lot of text incoming, i'm just having trouble going into further and further detail into the same thing again, and i'm already not good at explaining things like this, take it or leave it, i cannot trim this any harder, sorry
just to clarify, when i say something to the effect of "not smash", i mean that it doesn't fit within the already established rules or what you would expect a smash character to be able to do. the subjectivity of it isn't relevant imo, the fact that most of the cast follows these rules consistently makes ignoring those implicit rules just unproductive. you're right though, my rules arent the same as yours, but i have a ton of reasons to back up why they exist and shouldn't be ignored when designing a character or understanding why they do or don't fit the general conventions
***also animations are very important, i can go into that too cause it keeps being overlooked but i think it's self-explanatory and it's not being recognized for playing an important role in the game because it absolutely affects gameplay, although not "directly" i guess***
okay well i guess it's kind of a given that if you mentally remove yourself from the overt trends in how characters play then he would seem like any other pm matchup, yeah, but this seems like a band-aid over a broken arm kind of thing. unless you mean to suggest that people should/tend to unconsciously not notice how lucario is drastically different from literally everyone else in the cast, which i don't believe really happens. we look for patterns without knowing it, idk how you would repress that to compensate for a design anomaly like lucario
for your examples of other characters, those aren't really comparable to lucario at all (with the exception of yoshi dj armor, i agree with that a bit more and i have no idea how you would figure that out "intuitively"). inhale and thunder are both heavily implied to function the way that they do through their animations (and their character associations, though that doesn't come up all the time), and the thunderbolt in particular is a really blatant example of teaching both players what the move does in an intuitive way with a giant neon yellow lightning bolt flying out of the air from a dark cloud directly above where pikachu was while it screams and summons zeus. they also don't re-invent or grab something completely out of the ballpark with the moves as concepts either: inhale builds off of established grabs, and thunder builds off of established projectiles. lucario builds off almost nothing and bases his system on a completely different game and doesnt even copy it well
i also wanna point out also that you mentioning the "magic series" pre-supposes that someone who isn't familiar with something like that would know what that means. to someone who plays exclusively smash, cancelling moves into each other is just foreign, there isn't some, "oh, it must be the magic series" realization or anything
i dont wanna re-explain the detail for lucario's system, so instead i just want to again emphasize how much better traditional fighters use clear animation and hitstop to show how a move cancels into another in a way that lucario doesn't
as for anti-combo counter-play, yeah, he has to deal with sdi and di, but i'd just like to mention a specific moment in chat where sosa literally said, "you have to sdi away in differnt directions from him and pray" and "there's no real way to not take huge damage from lucario combos". maybe i'm being misled, but this doesn't sound like intuitive counterplay to me
edit: i want to clarify that i know the counterplay is there and that it's possible and etc etc etc but the point is that it's not intuitive in the way it is for the rest of the cast etc
also zach, still missing the point, i don't know how to explain this any harder so i think we should agree to disagree here
