by Doc – Owner, Founder, On a Completely Unrelated Note, I Have a Date With a Lovely International Student At Some Point Next Week, and I’m Quite Looking Forward to It
I can’t remember the last time I heard an amiibo trainer gushing over Ridley or discussing his place in the meta. If I’m being completely honest, I have completely forgotten about Ridley’s existence in the amiibo meta since early 2020. Just the other day I was scripting out a draft for a possible upcoming video, and blanked on the fact that Ridley has been an A+ tier amiibo in vanilla tier lists for literally years.
Imagine my surprise when I booted up the Amiibots tier list I mentioned the other day, and saw this:
That… is not an A+ tier placement for Ridley. That’s a very not-A+ tier placement.
It’s worth noting that the Amiibots tier list is compiled of the average scores of the top 20 representatives of that character on Amiibots. At the moment, Ridley’s ranking is top-heavy, due in large part to two particular Ridleys, named “Spyro” and an edited one named “U R DED”. Spyro currently holds a whopping 38.90 rating for his trainer berniebrando, and “U R DED” holds a 37.64 for Azend_1. While Amiibots ratings always fluctuate in real-time, I don’t imagine they earned those ratings without consistently great performances.
For some perspective, the best Bowser sits at 36.11, and the best Kazuya sits only a half-point higher than Spyro at 39.31. It’s already silly that Bowser, Mii Gunner and Ridley are outpacing the perennial S tier crew of King K. Rool, Terry and Byleth, but on top of that we’re looking at a supposedly A+ Tier Ridley that’s within swinging distance of the best Kazuya. What the hell is going on? Has the community just completely got it wrong?
Maybe. Even the most widely-accepted and credible tier list, the USAC amiibo tier list that we host on Amiibo Doctor, is only the amalgamation of biased perspectives from a large selection of trainers. If even a handful of trainers have an abnormally strong opinion about an amiibo, they can collectively shift the rankings on the tier list up or down. It’s possible that we’ve gotten so used to Ridley being an A+ tier amiibo, and took it as a given, that we didn’t take proper notice of these two rockstars as they rose up, resulting in an undeserved A+ placement.
Unlike all prior amiibo tier lists, the Amiibots tier list isn’t an opinion-based tier list. It’s exclusively based on the results of the Amiibots matches, and as such carries far more persuasive weight than previous tier lists. It’s simple, objective tiering based on relative skill, and it seems to me that that objective tiering has revealed Ridley’s resurgence.
I can’t speak for any Ridley trainers, and certainly wouldn’t want to – after all, they’ve taken the brave steps of 1) remembering that Ridley exists and 2) training him far better than I ever would. But I can say that if there was ever a time for Ridley to become very popular in the amiibo meta, now is the time. I’ll be keeping an eye out for matches with these two Ridleys to analyze them in future Amiibo Doctor content, and for any future Ridleys that rise up to challenge these two.
Amiibo Doctor 