ProtoBanham outdid all of them and managed to win the tournament to boot, winning four sets against PGRU Top 15 players (two against Zackray, one against Shuton and one against Tea). His other wins in Top 64, over Yoshidora and Sigma, came against arguably the best users of their respective characters, Yoshi and Toon Link.
Despite the relatively small size of Kagaribi 4 compared to S- and A-Tiers from past seasons, ProtoBanham still managed to accumulate one of the highest Upset Factors we've ever seen. Upset Factor is a statistic that measures how much farther the player who was upset was projected to make it in bracket than the winner in terms of losers bracket rounds. ProtoBanham's Upset Factor for Kagaribi 4 was a whopping 30, largely thanks to his two Upset Factor 9 wins over Zackray. Across Ultimate's history of S- and A-Tiers, only six other players have reached that mark,
While impressive, their wins simply don't stack up to the glut of top players ProtoBanham ran through to win Kagaribi 4, with only KEN's run at Umebura SP3, where he finished 3rd as the 29th seed (+7 SPR) including multiple PGR players (ironically enough, KEN also beat ProtoBanham at that tournament in Losers Semifinals, a matchup of the 29th seed against the 47th seed).
Yoshidora's winners run was stopped by ProtoBanham in Top 8, but Japan's top Yoshi put together yet another impressive tournament after putting himself on the map with a second place finish at Sumabato 17, where he was only felled by Atelier's Pokémon Trainer. The Japanese scene has long been familiar with Yoshidora, particularly the online players. On Japan's online system Smashmate, Yoshidora was one of just seven players to attain what was considered a "Tier 1" ranking, and he has stayed at a high level whenever he has attended offline events, finishing Top 6 at four of the five offline events he has attended in our database.
Yoshidora's set count in those five tournaments now sits at a ridiculous 43-9 (83%). And in his limited chances against PGRU players, Yoshidora has made them count. After picking up set wins on Choco, Eim and Lea at Kagaribi 4, Yoshidora is now 4-1 against PGRU-ranked players.
Kagaribi 4 featured three of the best Zero Suit Samus players in the world, all previously PGRU-ranked: Kuro, Choco and shky. It was a rough event for all three of them:
shky: 25th as the 6th seed, -5 SPR
Choco: 49th as the 29th seed, -2 SPR
Kuro: 49th as the 18th seed, -3 SPR
The three Zero Suits combined to finish a whopping 10 rounds behind their projected seeds. Kuro took an early loss to a previously unknown Chrom and Roy player, Lax and then fell to JILL, a heavily underseeded Fox main who also took out Abadango and yuzu and placed 25th as the 114th seed. shky fell to HERO's Bowser, one of Japan's best online players who has made some offline waves in the pandemic era, including a win over KEN at Kagaribi 3, and Tsu's Terry. Choco lost to the aforementioned Yoshidora in winners and fell to Nanchan, another Zero Suit Samus player who managed to make a run to 25th as the 68th seed, Zero Suit's saving grace in this tournament.
It's easy to worry about Zero Suit's place in the meta following Fighter Pack 2—characters like Min Min, Sephiroth, and Pyra/Mythra have fantastic tools to outrange Zero Suit and KO her at early percents. But none of those characters were seen in any of the notable ZSS's losses. Instead, it was primarily a bunch of scrappers: Fox, Bowser, Terry, and Yoshi. Did the nerfs to ZSS's neutral air and up-b hurt her up-close game enough to give characters like this an advantage? Her performance at majors will certainly be worth watching as offline events ramp up.
This should come as no surprise, as it has been over a year since we've seen a collection of top talent like we did at Kagaribi 4 this weekend, but given the relatively small size of the event, Kagaribi 4 will go down as one the most volatile tournaments Smash Ultimate has yet produced. Not counting the two major DQs (Kirihara and Ark), a whopping six players finished with a Seed Deviation of at least 5, meaning they either outplaced or underperformed their seed by at least 5 losers rounds. Chief among these was ProtoBanham at +9, of course. The full list:
ProtoBanham: +9 (1st as 25th seed)
Yoshidora: +6 (5th as 36th seed)
HERO: +6 (4th as 27th seed)
Kameme: -5 (49th as 10th seed)
shky: -5 (25th as 6th seed)
yuzu: -6 (97th as 15th seed)
Top 64 seeds on the whole had an average Seed Deviation of 2.28 rounds (which only drops to 2.17 after DQs are removed). That puts Kagaribi 4 in rare territory for major Japanese events; even Evo Japan 2020, a notably difficult event to seed, finished at a 2.0 average Seed Deviation for top 64 seeds. Umebura Japan Major 2019, in which MkLeo finished 33rd as the top seed and another tournament that saw ProtoBanham make waves, only barely outpaces Kagaribi 4 with a 2.38 average Seed Deviation for its top 64 seeds. For context, see Kagaribi 4 in comparison to previous Ultimate and Melee majors, as well as the SWT Online Qualifiers:
While some of this can be chalked up to the Japanese custom in which seeding is heavily influenced by placings at the previous instance of the event, certainly not all of it can be. We're entering a new era, in which our previous hierarchies of who's a top-level player and who's a high-level player are no longer set in stone. Players who previously spent much or all of their Smash careers online like Yoshidora and HERO are set to make huge waves, and we shouldn't expect the tournament experience here in America or elsewhere to be any different as major events are set to return.
