So, as planned all of the week was spent maining Kirby. Also, I feel I had progressed enough at ledgetrumps, tomahawk grabs, two-frames, and resets to move on to the next Izaw Art of Smash Training. So, I think I have parts 1 and 2 down good and started working on a few things from Part 3. This week I worked on turn around tilts, instant dashes, dash cancels, turn around dash cancels, Pivot grabs, and pivot cancels. I think one week was pretty good for the turnaround tilts and dashes so I can add two more things next week.
I also tried to play some more Discord Friendlies this week, but was only able to get a set of matches one night. It was the only night I played Joker as well. But I played around six matches against a very good Cloud. And lost everyone very handily. It’s not just that the opponent had a better grasp of there character, even online I could tell that their reactions were twice as fast as mine. I think the matches were helpful though? I saved my two worst losses and I’m going to go back and review before the next time I play Joker.
The more I get into this, the more and more I realize, I’m just never going to be “good” at this game no matter how much time I put in. I have never been great at reaction based games like Fighters,or First-Person Shooters. And as I get older, I’m improving less quickly, and getting owned more and more. There’s a 13 Year-Old kid destroying the top Smash players in the world right now. Things like Elite Smash and Top 16 finishes in Tournament I just need to let go of. The goal should just be to improve and be a little better than I was the week before.
But I wouldn’t have been playing this one game for over a year almost every day if I was just grinding getting good. I enjoy it a lot, clearly it’s captured my attention in a way no other game has a in a long time.
But anyway back to the topic at hand. So, no reason to go over the steps, I did what I always do when I try out a main. This time I also went back and played Classic Mode for Kirby and all the characters I’ve already crossed off my main list.
Another brief tangent, a lot of the characters I’ve already crossed off the list to try out I’m adding back on. I want to have at least played 10 games of Online Quickplay with a character before I cross them off. Because I really want to have a good sense of which character has the best winning percentage. Which also means I’m going to add all the Echo fighters back in; because it just drives me crazy to have those 10 matches split and not have an accurate Winning percentage and GSP for each character. So I’ve only “tried out” 15 characters, including Kirby so far.
And back to Kirby. After a week of maining him, he is definitely not main worthy. Or secondary, or even a counter-pick character. He’s easily lowest tier in the game. It’s funny, everyone always picks him up first. He has the multiple jumps for recovery and the Down-B rock for the big punish. But once you move past just Beginner status and start playing in a competitive way at all, he’s no longer viable.
He’s very, very slow. It seems like every character has an speed advantage against him (except maybe Jigglypuff, Byleth, and Robin). Or the opponent has projectiles they can just keep Kirby away with those. Or most characters can just utilize the fact that Kirby’s moves have lower priority over seemingly every opponent move. His strongest moves of Down -Air and the Down-B rock don’t have as big a priority as they had in previous games. I was so often being beaten by opponents just using Up Air or Up-B. And the additional jumps would seem to make his recovery great, but his airspeed is so slow, it’s actually easy to punish.
So, what strategy did I use when playing as him? It was reliant on staying away and countering opponents with hard reads. I stayed above and spaced most opponents using aerials. It was kind of like Hungrybox’s Jigglypuff strategy (though not nearly as effective). I used instant dash attack, and boost grabs to approach. Anytime I got a hit I tried to juggle as long as possible. And I pursued offstage as much as I could.
It must have been frustrating to play me, but it was frustrating to play as Kirby as well. I played few Jokers, Wolves, and Captain Falcons that were way below me in skill level, but I would lose or just barely win. Even if they were whiffing on Smash attacks and being incredibly predictable with their approaches and recoveries Kirby was just to slow to punish them. It stunk when I felt like I could have destroyed these opponents with almost any other character.
So, I’m getting a little sick of trying to be a low-tier hero. I’m ready to just go back to letting my character carry me. I am hopeful that the some lessons I learned while maining these bad characters the past few weeks carry-over to whoever my eventual ultimate Ultimate main is. That I can take the Neutral Spacing I learned with Rosalina, the ledge-trapping I learned with Robin, and the patience and counter-attacking I learned with Kirby and apply them to my best characters.
So next week, I’m starting off with Simon/Richter per the Random character selection. I think I may not do a full week next week, I need to catch up on my 2010 movies as well.