So, I’m back a little earlier than I thought because I had a free week. And by Random Selection I was assigned Luigi. So I tried out Luigi for a week, and then I tried out Ryu for one day and Mario for one day. So, i t was a little more than a week I played in a chunk. I’m going to break this down into Luigi, Ryu, and Mario sections rather than Nights. Also, I streamed Online Quickplay of both Luigi and Ryu on Twitch here – https://www.twitch.tv/mark_the_stampede . When I have time on Saturday Nights I’m going to stream Smash Bros, Smash Bros related games, or just Fighting games in general.
Luigi
So I followed the same procedure I always do when I try out a character for a week. I practiced in Training Mode first. This week I decided to work on my RARs and follow the training in this ProGuides Super Smash Bros Ultimate Tips video – https://youtu.be/T4BHhW_oR0Y . I’ll discuss it a little more in my wrap-up. Then I practiced against CPUs starting at Level 5 the first night and increasing it until I was playing Level 9 CPUs the last few. nights. Then I played Online Quickplay.
So after a week of trying out Luigi, what do I think? I think Luigi is mid-tier at best and Luigi isn’t for me. Luigi is most famous for his 0-death combo. I pulled it off once against a Level 6 CPU. But he has more than that combo, after you get an aerial or throw in you can just follow the opponent’s DI and react. He’s got one of the best combo games in Ultimate. His Down-B is a good combo breaker and has a long hitbox that can catch your opponent off-guard. His down aerial is a great spiking tool.
And now for the bad. Luigi’s recovery isn’t bad as people make it out, at least after you learn how to chain his Side-B to Up-B to Air Dodge. The problem is this is incredibly predictable and easy to punish. His ground and air-speed is too slow to effectively whiff punish opponents. His short-hop is just too high; it’s the height of other characters’ full hop and takes as long to complete. Because of that he can’t space effectively. His game revolves around his grab, but his grab comes out very slow it’s very hard to get one in. His disadvantage state is completely awful. Even at 0% he’s flying across the stage on a normal hit. If a sword character continuously pushes forward Luigi has no chance. For some reason Ridley also seemed like a completely unwinnable match-up as well. Honestly, I think I lost to the the CPU more when trying out Luigi than any other character.
I have mad respect for good Luigi players, but I can’t really win with him.
Ryu
So I tried Ryu out for one night. The same procedure for trying characters out for one night as always – Training Mode, fight three Level 6 CPUs, play 10 Online Quickplay matches, and then play Classic Mode. I only streamed the Online Quickplay matches and Classic Mode.
One night it not enough time to learn all the ins and out of Ryu’s moveset. Some of his moves have light, medium, and heavy versions. Three of his special can be changed with additional control stick inputs and all four have different strengths. Really mastering Ryu would take some time, but why wouldn’t you just play Street Fighter at that point?
Anyway, I was still pleasantly suprosiesd with Ryu. He has fast enough ground and air speed to actually punish opponents after they miss an attack. His neutral special is a good spacing tool and when you do the Shakunetsu Hadoken it’s good for edge-guarding as well. His side-B is good for combo breaking, spacing, and recovery. And he’s got some simple confirms into his Up-B. Though I did keep missing them. His Smash attacks come out fast.
The bad is obviously his recovery. Though like Luigi chaining his Side-B to his Up-B increases his recovery, his vertical recovery is absolute trash. The extra inputs to get stronger specials often result in you performing the wrong special, say if you wanted the bigger side-B and you down-B instead, and then your SD instead of recovering. His grab has no range. His aerials are only okay and don’t really combo together they just chain into Up-B.
Honestly I really enjoyed Ryu. Multiple times I hit my opponents with a Smash attack after they jumped over a Hadoken. I wouldn’t mind playing more of him. If you master his inputs I think he’s lower high tier. But as he stands he’s more of mid-tier because of the missed inputs and his recovery. But I would put him higher than Luigi.
Mario
So I went through the one day procedure again for Mario. But I didn’t stream it. I literally lost 10 matches in a row, but I still think there’s a lot of good things about Mario. Honestly, part of why I lost was I playing Mario as would play Luigi, since I had just played Luigi for a whole week.
Mario is just a solid all around character. He has good speed, good combos, strong attacks, and both good advantage and disadvantage state. And he has multiple edge-guarding and neutral tools.
Really his only weaknesses are a poor recovery and his lack of easy to pull-off kill confirms (and really not many kill confirms overall). I mean his vertical recovery is good, but his horizontal recovery is bad; so the opposite of Luigi. This might be controversial but I may like Luigi’s recovery more. Though Mario’s is harder to predict and punish. And though his Smash attacks come out fast I felt like I was getting punished online – when I threw some Smashes with Mario they would have hit offline but online the opponent hit me first.
Wrap-Up
So a few other things. Going back to practice and training I had to change my control scheme up again. It just wasn’t possible to perform a Reverse Aerial Rush with jump buttons only on Y and X. So, now the modifications I have from the standard scheme are as follows – Tilt attacks to C-Stick, Tap Jump Off, Stick Sensitivity High, and the L trigger as an additional jump button. I had turned the Rumble off at one point, but turned it back on to get the vibration feedback. I tried mapping things to the D-Pad as well but I would never remember to use it. Of course if I had known I was going to end up with this control scheme I would have started with it a year and half ago. But after a little over one week I can pretty reliably get a RAR out so I think the change was worth it. And I think it will also make it easier to attack cancel whenever I try to learn that.
And going to back to Mains, Secondaries, Pockets, and trying out Mains. Obviously in the past I had already “tried out” Mario and Bowser and I previously went over that since I didn’t get 10 online matches in I didn’t’ feel like I had completely tried them out (and the imbalance for my online stats was driving me crazy). Roy was the first character I tried out with 10 online matches. But it seems like I HAVE to have a mastered sword character in this game. So, eventually I’m going to revisit all sword characters and figure out which one to put time into it. Right now I’m leaning towards Roy. In the past I spent extensive time with Pikachu, Wario, Peach, and Lucina, but I’ve since changed my control scheme and I learned a lot more about Ultimate in general. I don’t think I need to put in a full week with any of these character but one more day of training couldn’t hurt.
Also, with the prevalence of Online tournaments during this crisis, some characters have become more important in the meta. So that’s added a few more characters to try out seriously. So currently the fighters I’m going to put at least a week into are – Palutena, MegaMan, Zero Suit Samus, Pokemon Trainer, Fox, Wolf, Inkling, Cloud, Sonic, and one sword character to be named later.
The funny thing about trying out a character for a week is your opinion stills changes after that. I complained about the weaknesses of both Rosalina & Luma and Kirby in this blog after trying them out. But I’m still playing them. In fact, I’m more likely to finish a night playing Kirby or Rosalina than Joker. Rosalina is actually my third most played character and is catching up with Joker. And after I played as Byleth for a week I thought he/she would become an interesting pocket but I’ve never returned to playing that character.
At this point my lineup is as follows-
Main – Joker
Secondaries – Young Link, Ness
Pockets – Rosalina & Luma, Kirby
Like I said I still need to add a pocket sword character. And I don’t know about Young Link, I really choose him as a secondary because he covered the majority of Joker’s bad match-ups but these days I’m not playing as Joker or Young Link much. After I finish trying out all 86 characters, I’ll have a good solid line-up. And then they’ll be six more DLC characters to try out. Then I’ll try those out, be burned out of the game and never play again.
Anyway, not sure when I’ll return to this Smash Bros. blog series. Planning on streaming other games this week and then catching up on 2010s movies the rest of May. So maybe be back in June.