Quote:
Originally Posted by Used Can
Isn't that very similar to Nodoka and Hisa?
I don't think it's a good idea to lump characters with defined signature moves or styles like Nodoka, Hisa and Sumire, with characters with clearly defined superpowers like Yuu, Kuro and Momo.
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Sumire is as much an ability user as Toyone is. Her "sharpshooting" requires her to basically be able to draw very specific tiles to match the discardable tiles on her opponent's hands (she could do it on command, too). Plus, it also requires her to be able to know what tile an opponent will
discard to improve her hand, which you can almost never do by reading tiles alone (you can get a sense of what an opponent's hand is shaping up to be, but not the tile she still has and cannot use at all). All of this extends quite a bit beyond the basic "luck" that skilled players tote around.
For Arata, not being restricted to her bowling waits (remember: she only won
once with a non-pin wait) does not at all mean that she doesn't have a skewed drawing ability as implied in Achiga. We see Yuu pull it off as well - winning off of non-warm tiles like the eight of pins/six of bamboos when her draws are explicitly mentioned to be skewed towards red tiles. What is more important is that purposely restricting her winning hands to pinfu waits most of the time is actually a detriment in normal mahjong - it makes you more predictable and less flexible, while really offering no advantages at all (Arata doesn't really seem to go for flushes); the only way for her insistence on using bowling pin waits to make sense is if she actually has a higher chance to draw bowling formations than other tiles - supported, in fact, by how all of her bowling wait wins are by
tsumo.
I'm not entirely sure that Hisa can classify entirely as non-ability, either. Her hell waits in the individual matches (when they weren't targeted at Bundou) skew probability by quite a bit, and she does self-draw on hell waits way more than standard probability would suggest. She did also mention that the reason she uses hell waits is because they enable her to win - and with only one winning tile remaining, you can't really guarantee winning from opponent discards enough times to justify using it as a main strategy. In addition, she can see "meaning behind the tiles", which enables her to put up a flawless defense in the match against Hajime. All of those suggest that she's an ability user in her own right.
Nodoka, I think, is the only person in your list that is truly a skill-based player.
Also, for the tier list, I'm not sure if we can really call it a 'tier' list as much as a classification list. For instance, there's no question that Mairu is batman and Seiko is an ability user, but we have already seen that pound-for-pound, Mairu is simply stronger than Seiko. Placing 'ability tier' before 'batman tier' in a specific tier list, for instance, mistakenly suggests that ability users are better than batmans (making 'monsters' the only class that is fully accurate as a tier). It would make sense in segmenting the players into groups, but can't really be called 'tier' in any instance.