Game Theory: Why Ridley is Smash's Deadliest Fighter! (Super Smash Bros Ultimate)

And now Game Theorists Theater presents a dramatic recreation of Bowser stepping into Big Blue. (Introduction) Hello internet! Welcome to

game

theory

. The Joker no one is excited to see enter the big conversation. So when I've covered Smash in the past, it's always been on a larger scale, piecing together the story, looking for secret levels hidden in the

game

's code, doing things like Calculate the infinite number of ways you can play this game. All of those episodes are In fact, I linked you right there in the top right corner of the screen. But today I really wanted to do something different.

I want to focus on something a little smaller, a little more subdued. A character, a movement. Seems silly right? But this is not just any movement, my friends. It is a move that is faster than Sonic. It's stronger than Ganondorf, a move that is so brutal and violent that it takes Gaur Plain and suddenly transforms him into Gore Plain, for all Nintendo, ha, you wish you hadn't included this move because it technically ruins the E rating for everyone. . You see, one of my favorite things about Smash is its ability to test the limits of characters' moves and items.

Smash Brothers is one of the venues, if not the only one, to test different

fighter

s from different franchises against each other. You want to compete against a

super

sonic. hedgehog and an electric rat, great! You can do that. How about an all-out fight between the two most famous reptile kings in video games to see which one reigns? this game because you're always surprised by the results, like the fact that little Mac here, who literally can't recover to save his life, is somehow able to escape the highest hit in the game. Faster than you could say final destination, no element sucks that Kirby. with increased speed and jumping ability That's according to a Nintendo Unity video, by the way.

Or the fact that there are multiple ways to create a move that instantly makes the lightsaber noise for 999 percent damage because spirits are broken and this game is fun. But It was while watching another of these types of videos that I was inspired to make Today's Theory You See in December, the channel's community game actually made a video testing who could survive running on the Big Blue stage. Now to catch you up, Big Blue is a level inspired by the racing game f-zero, a game that takes NASCAR and turns the dial up to 11 because now you have racers flying around the track at hundreds of miles per hour.

Now in Smash the Big Blue stage actually has you fighting on top of a jet and then some of the smaller race cars, all the while the track flies by below you if you land on that track. It's almost an instant kill as the platform races forward to drop you off. in the dust and as a mere explosion off the screen. As such, you can also treat the Big Blue Highway almost like a giant treadmill, a treadmill that is so fast that only the fastest characters can keep up with it. But according to this video game community, even those fast runners can use the help of an item.

This is me injecting those characters with some extra juice, but not death juice or steroids or anything like that, this is brand friendly guys. Although we're talking about brutally murdering childhood pets when I say extra juice I mean injecting them with a bunny hood or a spiritual boost or heck some mega mushrooms. YouTuber Aaron Voe did an incredible job of running tests to create a tier list of everyone's ability to survive. This level thus ranks everyone's speed and the results are what you expect Sonic to be at the top, right? The only character that is able to survive solely with the help of a mega mushroom and then you have Fox Captain Falcon chic and littlemack following you now, that's cool and all, but there is someone who is faster, someone who doesn't need items to...

Overcome the big blue race track? We all assume that Sonic here is the fastest character in this game because it's his trademark and all, but he's not, he's actually Ridley, the fire-breathing space pirate dragon from Metroid, a character who has died so many times that he has more lives. Now more than a cat, Ridley is a brutal character. He says a lot when the introduction of him to this game series is him literally killing the game's mascot, but it's the B attack ahead of him. That's particularly unique. He can lift his opponent with his claws and then simply physically lift them up. drag them along the ground and if that wasn't violent enough, he can actually do it fast enough to outrun the flying Falcon in this footage right here.

In reality, he is outpacing a plane flying over a futuristic NASCAR race. It's true that things in the Smash Brothers series should always be taken with a grain of salt in the name of balance. We need to tweak things a little so that when Palutena, who is literally a God faces off against Isabel, a Shiba Inu. It doesn't end up like a one-sided stomp, but still, the speed and violence of this move is unprecedented in the Smash Brothers series and when you really stop and do the math behind what's really happening. as part of this movement?

Suddenly, this familiar game turns into a gruesome bloodbath, so be careful the next time you choose your favorite character to play. Because maybe you don't want them to have to go through the physical horror that this movement will subject them to. Think about this if you've ever scraped your knee on the pavement. You know how much a small scratch on the ground will make you at low speed. Just imagine the level of devastation that would happen if you went at any speed.

ridley

is going here. Where others decide to speculate, game

theory

decides to calculate *loud clicking noise* It lasted much longer than I expected, and that's exactly what we're going to do today.

The first factor we need to consider here is how fast an olive

ridley

sea turtle would do it. You have to move to overcome the speed of the stage. Now when you play without obstacles on the stage, all you get is the Falcon steering wheel flying along the race track. However, this is not particularly useful for our calculations. Believe it or not, the Falcon steering wheel never appears in any s-0 game Yeah, as prominent as this thing is in Smash Brothers. His only connection to the f-zero story is a comic book frame from the first game's instruction manual and then a page later you have this blatant copy of Spider-Man's kingpin.

No, to get an accurate reading of this speed stage, you actually need to activate the stage hazards, which unleashes a legion of real racing cars that can be played in f-zero games. And that part is essential because F-Zero is a racing game. And like any good racing game. It has a speedometer that we can then use to measure what kind of speeds these racers would travel at on the Big Blue course. Now to calculate Big Blue's speed here in

smash

ultimate

. In fact, we did 30 runs of the big blue trek here in f-zero GX in standard mode.

Now it's worth mentioning that Big Blue's track in Smash is very different from how it actually looks in the f-zero game. For consistency's sake, we actually noted the average speed only on the straights. Those 30 races were spread across three different racers: Blood Hawk, Super Falcon, and Fire Stingray, all the cars we see in Super Smash Brothers in all of that data. We found an average speed of 1087 kilometers per hour, which for us who still live in the United States is 675.4 miles per hour, which is pretty tame by f-zero standards, but for a group of normal

fighter

s that is a ridiculous speed. "Prepare the ship for ridiculous speed." .

Especially if you're the guy being dragged by the fire-breathing space dragon. From there we can estimate Ridley's speed. It takes just 14 seconds to drag part of the entire stage if you want to be exact. Actually, it's thirteen point nine eight. And in that period of time. You're actually traveling a distance of about 98.5 feet based on the relative sizes of Fighters Ridley's average speed, so it would be the speed of the race cars plus the amount Ridley is earning on those vehicles for a total of 680 .2 miles per hour 680 MILES PER HOUR, that is, one hundred miles per hour faster than the speed of a commercial airplane.

He is almost flying at the speed of sound, which is 761.2 miles per hour 1225 km/h. Technically, it's at point eight eight Mach, which is actually an interesting coincidence since point eight eight Mach is actually a fairly common flight speed. You see, most things in life have a most efficient or optimal configuration and in the case of flying this is often based on the shape of a wing, now on average both airliners and airplanes . Fighter jets choose to fly near the eight eight Mach speed point because they get the best gas mileage relative to their wing design once you start getting much faster than that.

You actually start to get disturbances in the air due to minor shock waves that occur as you get closer. The speed of sound now I don't think any of that was intentional on the part of the

smash

team. I just think it's a really cool coincidence that Ridley is flying at those speeds. Well, I guess it's great for him. It's absolutely devastating for any cute Nintendo mascot unlucky enough to get caught in his paws. Let's talk about damage, shall we? People who fall from motorcycles at speeds above 50 miles per hour can suffer third-degree rashes. If not worse, now third degree rashes, like third degree burns, are no joke, like exposed muscles and bones.

It's no joke, so if that's 50 miles per hour, here Ridley is dragging people down the road at over ten times that level of speed, imagine how much more damaging and painful that would be. Oh wait, no need. I calculated it so you have a better idea of ​​what Ridley Road Rash would seem useful to understand conceptually What is road accident really? Why does it hurt to suffer a sprain? Well, scratches are caused by friction, that's why it doesn't hurt when you go down a slide and fly down a slide and the slide is specifically designed to have low friction, the rougher the surface, although the higher the friction and the damage will be worse. and there are few things as rough as asphalt and they prove it.

In fact, today we have a special guest on a part of the roads of Los Angeles. Angelenos wonder why their potholes are so bad. We are a group of YouTubers who steal pieces of their roads to entertain YouTube videos. Congratulations, but seriously, look how hard this thing is. . It's like the most aggressive loofah in the world. Yes, this is bad, but there is another component of friction that we must take into account. What is called a normal force that acts perpendicular to the direction of your motion? It's basically a more complicated scientific way of saying, "Hey, the more you're pressed against something, the more friction you'll have." This combination of the two factors, the roughness of the surface and the force with which you press when you rub them, is expressed by a fun mathematical formula.

F equals a Now, whoever says Science and Fun hasn't learned about friction force equations. , I am right? above! awkward silence We are all we are all my math and science nerds add up Silence Okay, so the first step in the equation is the friction force F sub f which is equal to the coefficient of friction little, you look at the number a number that represents the surface roughness multiplied by the normal force and what we just talked about. So to find out which part of Mario's face is turning into a human pavement eraser, imagine this is Mario.

We need to determine two separate things. First. How rough Big Blue's track is and secondly how much deadly rage Ridley is putting into his B-side drag attack as he rubs Mario's face into it and you get this. Oh, Mario, that's a couple of inches shorter and also a knuckle-scratching cue. The first question is easy. We'll assume the track is just asphalt like most other NASCAR tracks now, to be fair the f-zero racers use futuristic magnetic levitation systems that allow them to float above the track. Therefore, there is a small chance that the clues were made. of some smooth metal such as titanium.

But considering the fact that Ridley performs this move on all types of surfaces, on all different textures using asphalt, it won't be that difficult here, therefore our coefficient of friction will be 0.9. Then comes the question of how hard Ridley is pushing people onto the stage. Now Ridley doesn't seem like the type to take a beating from him. So what it calculates is as if he was pushing his victim to the ground using all of his weight. Ridley in games. He doesn't have a cannon weight, hell, Ridley doesn't even have himself. The height of a cannon, I mean its size constantly changes throughout the Metroid series.

Did you think the ridley meme istoo big was just an argument for Smash Brothers fandoms. Ah, think again, friends. Here's Ridley's height compared to Samus in the original Metroid for NES and Here's his height in Metroid Zero Mission, which is supposed to be a remake of this original game in Metroid 1. Here's Ridley. He's like 25% taller than Samus and then here. on mission zero. He is literally 111% taller than Samus and is literally twice as tall as Samus. And if you want more examples of Ridley's fluctuating size throughout these games, montage time! So why does all this matter?

Well, Ridley's size relative to Samus is important because while Ridley isn't cannon-sized, Samus is, according to the Metroid manual, Samus in her suit is one hundred and ninety centimeters tall, which means she's six feet and three inches. . From there, we can use Smashes' character scale to our advantage, like for the first time in one of these theories. It allows us to resolve the disagreement that exists exactly how big Ridley is in relation to Samus. Obviously, the scaling in these games is not exact. But if there's one thing we can count on, it's that these games try to be somewhat faithful to their source material.

I mean, Sonic is really fast. Bowser. It's slow but powerful and hell, the cold stare of the villagers is as heartless as it ever was in the Fire Burning animal crossing games. And with that being said, we can discover that Ridley's model appears to be about 25% taller than Samus. as he was in Metroid 1, so let's go with that, that would make him 238 centimeters standing or about 7 feet 10 inches tall. Using this approximation of Ridley's size, we can now estimate its weight based on all the details of Ridley's design. It is closer to an American alligator, a reptile that actually weighs between 200 and 400 kilograms or, in the United States, 440 and 790 pounds.

Standing just under 8 feet tall, Ridley would actually tend to be on the smaller size for the species. We'll just take that lower limit as the 440 pound range, now ladies and gentlemen it's finally time to have some fun and by fun I mean plugging hypothetical numbers into a scientific formula that has a nice acronym to remember by solving for f we find that the force of Friction is 2478 Newtons, which makes no sense. Newtons are always strange to interpret, so you know, today we don't care about the digits, we care about the damage, so let's translate this into some destruction, shall we?

Now, in a previous game theory episode covering how deadly Mario Kart racing is, we determined that in a car accident, for every mile per hour you go over 30, you will lose a millimeter of your body, spin the clip. Since the average thickness of human skin is 1.3 millimeters at 31 miles per hour, if you hit the ground, you're losing most of the skin covering your delicate internal parts. Ridley is dragging you 650 miles per hour faster than that, that means. 25 inches of your favorite character's body is just disappearing into the pavement That's this, and then another one of these, and then, like, two more inches 25.5 inches More than two feet of human flesh or poke some more eye-catching Kirby meat than It just got erased.

Also notice how Ridley is actually dragging your character's body. Here he is not using you like the long end of a pencil. He's dragging you down in so many ways, which means every inch of your body feels the burn and then guess what doesn't feel that burn anymore because he's just crushed into nothingness. He's gone. Your body is not two feet thick. I mean, you may be thick, but not that thick, you're just gone, and wait, that's not all, that number assumes you don't have a 400 pound space dragon pushing your face into it. dirt if you don't think that's going to affect the numbers at all Well, then you don't do game theory, bro.

If they don't wipe two feet off your body, it was bad now for every mile per hour over Ridley's 30. goes suddenly You're losing three point five millimeters of flesh Yes, that's two thousand two hundred and seventy-five millimeters of flesh torn from your body almost 90 inches or seven and a half feet rubbed against the ground with this movement No It doesn't matter if he holds you upright side, up, down, diagonally. Who cares? You're just gone, you've been erased into oblivion, the pencil that the eraser on your body is attached to suddenly squeaks against the paper it's trying to erase because the metal is now hitting it and just thinking about that sound makes me shudder. worst.

Always feeling like the pencil man. Sure, your damage counter may only read a mere 17 percent or 20 percent or whatever, but Ridley just grated your Jigglypuff into the ground in this game. Yes, it's all for fun. It's all nice. Oh, look at how our favorite characters punch each other in the face. Yes,

super

fun No, in real life, if you do the math, Ridley is literally tearing them apart. Using the ground, forget that Mariokart is the

deadliest

Nintendo game, ladies and gentlemen. We have a new champion. So next time look at that huge. List of faces begging you to pick them up now with the new additions of Joker and Piranha Plant.

There is only one clear choice to make, if you want to brutalize your opponent and I mean, really hurt them. The choice is obvious, Ridley, always, even if you don't officially win the match, you and I and the rest of us theorists will know that you're doing a hell of a lot more damage than Nintendo here wants to admit. But hey, that's just a theory, A GAME THEORY! Thanks for watching! Erase me This is me erasing Oh no, they are rubbing me into dirt, it's very painful! (HA HA HA)