I see a lot of people throw around the term "fundamentals" a lot when it comes to Marth, and any character really. The broadness of this term may vary from person to person. What do you think are the most fundamental aspects of marth's game, and the game in general?
OOH, nice question! This word gets thrown around a lot, but almost nobody ever defines what it is; people usually just imply what it's not. I suppose there's no actual agreed-upon definition of the term, but I'll give it my best.
I feel like humans have 3 major components: the will, the intellect, and the body. These 3 components work in tandem for nearly every activity. The will demands something, the intellect finds a way to carry out that will, and the body implements that strategy. For Smash, you can divide these 3 aspects into motivation, decision-making, and technical skill. Motivation doesn't require much discussion, everyone here has a motivation to play and improve at Smash, I take it. Technical skill, to me, encompasses pretty much everything you do with your controller. Walking forward? Technical skill. Spamming fsmash? Technical skill. These aren't good on their own, but being able to perform any technique consistently constitutes technical skill in my mind. You could probably divide this category further into technical consistency and range of techniques (ideally the two would overlap completely).
Fundamentals, I feel, are everything between these 2 points of motivation and execution that occur within the game. Still, this covers a breadth of things. I'd say to a degree all aspects of fundamentals are important to every character, but as you imply, some characters lean more heavily on certain fundamental skills than others. First, I'll list all the categories with examples that I can think of, though it's probably not an exhaustive list.
- Positioning: Keeping center stage, platform camping, standing beneath platforms to protect from aerials, moving around the stage, taking the edge vs a recovering sheik, spacing (basically positioning when the characters are at a close range)
- Move selection: Choosing attacks that will lead into more damage/combos, using strong attacks only to kill at the right percents, approaching with relatively lagless moves to avoid being punished
- Mindgames: Forming a habit and then breaking it once your opponent has adapted (Conditioning), faking out your opponent (DI left, tech right; empty shorthop to grab; run up to shield), predicting your opponent's decisions (Reading)
Now again, these skills are important for every character, but almost all characters have a focus. Marth, with his great range and movement options focuses mostly on positioning. Move selection is important, but fairly easy to learn with Marth, most of his moves pretty easily divide into the "killing" and "combo" categories, though you may have to know the percents where some moves transition from one to the other. Mindgames are important, but he doesn't depend on them nearly as much as slower characters like Bowser or Ganondorf.
To end, I want to address the big "fundamentals vs tech" debate. I think people acting as if these are on opposite ends of the spectrum are pretty stupid, saying things like "solid fundamentals beat tech skill any day". Fundamentals/tech is not a 75/25 split. It's not even a 50/50 split, it's pretty much a 100/100 split. Want to know what pure tech skill looks like? The 20XX drillshining Fox CPU. Roll past him for the easiest JV5 stock of your life. Want to know what pure fundamentals look like? PPMD's brain in a jar. He knows exactly what to do but can't perform anything. Without one, the other is literally useless. Like I mentioned at the top, tech skill is not only flashy or difficult to perform maneuvers. Wavedashes/dashdancing are technical. Chaingrabs on fox are technical. Short hop fairs, IASA dtilts, utilts without jumping first, all these things fall under technicality despite not being difficult to do. This is why players like Borp (or maybe just Borp fans) bother me, just because they draw from a small pool of techniques doesn't mean they're untechnical. Borp's timing is incredibly precise and most of his movements are executed just as he means them to be. His Sheik is not pure fundamentals, it's just a Sheik who eschews some (I'd not even say half) of her options.
Anyways, I hope this helped, I did spend way too much of this post talking about what fundamentals AREN'T, but I feel it all needed to be said.