Super Naruto: Clash of Ninja 4/Resources
Guides for Improvement
- Explaining Stance Break - A Reddit post by Hatchy quoting Abbock as to why you want to stance break - a technique done during Y-Cancel combo strings that "breaks" the game's damage scaling in your favor.
- "Forward Movement" Explained - A video guide by Abbock explaining how "forward movement" works - or rather, the frustrating nuances of hitboxes in GNT4 causing players to, at times, perform a substitution only to reappear on the wrong side.
- Okizeme & You - A Reddit post by KariG explaining the concept of okizeme - aggressively pursuing a recovering opponent to follow up - how to develop okizeme in your gameplay, and how you can prevent it from happening to you.
- Instant Run Tech - A video by TBC showing how to quickly perform running attacks from a standing position.
Modding
- GNTool, a tool to help modding GNT/CON games. Also has a repository of Gecko codes and model / palette mods.
Community YouTube Channels
Tier Lists
The tier lists on this page are subjective in nature, and are the products of their individual authors. You can only trust a tier list as much as you trust its author.
Tier lists reflect the understanding on relative character strength at the time that they are written. Metas can develop and characters can change after a tier list is made.
Tier lists usually do not account for character difficulty, but that can sometimes be a factor depending on the author.
Depending on your goals and how competitive you are, tier lists may or may not be entirely irrelevant.
First Community Tier List
The first community tier list was released on December 29th, 2021. It corresponds to game version 1.3.42 (Uchiha Hideout). Clemente collected the ballots and performed the calculations. Thank you to all the players who submitted ballots,[1] everyone who gave feedback on the initial release, and special thanks to Kyuubi for making the graphic. There was a revision to the tier names on January 1st, 2022.[2]
Methodology
The community tier list was calculated by averaging rankings supplied by members of the SCON4 community. All members of the Super CON4 Discord were eligible to submit ballots, which were collected between August 2nd and December 26th, 2021.
Respondents were asked to rank the 37 tournament legal characters from best to worst. Ties were allowed but respondents were encouraged to order as much of the list as possible. All characters needed to be ranked (no "IDK's" allowed among the legal characters). Karasu and Akamaru were disregarded due to not being tournament legal. 29 players submitted usable ballots.
The rankings were converted into numerical values between 1 and 37, with 1 representing the best character. In the case of ties, the rank value was split between the tied characters. For example, two characters tied for rank 3 would each be given a score of 3.5. To lessen the effect of outliers, the top and bottom 5% of scores for each character were dropped, which wound up being only the top and bottom scores. The remaining 27 scores for each character were then averaged to get the final rank score.
K-means clustering was used to generate potential tier groupings with different k-values (numbers of tiers). Five was selected because it was the smallest number of tiers that captured the meaningful gaps between characters. In addition, the majority of submitted ranks with tiers utilized 4-6 tiers, so 5 was considered the consensus distribution.
Results
Itachi was the highest rated character and is close to being in his own half-tier (the gap between him and 
Sasuke was similar to the gaps seen between the lower tiers). The gap between the first two tiers was about twice the size between any other tiers. The tiers have been named S, A, A-, B, and B- to reflect the difference in distances, and also to represent the community sentiment that all characters have sufficient power level and tools to defeat characters from any other tier (all characters are "tournament viable"). 
Jiraiya was the only character never rated in the top 20. 
OTK Naruto was the most inconsistently rated character.
Second Community Tier List
This tier list was released on January 12th, 2023.
Methodology
Instead of being open to submission, about 30 of the top players and predominant members of the competitive scene who were active in the past year were directly invited to submit ranks. 27 entries were returned.[3] Voting took place December to January 2023. The game version was 1.5.1. Placement within tiers is ordered, from left to right.
Credits – Clemente, Cyber, Kyuubi and GunBlaze made decisions, Clemente collected ballots and did the statistics, Brutalmoon battled tedium in creating the custom character portraits and Wahu made the rest of the graphic- and is GOATed for transcribing the picture ranks into text form.
Results and Interpretation
2023 saw two major, in-person tournaments: Combo Breaker in May and CEOtaku in September. The dominant storyline in both tournaments was the success of seasoned GNT players who had spent less time with SCON4 specifically, as compared to the field. At Combo Breaker, Abbock and his 
Kiba surprised everyone by tearing his way to grand finals on winner's side, including a victory over the tournament favorite, Lemo. Lemo was, however, eventually crowned champion, having played 
Kankuro in bracket and avenging his loss to Abbock in grand finals by switching to 
Temari. Five months later at CEOtaku, Icebro made a legendary loser's run after a round two loss and took home first place- another deep run for a Kankuro player.
Combine highly visible performances with the subsequent interest in those characters and it's not surprising to see them take large leaps in the 2023 list. Kankuro (+25) is now the top ranked character, followed by Temari (+16). The top tier is rounded out by 
Kisame (+0), Itachi (-3, knocked off the top spot) and 
Neji (-1). Kiba (+9), 
Tenten (+8), 
Shikamaru (+7) and Jirobo (+12) saw significant promotions as well.
The furthest falls belong to 
Sakura (-25) and 
Hinata (-20), who both dropped from high tier to the bottom tier. Both characters had received changes, largely considered as nerfs, after voting for the previous tier list had started, so their drop was not surprising. 
Rock Lee (-14) also saw a steep decline in this iteration (IDK why haha). Smaller demotions for other top/high tiers can be partially attributed to the rise of Kankuro and Temari.
When looking at the distribution of scores, four obvious groups emerge:
- a top tier (named “S”)
- a large second tier starting at Neji or Ino (named “A”)
- two lower tiers splitting at Lee or Jirobo and Shy Hinata (“B” and “C”)
Neji (S and A) and Lee (A and B) are in-betweeners. If k=4 were used, Lee would be in B. If k=6 were used, Neji would be in A ("k" represents the number of clusters).
The main question of how to display the tier list was: How many subgroups should divide the second tier? The first break created the A- subgroup. The second break would divide A again and pull Neji down, helping form an A+ subgroup. In the end, we decided to go with only A and A- subgroups (k=5), erring on the side of simplicity.
We were somewhat split on how to name the bottom tier. About 3/5 of the voters submitted tier lists with a tier named "C", "bad" or similar. Considering the bottom two tiers have a greater range of scores than the whole A tier and because more voters than not included a "C" tier or equivalent, we felt comfortable naming the bottom tier "C". Ask most players and they'll tell you that you can still win with these characters, they're just less strong than the other characters.
Vanilla Archive
Many resources for the Vanilla game exist on the internet, which can be of value for historical reasons, entertainment, or even finding useful tech or gameplay footage. But be warned that your mileage may vary while trying to apply these lessons to Super.
Resources
- TORNADO - A GNT4/GNT4Remix Combo Video - Compiled by GNT4Clips in 2018, this is a montage of combos in both GNT4 and the "Remix" mod, performed by various members of the GNT community.
- Naruto: Gekitō Ninja Taisen! 4 gets new life in this GNT4: Remastered Combo Video - A short article on Shoryuken describing how the scene is still strong and showcasing a Remastered combo video by TheCape.
- Using Special Mid-String - A Reddit post by GNT4Clips explaining how one can execute a Special Technique in the middle of a combo for maximum efficiency.
- Mid-String Delay Punish Guide - A guide by David Hsu posted on GameFAQs outlining the delays in characters' combos, so you can follow up in their string in order to punish your opponent appropriately.
YouTube Channels
- Abbock
- Hippo 64
- kosheh
- RisingJericho
- ChocoboMog123
- DanDaManProductions
- eiyujpn
- Justin (NarutoCircuitSeries)
- motion51 (GNT4 videos are unlisted)
- PhilSunderland
- purefunked
- RaginAsian
- thedukeoftbc
- xroninbladex
- WolfAndRaven
- GNT4 Clips
Notes
- ↑ Voters for the first community tier list: Athkore, Bimbs, Brutalmoon, Clemente, CozyContainer, Cyber, Hamadarody, HewbrewHammer, Heartnana, Icychains, Jakyi2x, Jerry, Kung Julio, Leeshmow, Monkey Kong, Mr. Sinister, Ninshi, No More, Nywen, OMJ, Ricky Ant, Rwbyred, ScrabbleDestroyer, SeroQ, SmthSweet, Spicy, Taelon, Tawkos, and XxxvictorxxX.
- ↑ After the release of the tier list, player feedback was that a more "compressed" tier naming system better reflected the state of SCON4. Thus, the tier names were changed from [S A B C D] to [S A A- B B-].
- ↑ Voters for the second community tier list: Bimbs, Brutalmoon, Clemente, Dope, GreyAlice, Hamadarody, HebrewHammer, Icebro, Jakyi2x, Jerry, Kandle, Kitaeo, Leeshmow, LilyHV, Malex, meowmix, Netachi, Ninshi, Paradise, Ricky Ant, Rwbyred, SeroQ, Skeet, Snover, Taelon, themacj and THORFIN.
