LiteralGrill
Smokin' Hot~
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Hi all, we’re back this week with yet another (excessively late, apologies in advance) Mind Over Meta. This week, I want to talk about an aspect of Smash so central to the competitive scene that it’s often the sole issue separating “casual” and “hardcore” players. As such, it’s imperative that you understand the importance of this part of play and its impact on you and your opponents.
This week, let’s talk about technical skill, and technicality. This week’s MoM is not intended to be an in-depth guide on how to perform techniques, but an overview of tech skill and its place in Project M.
Pushing Boundaries
Smash’s competitive scene is usually defined in terms of what many call “advanced techniques;” in very rough terms, that means anything more difficult to perform than what is in the average official manual for Super Smash Brothers: Melee. In my lingo, “technical skill” can cover anything from wavedashing to specific combos. So powerful are these techniques when used well that conversations just about Project M are often contextualized by them. I have spoken with many people who show interest in Project M but tell me that they “don’t care about things like L-canceling and wavedashing, but just want to play a game for fun.”
First and foremost, Smash of any kind is a game you should play to enjoy and have fun. If you are pressured to play in a way you will not enjoy, you are entitled to the right to either have fun how you like or not play. However, tournaments build a different kind of environment which prioritizes besting the competition. In competition, every edge you can find matters, and that means pushing the boundaries of the game as much as you can. And I personally find that the game is better enjoyed when I am unrestrained and faster, less oppressed by factors like distance and time, even in casual gameplay.
For this reason, I must stress the importance of developing technical skill (abbreviated “tech skill”) for Project M. The characters are designed and toned with the use advanced techniques explicitly in mind, and as such, playing the game with absolutely no inclination to learn any tech skill is akin to playing without unlocking half of the characters. You simply cut the potential experience short.
At the same time, tech skill is not the central point of Smash. The game rewards good tech skill, yes, but it rewards smart play and spacing, proper neutral game, and predictive power so much more. The role of tech skill, then, is not to replace these principles, but to supplement them; to make it that much easier to space well, play a neutral game, hedge your bets well to cover all of your opponent's’ options, follow through combos etc. The reason the game rewards tech skill is actually because the tech skill helps you play to these other fundamental principles. Keep this in mind, so that your gameplay is focused in proper directions instead of sidetracked.
To the Chalkboard
Project M has a lot of tech skill. Having come about through love of Super Smash Bros: Melee, this is expected. Consequently, much of the tech skill affecting the full roster in Project M derives directly from Melee’s repertoire of techniques. Wavedashing is perhaps the most eye-catching; by air dodging directly into the ground diagonally, any character in Project M can slide forward or backward in a standing position. L-canceling is perhaps more important, performed simply by pressing L during an aerial attack just before hitting the ground to cut your landing lag in half. So important is L-canceling that Project M includes an L-cancel percent calculator on the results screen after each game. Dash-dances are also universal in competitive play, letting you stride back and forth by dashing repeatedly to weave in and out of your opponents’ range, goading them into missed attacks. Other techniques that come from Melee include moonwalking and out of shield actions (like up-Bs, or up-smashes).
Because of Brawl’s deep and detailed engine, however, Project M includes much of Brawl’s advanced techniques. Reverse aerial rush is exceptionally useful and often underutilized. By running forward, tapping backward after a little while, and then jumping, one can instantly jump forward while facing backward, allowing almost every character to launch back-airs at their opponent suddenly. B-reverses are also show a lot of utility; by using an special move and then immediately tapping in the opposite direction, a character can use the move while suddenly reversing their full momentum, turning retreats into approaches and vice versa.
These are all examples of techniques which are straightforward to perform and are considered fairly basic, though many call them “advanced techniques.” I prefer to call these kinds of tech skills “intermediate techniques.” For competitive success, I would argue that, in general, wavedashes and (especially) L-cancels are a baseline requirement. Project M is fast-paced, and to keep up, L-cancels will cut down your lag times after many moves, allowing you to unlock the true potential of your aerial attacks and increasing your full arsenal of potential moves onstage.
Advanced techniques are often combined to great effect. Such combinations of techniques together, along with your normal repertoire of moves, of course, enable impressive combos or clever mindgames and escapes from the clutches of danger. The ubiquitous “SHFFL,” or short-hop fast-fall L-cancel, lets you use your aerials close to the ground in rapid succession. To watch it in full effect, Mew2king often does a phenomenal job chaining together Fox’s nair for quick high-damage combos. At a more advanced level, Fox is also infamous for “waveshines,” where Fox’s down-B (the shine) is canceled early with a jump and then airdodge to flow together as a wavedash, following the opponent’s drift after being hit with the shine. This technique is specific to Fox, Falco, Wolf, and to a lesser extent Ness and Lucas. But don’t fret, the other characters weren’t left out!
I’m Special In My Own Way
Project M’s allure (and sometimes its bane) is a bevy of character-specific tech skill. These are techniques which, because of special properties or moves available to a small subset of the cast, are rather exclusive. The aforementioned waveshines are a good example.
Squirtle and Lucario are also good examples of characters designed with a focus around specific advanced maneuvers. The former relies on slippery, slidey movement utilizing Squirtle’s unique turnaround animation, from which he can perform shellshifts and slingjumps that propel him backward or forward with high speed and use aerials, quick grabs, sudden pokes, and other tricks to punish opponents. The latter must use his character-specific on-hit-cancel system to string combos together, and use aura-sphere-cancels to extend combos beyond naive limits.
Double jump-cancels are also very common in Project M. A technique returning from Melee, double jump-cancels affect characters like Ness, and Peach whose aerial jumps suddenly alter their momentum. By using both the grounded jump and the aerial jump in quick succession, these characters are able to suddenly alter momentum and launch sudden barrages of attacks or fast retreats. In Super Smash Bros: Melee, fan-favorite Yoshi player aMSa utilizes double jump cancels to land combos, as well as to tank through the opponent’s hits with Yoshi’s unique double jump property that absorbs damage.
Some characters are designed to use moves with very specific properties, such as Ike’s Quickdraw, from which you can jump in the middle of the dash and hence wavedash, reverse aerial rush, or some other technique.
These character-specific tech skills can also include techniques which are available to everyone in theory, but only useful to a certain group of characters, such as Bowser’s up-B out of shield, to punish opponents attempting to capitalize on your defensive position. Most other characters lack the mobility after their up-B to perform similar techniques safely.
The Motion Commotion
There is a common factor in most of these examples of advanced techniques: they all facilitate movement. As I have said before, and as /u/PlayOnSunday - agrees, the game is almost entirely centered around movement.
Smash, as a platform fighter, utilizes space to a great degree, and players who can utilize limited amounts of time the best are able to sift the greatest rewards from narrow opportunities. Put space and time together, and you get movement, either by increasing the space you can move to easily (such as wavedashes or moonwalks) or by reducing time between actions and therefore allowing you to string together inputs more quickly, so you can do more in less time. This is the central philosophy of developing advanced techniques, to remove the ordinary restrictions of your character that you might experience straight out of the can.
You must keep this goal in mind when researching techniques. Every question asking “how will this technique help me” must instead be reworded, “what advantages in movement, distance, or time (i.e. frames) will it confer?” Almost every useful advanced technique will pass the test of answering that question, from wavedashes to taunt-cancels (incidentally, I find taunt cancels very useful, not just for annoying the opponent, but for halting momentum at a ledge, allowing you to control when you descend and play mind games like a dash dance!).
Some techniques even enable you to do any movement at all in situations where you would normally be stuck or restricted to very limited options; Snake’s up-B out of shield is able to attack opponents who attempt to pressure his shield too close and even reverse pressure by giving him a chance to quickly cancel the up-B and land sticky mines on his opponents, gaining the upper hand. Otherwise, Snake would be limited to spot dodging, rolling, grabbing, or waiting in this situation, all of which come with long lag times and big vulnerabilities.
For more information about various types of movement options, you can also check our much older discussion of movement. Additionally, the internet is full of hundreds of good, more specific resources on advanced techniques, both for general tech skill and character-specific techniques, so search engines are a great friend.
Technical Expertise
One major barrier to playing Project M at the next level is actually learning the tech skill necessary. At the most basic levels, you find yourself needing to learn how to L-cancel, dashdance, and maybe wavedash. This becomes a baseline level of technical abilities for your career in Project M. Once you have these basics down, you learn technical skill as you feel you need it; while I recommend all the most general abilities to all players, such as reverse aerial rush, taunt cancels, b-reverses, and the like, they are not as big a barrier to improvement.
In fact, over time, you will find that the more technical skill you gain, the less gain you will probably gain from learning another skill. Learning technical abilities, then, follows a law of diminishing returns; as a player learns the most basic abilities and nails them down, they feel their power onscreen increase dramatically. But when the next piece of tech skill to learn is something highly nuanced, like a very specific combo against a very specific character, your relative gains are much smaller. For example, my success early on was drastically improved when I learned how to wavedash-ftilt effectively as Luigi in Melee, but learning to “standing nair” (also called a platform-canceled neutral air) was an incredibly small gain for very specific scenarios. I still have much ground to cover to gain large boosts in my success, as I have yet to incorporate shield drops effectively in my play, but such a gain will not magically shoot me to number one. It is important to be realistic in this regard.
But it will help, undoubtedly. How can I, or anyone else, go about learning new technical skills? The first thing I recommend is practicing in private, or in a relaxed setting. You should begin by finding out what the skill is and how to perform it. If you don’t know what your goal is, how can you achieve it? Once again, the internet and helplines/chatrooms/forums are great resources for this.
Next, you open up the game, go to a game with a willing friend, a CPU, or most likely Training Mode. In Project M, training mode has good functionality coupled with Project M’s debug mode, so I recommend using it (in Melee, I found myself frustrated often unable to use the C-stick to practice aerials in training mode! Project M spoils you, so take advantage of it!). Once there, simply repeat the motions of the technique. Practice your specific tech skill in a contained setting. Debug mode helps to work out exact timings. Much of the tech skill in PM requires pretty tight timing, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t get it right away, or even after weeks of attempts! You will feel that much more rewarded when you can finally nail that Thunders combo, or learn to wavedash effectively. Practice for consistency and eventually fluidity, not speed or power. Flashiness comes later with confidence, and on the outset your initial goals should be repeatability. Mastery is only shown by being able to do something well 100 times, not amazingly only once (we call that dumb luck!).
Once you feel confident with the technique, it’s time to practice it in context. Play friendlies while focusing on applying the technique. Low or no-stakes gameplay practice is the best way to nail down those techniques outside of a comfortable environment. I hear many complaints that remembering to do things like L-canceling in real games is hard, because the player is focusing on other things in game, like getting smashed to a pulp. To that I say: focus on the technique. Don’t worry about losing, you are not in this for pride right now. You are in that game to learn, and to that end you have to put effort in, because no one else is going to practice those shield drops for you. Initially, you can use it out of context; shield drop on platforms when no one is around if you need to. It’s not efficient, of course, but it does help add to your consistency. Then you can start applying it after the opponent strikes your shield, as you should learn when the technique is actually appropriate.
After you are consistent in using your tech skill in real games, it’s time to move on to tournament settings. Doing this is tricky. As I have said before, your primary aim in any tournament match is to win by whatever (fair) means necessary. However, you only learn to do something under pressure by doing it under pressure. This is a fact; it’s not something taught, but learned through experience. Proper training in friendlies only helps so much. Your goal by this point is to have internalized the techniques while in casual training, but I find that in practice I end up using half-formed tech skill quite a bit. Sure, I lose lives all the time being inconsistent (largely to SDs). However, to that end, I’d like to just respond with wise words from Roy maven Sethlon:
[Ledgedashes, wavelanding directly from ledge] is one technique that will take a lot of practice to get down. You will SD, a lot. Even when you have the technique "down", there will be times where you'll SD when attempting it in tournament. And it will be worth every single stock.
Though many might disagree with me, I strongly argue for using even half-consistent tech skills in tournament in situations that call for them. Roughly paraphrasing Sethlon once again, if a God of Smash Bros gave you the ability to, for example, gain invincibility for a full second after grabbing ledge AND warp you onto the stage at the cost of every 10th, every 5th, or every other stock, that is a deal you ought to take.
So we’ve walked through very roughly a good route to practice tech skill. Of course, it won’t work for everyone. Some top players have mentioned that they never practiced any tech skill alone in their lives, and learned it all through friendlies and tournament practice. Others, like Mew2king, preferred to spend hours alone grinding out their abilities to 100% consistency, taking careful accounting of frames and microspacing. Your routine is your own. However, I need to now caution you with some warnings before we get ahead of ourselves.
There’s More to Life than Multishines
I played a tournament match against a younger Wolf player once at a local. He was surprisingly technical, able to multishine 5-6 times breezily in place and against my shield. Quite impressive for the age. However, I tore through him in an easy 2-0. This is not a signal of any particular strength on my part. This is a sign that his priorities were mismatched, and though I don’t remember his name, I hope he sees this, because I wish had mentioned this to him at the time.
The problem this player had was a lack of fundamentals. In Project M, it’s quite easy to get ahead of ourselves and rely on our characters to supplant any need for fundamentals, as characters have so many tools available to them. Why should I bother with spacing when I can just multishine and hydrolasagna my way through everything and win? The reason is that you won’t win for long; your cheeky tricks, be they booster fairs, stomp-to-knee, shine spikes, or whatever, are not broken. Project M is, in fact, theoretically beatable, and if you are not the best player in the world, there is someone who will beat you. If you are not strong in fundamentals, you will find that there are a lot of people who will beat you.
If you’re OK with that, you’re of course not obligated to change. But for those who aren’t, it is important to know that, as I said earlier, technical ability is never a replacement for fundamental skills; it is a supplement. The KISS model, “keep it simple, stupid,” is wonderfully powerful in Smash. I can’t tell you how many stocks I’ve lost trying to nail a Reverse Hydroplane Usmash, for example, when a simple nair would have worked to kill. When you use your technical skills as a crutch, you’re liable to letting someone kick out your legs out. When your legs are strong, crutches only add more stability, and then let you reach out and thwack a jerk in the shins as a plus.
What I’m trying to say is that when you learn your tech skill, in Project M and Melee (and to a lesser extent in any other fighting game), you have to never lose sight of your fundamentals. Beginning with a focus on fundamentals is best. I tell you this from my own personal struggles. Having played with no one for 3 years and just practicing little technical things I saw in videos like chain grabs and wavelands gives me some cheeky options, but I was severely stunted when I came to college and saw that real competitive scenes are in grasp. Not paying attention while watching VoDs of matches, I failed to notice neutral games and the idea of safe versus unsafe options going on in the matches; I only saw the flashy things. When I play a real game, I get frustrated: where are those chaingrabs and endless down-smash combos I could do before? The answer is that I couldn’t earn them.
Your multishines mean nothing if you can’t set them up or capitalize on situations in which they’re a possibility, and your tricky moonwalks mean nothing if they won’t lead to anything useful. They’re just dumb, and accordingly I no longer fear people with flashy tech skill without first playing against them; big bark, bogus bite. It’s a lesson I learned the hard way, and I hope none of you need to work out of the that hole I was in. Your technical work means nothing if your neutral game, punish game, edgeguard game, mental game, and street-wise game suffer. I tell people all the time: a smart player beats a fancy one at equal “skill levels” almost every time. Learning to be smart is less physically demanding than being technical, and if you’re good you won’t need as much highly precise tech skill. So my moral to you is the same my parents taught to me in life: work smart, not hard. Learn your tech skill where you need it, but don’t rely on it to carry you through tournaments. You need to win games, not your finger joints or your character.
To be quite clear, if tech skill was not of very high importance in PM, I would not have spent hours on this article. However, it has a time and place, and it ultimately should always come second to the player with better fundamentals.
If you feel that you are being carried by your character’s tech skills, I can encourage you to try out different characters across the CSS. This teaches you what your character does well at and what it doesn’t do so good with, by comparing and contrasting with others. For example, a Falco player using Dedede will feel the pain of not having immense speed and easy kill moves, but will appreciate an easy recovery from far away, as well as deep offstage edgeguards, tricky burst movements, and immense disjointed range with ftilt. Upon returning to Falco, the player might have learned something to conceal Falco’s poor recovery, maybe by using better mixups, and utilizing Falco naturally good neutral game having played someone with a much poorer one. I hope this section of this week’s MoM serves not as a stern warning against practicing tech skill, but a gentle precaution to keep in mind the bigger picture.
Teach Tech
I can pontificate about tech skill for hours. However, there is not a perfect method to teaching you the fundamentals of smash. Ultimately the best advice across the board I can give you is to experiment a lot, and see how you can incorporate technical abilities into your gameplay, rather than the other way around.
If you keep focused on this ground rule with what you learn (aside from, of course, cheeky “tech skill” you might just learn for fun or laughs, but that’s another discussion), you should be able to apply your tech skill in tournament matches without much problem, and as you pick up more and more technical abilities you will need less effort to figure out exactly when these things are appropriate in practice. This will be because along the way, you learned the fundamentals of Smash and PM, as well as a variety of matchups and ever-higher comfort with the game, and it’s all boosted one more level by your mechanical prowess.
Thanks for being patient with a very late MoM; I just came back from a tournament late in the day, and had a lot of thoughts mulling over that simply needed time to come out. I hope this helps guide you in navigating Project M’s technically-focused environment and learning to play at the ever-waiting next level.
Take care! -- The Mind Over Meta Writing Team.
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SmashCapps hopes readers enjoy these articles as he always finds them well thought out and insightful. To keep up with his own writing adventures be sure to follow him on Twitter.
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