Board 8 > Best of the Trope Season 2: Day 188 - Tier Induced Scrappy

(+) Yeah! (+)

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Best of the Trope!

Here are the rules. Each day, I will post a trope from TV Tropes, and each poster can name up to three examples of that trope. Whichever nomination gets the most mentions wins! Posters may also name as many Honourable Mentions as they like, but they are purely optional and will not count towards the running score. You may look at the TV Tropes page for that day's trope for examples, but you do not have to pick all your examples from the page. You can nominate whatever examples you like, as long as they qualify for the trope. Each trope will last around 24 hours before the next one goes up.

Posters may also nominate any tropes they wish to see come up during the series. This is optional, and you don't have to do it every day, or at all. Tropes will be randomly selected from the list each day, except for some occasions where I will pick a thematically appropriate trope that may or may not be on the list.

Here's the list of previous tropes, so if you wish to nominate some tropes, check on here that it wasn't previously done. http://board8.wikia.com/wiki/Best_of_the_Trope

Trope list:
That One Level
Game-Breaker
Cruel and Unusual Death
Squishy Wizard
Magic Knight
The Reason You Suck Speech
Storming the Castle
Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence
Mentor Occupational Hazard
Clipped Wing Angel
Torch the Franchise and Run
Trash the Set
Grand Finale

The winner of yesterday's trope, Lampshade Hanging, was How did Yzma and Kronk get there first? (The Emperor's New Groove), which got 5 votes.

Previous Winners: Day 151 Onwards
Despair Event Horizon - John Wick's dog is killed (John Wick)
A**hole Victim - Joffrey Baratheon (Game of Thrones)
Crutch Character - Marcus (Fire Emblem 7)
Your Soul is Mine - Maximillian Pegasus (Yu-Gi-Oh!) / Shang Tsung (Mortal Kombat) / Dementor's Kiss (Harry Potter)
Pop-Cultured Badass - Deadpool
Acquitted Too Late - Tom Robinson (To Kill a Mockingbird)
Lightning Bruiser - The Flash (DC Comics) / Bob Barker (Happy Gilmore)
Me's a Crowd - Naruto / Multiple Man (X-Men)
A Taste of Power - Samus (Metroid Series)
Shrinking Violet - Violet (The Incredibles)
Stone Wall - Shuckle (Pokemon)
One Scene Wonder - The Black Knight (Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
Magikarp Power - Magikarp (Pokemon) / Pawn (Chess)
Joke Character - Pichu (Super Smash Bros Melee) / Dan Hibiki (Street Fighter)
Lethal Joke Character - L-Block (GameFAQs Contests)
Stupid Statement Dance Mix - They're Taking the Hobbits to Isengard / All Your Base
Giant Space Flea from Nowhere - Necron (Final Fantasy IX)
Roaring Rampage of Revenge - The Punisher (Marvel Comics) / John Wick / The Bride (Kill Bill)
Glass Cannon (Redux) - Tracer (Overwatch) / Hypno Disc (Robot Wars) / Nightmare (Battlebots)
Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome - Marie (The Bourne Supremacy)
Even the Girls Want Her - Lana Kane (Archer)
Even the Guys Want Him - Gaston (Beauty and the Beast) / Big Boss (Metal Gear Solid)
Mighty Glacier - Tohru (Jackie Chan Adventures)
Breather Boss - Morpha (Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) / Gi Nattak (Final Fantasy VII)
Big Bad Friend - Big Smoke (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas)
Launcher of a Thousand Ships - Nightwing (DC Comics)
Evil Cripple - Mr. Glass (Unbreakable)
Breather Level - 100 Acre Wood (Kingdom Hearts)
Beef Gate - Automatic 4-Star Wanted Level (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas)
One True Love - Buttercup and Westley (The Princess Bride) / Shrek and Fiona (Shrek)
Cliffhanger - The Snap (Avengers: Infinity War)
Anti-Climax Boss - Yu Yevon (Final Fantasy X)
Lights Off, Somebody Dies - Devil / Anthology of Interest (Futurama) / And Then There Was Shawn (Boy Meets World)
Broken Base - Sub VS Dub (Anime) / Original VS Reboot (Devil May Cry) / Country VS Pop (Taylor Swift) / Casual VS Competitive (Super Smash Bros) / Genwunners (Pokemon)
Difficult But Awesome - Ana (Overwatch)
Disc One Nuke - Hawlucha (Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon)

Today's trope is Tier Induced Scrappy. Here is the link: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TierInducedScrappy

Two variations of The Scrappy specific to Video Games and/or Tabletop Games.

The first, often seen in fighting games, concerns the best characters getting hated not out of a hatedom but for being overused and/or downright difficult to defeat due to their high power, gameplay-wise; understandably, those two points get on a lot of people's nerves and tend to be favored by other people. Characters who are Difficult, but Awesome tend to avoid this fate because they are hard to play well, but disproportionately powerful examples can still earn this status. A typical Tier Induced Scrappy is a high tier character with next to no learning curve, though high learning curve characters who are unreasonably difficult to beat when played by a master (especially if they also happen to be extremely frustrating to play against and/or boring to watch) can and will earn this status. Stone Wall and Gradual Grinder characters are the most common candidates for this trope (especially heavy zoners), though touch-of-death rushdown characters (particularly ones with good approach options) also tend to earn the playerbase's hatred. Characters with massive weaknesses who are strong in spite of those weaknesses are also common targets just based off of principle; people hate Fake Balance, and these characters are often powerful when they shouldn't be. See also Too Qualified to Apply.

The other, more common to RPGs, is a character who is widely hated because they just suck in gameplay terms. They might be the nicest person in the world, but if they're The Load in combat or gameplay, their fate is decided. A Low Tier Induced Scrappy has no Magikarp Power; they're bad from the start and there just doesn't seem to be any point in training them when there are other, more rewarding characters on hand.

The final and rarest breed is a character who has been in both positions at least once; this tends to happen to characters with movesets that are very sensitive to metagame shifts (which can and often will make previously useless characters into rising stars), and characters with awkward or outdated movesets also tend to fall victim to this due to the difficulty of balancing them without giving them buffs that leave them obnoxiously overtuned rather than genuinely good or nerfs that make their whole kit fall apart. Gimmick characters tend to fall victim to this due to the inherent difficulty of balancing a character around one very specific gameplay element, and when they are powerful, they are often frustrating to deal with and/or overtuned to make up for their often glaring weaknesses.

TL,DR: This character is hated for being either way too powerful or way too weak, or both at different points.

Nominations:
Meta Knight (Super Smash Bros Brawl)
Wesker (Marvel VS Capcom 3)
Bob (Tekken 6)

Wesker (Marvel VS Capcom 3)
Cable (Marvel vs. Capcom 2)
One Man Army (Modern Warfare 2)
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Meta Knight (Brawl)
Bayonetta (Smash 4)
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Every class, at different points (Hearthstone)
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Bayonetta (Smash)
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Meta Knight (Brawl)
Bastion (Overwatch)
Mercy (Overwatch)
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GavsEvans123 posted...

Meta Knight (Super Smash Bros Brawl)

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Hbthebattle posted...

Meta Knight (Brawl)
Bayonetta (Smash 4)

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Barbarian (Board Game Online)
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Hbthebattle posted...

Meta Knight (Brawl)
Bayonetta (Smash 4)

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Reinhardt (Fire Emblem Heroes)
Barbarian (Board Game Online)
Garchomp (Pokemon)
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Meta Knight
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Meta Knight (Super Smash Bros Brawl)
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Sharla- Xenoblade Chronicles (I like her actually, but she is easily the worst character)
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Rankings so far:
Meta Knight (Super Smash Bros Brawl) - 8 votes
Bayonetta (Smash 4) - 4 votes
Wesker (Marvel VS Capcom 3) - 2 votes
Barbarian (Board Game Online) - 2 votes
Bob (Tekken 6)
Cable (Marvel vs. Capcom 2)
One Man Army (Modern Warfare 2)
Every class, at different points (Hearthstone)
Bastion (Overwatch)
Mercy (Overwatch)
Reinhardt (Fire Emblem Heroes)
Garchomp (Pokemon)
Sharla- Xenoblade Chronicles

Petshop (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future)
Meta Knight (Super Smash Bros Brawl)
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