Okay, let's start this off right. First of all, let's clear up something important:
It's pretty well know this game's landing lag is worse than Melee's and Brawl's.
First of all, this isn't true; average landing lag in this game is definitely lower than Brawl at the very least. Melee is a strange, non-linear comparison since, while Melee has less landing lag on aerials on average, smash 4 has considerably wider and more useful auto-cancel windows so lagless landings are way more common in 4 than in Melee. It's more about a different meta where you use your aerials early instead of late and do more full hops and don't fast fall as often since you're fishing for auto-cancels a lot more in this engine. This is also a really strange way to phrase things since, even if smash 4 had strictly more landing lag on aerials than Melee, that wouldn't be "worse". Since when does the amount of landing lag aerials have have anything to do with game quality? Lines of thinking like this are way too common and really hurt our collective ability to understand these games we play.
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I'm actually seeing much more pronounced skill gaps in 4 than I saw in past smash games honestly because I feel like this game has way more "footsies" than any other smash game mostly because jumping around (which resets situations) is so much worse. In Melee jumping put you in that state where you had these insanely safe attacks (due to how L-cancel worked in combination with the fortresses that were Jigglypuff and Peach in the air), and in Brawl, jumping put you in that state where you could fling yourself around with copious invincibility since Brawl airdodge was pretty ridiculous. In 4, when you jump, you're taking a huge risk every time. Landings are intrinsically unsafe due to airdodge landing lag (and pretty high average ground speed helps!), and the way auto-cancels work makes doing late aerials to bail yourself out of trouble more of a guessing game than an actually solid escape. The implication of this is that you just don't jump as much and rely instead on asserting stage control on the ground and trying to bully your opponent into situations where they are forced to choose between risky options. This is hard to do and hard to avoid, and when I see players of uneven skill meet, I often see extremely decisive victories due to skill gaps in this regard. When players are close in skill, I generally see the results come down to clean adaptation and decision making to force these decisions on the opponent; it feels to me like it's almost always crisp and clear that the winning player was actually playing better in this game.
I also think people confuse skill ceiling and skill floor. This game definitely has the lowest skill floor of any smash game; there's a pretty hard limit to how much you can suck at smash 4, and you don't need very much practice at all to be able to play in a coherent way that can look respectable. This results in far fewer total blow-out games among weaker players than in past smash games; even bad players at least have the bare minimum of ability to fight back. On the other hand, the ceiling is enormous; just look at what zero does to everyone he plays (generally brutal games that make it super obvious he's the best by far), and I strongly suspect even he is just barely scratching the surface of this game's depth. The game's skill ceiling, how much you can improve, is just obviously very large; it's my suspicion it will prove to be the largest of any smash game, but we won't be able to be sure of that for the next several years. I'd also like to make it clear what claiming the opposite means. If you believe this game has a low skill ceiling, then you need to offer some very serious explanation for why you aren't winning nationals since a low skill ceiling means it's easy to get as good at the game as you can get. You also need to explain how it's even possible for zero to be as good as he is versus everyone else; games in which a very small number of players just dominate everyone else are generally games in which the community as a whole is very far from reaching the skill ceiling.
I'd also like to share another observation that I think speaks well for this game. In early Brawl, it took about a year for top Melee players to really stop being a factor at a tournament level; they relied for a long time on skill transfer from Melee and it just worked until the meta grew a lot in Brawl. In 4, being good at Melee never seemed to help all that much, and even though you honestly see less cross-over, when you do see it the results just don't happen. If you don't specifically practice 4, you just don't win at it, and that tells me that smash 4 pushes players really hard. Like if this game didn't push skill, I'd expect to see players who don't care or don't try winning, and honestly, I'm just not seeing that at all in this game. I disagree 100% with the premise of this topic and actually feel the exact opposite.
Also to be clear, I'm not interested in smash game vs smash game arguments, but I do think that if you aren't fully immersed in 4, it might be easy not to notice the meta. 4 is a beautiful game, and it's growing better and better at an incredible rate. I know there will always be Melee-heads especially since the gameplay dynamics of 4 are even more different from Melee than Brawl was, but if that's you and 4 is seeming bad to you, I'd just ask you to consider that maybe what makes 4 great is just outside of your sight as opposed to non-existent. If that's not you and you just feel like you can't improve at 4 which is the source of your criticism, I really suggest looking within instead of blaming the game. Just watch your game with a super critical eye asking where you could do things better, and look at the micro level and not just the macro level (if you take a step forward at a bad time or fail to take a step forward when you should, that matters a lot!). You should find, honestly even if you're a top player, tons of spots where you didn't do the best thing even within your understanding, and if you watch others play especially those better than you you'll probably also discover that your understanding itself has a lot of room to grow. I know as a player I feel like I'm improving every time I play just from testing what does and doesn't work in my own play, and then I watch someone like dabuz who I can kinda relate to in terms of playstyle but who just outclasses me hard as a player and just see so plainly that I still have so much further to go. With that being the case, how could I possibly feel bad about the game?
