Each member of the Back Room had a chance to submit a rankings list, with the characters ranked from best to worst. Each character's rank was then averaged, with the top and bottom rankings for each character excluded to control for outliers. A vote was held to break any ties in score.

For this tier list, the distinction between the top three and bottom two characters compared to the rest of the class was clear. However, we could not find a way to assign any further tier distinctions that didn't feel random and arbitrary. We felt that assigning tier splits in such a way would be irresponsible and not be the best way to accurately represent information. However, we still wanted to make it clear that there is a definite sliding scale as far as character power levels, so we settled on the above system as a result.

Note that the average rankings were not used for tier breaks. This is because the gaps in these numbers indicate the degree of certainty in placing, which isn't what tier divisions measure.For example, if a character is locked in a place while the characters above them are more contested there will be a numerical gap above that character. All that gap indicates is that everyone agrees on where the character is ranked, not how far away he is from the characters above him.

The last tier is titled K tier for Kirby tier as a callback to the series of demos where Kirby was the worst character in the game.