I've got events big and small: from X-Mania and SBO through five-man Game41 tourneys but I'm light on Star Cup results as those are not typically posted game-by-game. No gachi battles nor casuals. HSF2 when both sides used ST characters.
The grey bars for Blanka just show how often they encountered each other. Results vs. other Old Honda players were set aside. Also set aside were characters that came up very few times: O.Sagat (10), O.Ryu (8), O.Zangief (6), O.Dhalsim (1), O.Cammy (1), Akuma (1)
The "top player" graph includes fights amongst the following players. There were too few matches for Blanka vs. Cammy and Blanka vs. Sagat.
Ryu: ShootingD, Daigo, Gotoh, Kurahashi
Ken: Mattsun, Aniken
E.Honda: Hamaki, Kusumondo, Roku
Chun-Li: Otochun, Tojo, Nuki
Blanka: Komoda, Nakamu, AFO
Zangief: Kakky, Pony, Gunze
Guile: Kurahashi, Muteki, ShootingD, Kikai
Dhalsim: Gian, Hakase, Yoshimura
Hawk: Mayakon, Viper, Toutanki
DeeJay: Seki, Ito, YuuVega, Yuzuru
Fei-Long: Noguchi, K, Hanashi
Boxer: Tama, Tsuji, Shiki
Claw: ARG, MAO, Noguchi
Dictator: YuuVega, Taira, Onishi
wow the second half ( wins/losses )is nothing less than shocking to me but so interesting.
ReplyDeletedjfrijoles
This is an amazing post. Awesome, man.
ReplyDeletenice, it's really cool to see the data presented so cleanly.
ReplyDeletedo you think the last chart might be a good representation for Blank'a matchups? i know there's some differences of opinion vs Claw and vs Guile
There's way too little data. Even if you tried to do something like this for SF4 just not enough tourney matches occur you're always going to be light. People could just fight long sets FOR SCIENCE like AFO vs. yaya 100 games but casual not the same as tourney plus different kind of endurance comes into play.
ReplyDeleteAnd b) no matter what we're talking about human players. Top players in fact possibly the most idiosyncratic. I mean Daigo his ultimate weapon is unpredictability but he gets carried away with it sometimes waits an odd beat when he could have simply pressed a button. Or in ST Yuu will run a health deficit just to crush your soul when he beats you but it doesn't always work.
{nohoho said...Or in ST Yuu will run a health deficit just to crush your soul when he beats you but it doesn't always work.}
ReplyDeletehaha are you serious ?? he really does this ?
Not like he intentionally takes hits but y'know
ReplyDeleteThis is... absolutely electrifying!
ReplyDelete