Keeshu

Been having fun trying to add more movement tech to my gameplay starting with the slingshot tech. Focusing on learning specific tech this year and just being significantly more structured as I realized I spent too much time dawdling on "what do I want to learn/practice today?"

Putting characters I'm thinking about secondarying in spoilers for a little less bias. Though thinking of characters that have no range
Pichu - Got a Pikachu main friend, but I've always loved Pichu more (and likely unintentionally influenced my username since I started using this name suspiciously close to when I played Melee). Safe to say Pichu is absurdly cute, also he's banner buddies with Sephiroth. Absolutely shortest range in the game too. Main thing I worry about is if his combos are too repetitive, and the fact he's glass cannon to the extreme making it harder to gauge how well I'm doing
Kirby - Sephiroth is fast, long range, tall with sluggish frame data. Kirby is slow, short range, small with absurdly fast frame data, they are complete opposites. Also always loved characters that take other characters abilities/turn into them. TF2 getting revived reminding of my time maining Spy, and Loki being my go-to in Marvel Rivals has definitely reminded me just how much fun it is to use character's abilities against themselves, and having excuses to analyze the nuances of every player's habits based on what they are playing. Also not quite the wannabe edgelord I once was when I first picked up smash, so I love how adorable he is (though.... it can be seen as Kirby being a massive troll....Doesn't help that I swear my most trolly moments were with Kirby. Only surpassed by the Kings of trolling with DDD and Krool)
Meta Knight - I prefer different playstyles, but if I wanted a similar one, Meta Knight would be the one (who is still pretty different). Similar burst range to Sephiroth, but more focused on close range. Also I treat Sephiroth's Up b like Meta Knight's dimensional cape. Also, one of the original 3 I wanted back in Melee who are all incredibly fun in Ultimate. 1 Ridley 'cuz big dragon (though now I like him for a few other reasons... but still mainly because I love big bad dragons). 2 Sephiroth (Even though I forgot for a while because I thought he'd be impossible, after all, no 3rd parties in melee, and Cloud has to get in first. Liked him for being a cool looking villain before, but as time went on I love him more for being a fallen hero and various things in his backstory... I really should play the FF7 series. I'm just afraid because it'll take as much time to play it as half the time of my time in Ultimate lol). 3 Meta Knight. Loved the Kirby series, and MK is the character that introduced me to the concept of a duel which I love. Also I view him as a mascot of my childhood, being those ultra try hard that tries too much to do everything and save everyone, when they really should chill the heck out and remember there's other things in life. Always loved him being a massive spike in difficulty, and being the hardest challenge in all the older games. Some of the newer Kirby games it's actually agony seeing how incredibly slow he is.
Sonic - "Pick a top tier" pick, except I really love the Sonic series (funnily enough used to hate Sonic himself though, but he's grown on me over the years). Also maybe because I haven't played him enough, but I love the way his combos look. I do worry about the future of playing with him though, since I hear he gets campy the higher level gameplay he gets. That said, if I do pick him up, I'm gonna spend a year not using side/down b to make it easier to be creative with everything else he has.... All that said, in the next smash, if Shadow is in, I'm playing him instead. Got more high hopes this time since if they were developing smash now, the year of shadow may influence things a bit
Lucario - Basically the character that taught me that you can be a try-hard badass, and relax while listening to emotions (as opposed to everything else in life being basically telling me "if you aren't angry 24/7, you're not trying hard enough" which is not how the brain works as while that mindset can get results, it's detrimental in many ways and there's more effective ways to get things done). Soooo definitely a very emotional pick because of that. However, with Lucario I try throughout the match because low aura requires me to set the opponent up for easier KOs, and high aura requires me to be careful to not die. Just about everyone else in the roster I will get overconfident as heck when I'm lower %s. I could try to get over that, but unsure if it's worth the effort, or to just use Lucario as a crutch. Also Lucario makes people emotional in interesting ways (and not just rage lol), without being BS (unless people let him live to absurd %S, which shouldn't happen since everyone kills so early in this game).


Rapidfire trying to say the main reasons why I don't play other characters that I tried over my 1k hours of Ultimate (but they are still fun casually):
BOTW Link & Young Link- Smash 4 Link separated into 2 characters, but I liked it when it was one. Also learned to love Toon Link that I can't pick the others over him now. Especially after a series of Link dittos with a friend that were amazing matches that made me go "This is why I play this game". Toon Link just kept "flowing" better than the other Links
Snake - I may love chess in Smash, but he doesn't let a good chunk of the roster do their normal gameplay. Especially with his frame 1 nade
Duck Hunt - Frame 1 Can when all my friends are combo character main lovers (Otherwise very difficult but rewarding fun)
Yoshi - Non-stop cheese with his movements and double jump armor makes me feel like I'm not playing the game
Joker - Also cheese with movements shrinking him. Don't like rain drop combos. If I became a Joker main, I would cause torture from using gun & side b throughout the match too much, but if I remove those, may as well just play Meta Knight
Isabelle & Sora - Surprised they have scary combos, but not enough to save them from the agonizingly slow movement (especially waiting to get back down after being launched)
Rosalina & Luma - Luma is almost always dead, which makes things tough for trying to learn this character. (Skill issue, I may try them again in the future)
Marcina - Marth (old Melee main) feels spammy and rewarded too much from tippers and combos compared to Sephiroth's sluggish stray hits. Lu Cena feels braindead compared to Marth
Ridley - Feels like nair the character at higher levels of play, prefer Sephiroth for competitive matches. (Ridley is a go-to for casuals though. Marth/Ganondorf hybrid afterall)
Inkling - Skill issues, my brain doesn't understand their combos. Learning how important bair is for them does hurt a bit (May pick them up later though)
Mewtwo - Very hard to gauge if I'm improving or not. Also anytime I take a break, it's like I never played him before, and he's the only character that is like this for me, which is annoying because he has a little bit of almost every gameplay style and is so stylish. It's like he keeps wiping my memory X_X
Wolf, R.O.B., Samuses - I feel like they are so powerful that they play the game for me.
Sheik & Mythra - Wins neutrals for free, and I feel like I'm bullying the opponent which I don't like. Also Sheik hype since Melee from everyone made me disappointed when I actually learned her combos
2213 Mii Swordsman - Incredibly fun, but I assume it'll get repetitive. Other movesets feel too slow, and I need to learn Chakram as it's uninteresting to me currently
Byleth - Probably better than Sephiroth due to similar range, but better frame data. However, while the currently 6 hours of 3 houses was fun, I prefer Sephiroth's gameplay and character more. I doubt there's more to Byleth other than this super form that I keep hearing about
Incineroar - His risk-reward feels absurdly in his favor that he feels too cheesy for me. Also can't unsee him as a particular friend's character, so it feels weird playing him 'cuz of that
Bayonetta - Main of go-to competitive sparring partner (Not so much a problem after watching Bayo cutscenes and liking Jeanne, I know what skin I'm using). Combos don't look cool to me now the magic tricks have been revealed after picking her up for Bayo dittos (but might become cool again if I learned her more in-depth)..... Also dumb slow fingers with the 4 frame input on up b that looks the same so I don't even know when I'm doing it wrong until after a combo is dropped and thinking about it is really annoying
Kazuya - Too much cheese, and main of a particular friend. Also more fun if he's played casually imo
Ryu - I might like his fundies in other fighting games, but in Smash holy crud he is too cheesy. (Though he'd be the traditional fighter I'd pick of the 4 in smash if I chose one... Also his vibes overlap with Lucario too much, I'd rather play Lucario character-wise)
Belmonts - Similar to Sephiroth with range, but sacrifices offstage gameplay for projectiles to help him use his whip. I don't like sacrificing entire portions of the game, so I'd rather play Sephiroth (also don't much care for the Belmonts..... give me Alucard, even if he pouts too much when Sephiroth stays positive with his smiles)
Ray & Doomslayer - Feels waaay too counterpicky. Fighting projectile heavy opponents feels among the favorite matchups in the game, but they are way too sluggish up close for fast characters. Some matchups just aren't as fun for one reason or another
Banjo & Kazooie - Worried about eggs being too important to the gameplay, nade recovery seems hard, and his combos feel weird, and his surprisingly fast falling with low hops catches me off-guard after playing other characters. (likely all skill issues, but may try him later. Though no nostalgia for characters since I haven't played Banjo)
Ike & Ganondorf - I love them because they are incredibly basic, and easy to play so I can focus on opponent easily, but I think they are better suited for casual play because of this as if I got good, that can probably be applied to any character.
While everyone in the roster has fun gameplay, it's not as much fun as all of all the above, and some of them I don't have as much love for the characters as above


There's my long ramble for the month. Now to actually play smash instead of thinking about it :3

Basically I've divided characters based off of 8 groups:
Top row: Rushdown type characters. They want to get in, stay in, and never let you have a chance to get away, and they have ways to "force" themselves into close range.
Second row: Deadly combo characters. They may have other tools outside of close range, but it's just to help them get in, and when they get in, it's just a blender of damage for high damage or taking stocks.
Third Row: Hit & Run. Emphasis on chipping away at opponent with absurdly good poking options.
Forth Row: "balanced" Basically characters that have a way to play at all ranges, with seemingly no bias for any range
Fifth Row: Big boys. Characters that have very large attacks, but don't have disjoints and/or frame data to throw out attacks carelessly
Sixth row: Swordies/disjoints. Characters that are meant to be at a specific distance tossing out safe disjoints with very little fear of being punished compared to tossing out moves to poke using other characters.
Seventh Row: Turtles. Characters that change the stage environment by having traps/slow projectiles/etc to limit options the opponent has
Bottom Row: Zoners. Characters that prefer to stay as far away as possible. To whittle away at the opponent from a safe distance.
Characters on the left side are the most likely to main for their category. Characters on the left side but close to the middle line are characters that are either 2nd in line for favorite in that category, or characters that have in theory all the stuff to be a main but I need to either learn them more or get attached to the character by playing their game so I don't ditch them. Characters on the right side I've basically reserved for casual play at this point.

So for the characters in each group:
Rushdown: This is the group that all feel incredibly fun to play. Just a bit harder to get with them because I literally only like them because of smash which is a blow to keeping motivation to play them. Also I have to learn combo routes a bit more, and I haven't spent enough time with them yet to really use them to their full effect. Fox & Sheik I basically view as faces of competitive smash. Pichu is just a fun time and quite hard, and practically influenced my username unintentionally because I love them so much in smash. Squirtle I don't know if he belongs here because I haven't seen enough experienced Squirtle players to really know what the playstyle is like, but I like the idea of swapping between different archetypes of PT so he's been on my mind lately.

Combo characters: Meta Knight is kind of a weird fighter. His up air combo isn't as consistent as previous games, but it's still a thing. He has frame data of a rushdown character so you can't just suffocate people randomly in some matchups. Though he often does a bait & punish style, so he can feel like hit & run sometimes. All I know is he feels amazing. Kirby feels like a very fun deadly combo character, but he feels underwhelming compared to other combo characters. All the other combo characters I can get bored with for long periods of time. Except for when my friend plays Falco and I don't expect those combos from him, and Ice Climbers because I don't want to break my hands playing smash. = )

Hit & Run: My first video games were all games that if you get touched, you are dead instantly, so you need to outmaneuver and outplay everyone with your superior speed & abilities so you don't have to restart your whole game because you got hit once in 3 separate lives. So obvious sonic is here since that's the entire purpose of the character, and he feels amazing to play every time. The main thing going against him is I know how most people can hate fighting/spectating him (but could help overcoming not caring about that since that happens to every character, just less often to others). Also I worry about how much Side b makes his gameplay repetitive later on. These categories were kind of inspired by Ramses Esports's archetype video, and he put inkling as waller. While yes that bair is insane, maybe I'm just bad so far, but it feels like ya gotta focus on their other options so the bair isn't insanely predictable. Inkling just feels like they get in, do a tiny bit of damage, and then get out most of the tourney footage I've seen and in my experience playing them. They feel so great to play. Gale tornado/chakram swordfighter definitely would be placed elsewhere. However I've gone to the 2213 Light shuriken, gale stab, stone scabbard, and power thrust Mii Swordfighter and I am absolutely addicted to this character right now. You have constant pressure at all ranges at every moment in the match, and the specials allow for quick hits that move both players around the map while they get in and out. Also I have now played Monster Hunter World, so now I love the Rathalos armor even more, and the 2213 set really does remind me of playing my main weapons Insect Glaive/Lance in Monster Hunter. Joker has a moveset that in theory I should be absolutely in love with. The bit of persona 5 I have seen I should love as well since it's all about psychology and how people think, with the archetypes of personas being based of Carl Jung's work and stuff. However, despite all that, something just feels off with Joker. Maybe it's just 'cuz he looks like a dorky teenager weeb, or maybe I'm not good enough at playing him. Both these things I can learn to love/get better at so it's not a problem. So, if stuff does suddenly click, I feel like he could instantly become my main, especially since multiple people suggest I main him. Emotions be a fickle thing.

"Balanced" characters: Lucario's sluggish frame data makes it so he can't really be a rushdown fighter (even if he is fast, though backwards charging aura sphere kinda lets him get in sometimes), but he is kind of like all the other archetypes put into one character depending on how strong aura is at the time. At this current point in time I feel Lucario is probably the best character for me to main since he'll get me into the right mentality of knowing how to focus, but also to know how to relax and have fun. Usually most characters I get one side or the other. Only Sonic, Inkling, Pichu, Ridley (well any of the big boys really), Sephiroth, Toon Link, Snake, and Olimar are the only other characters that can kinda tap into this mindset of focusing while remembering to have fun and experiment, but they generally don't strike as good of a balance as Lucario..... Also I've been playing Rain World lately, soooo that's been heavily biasing me towards Lucario recently. Mewtwo just feels like it's good absolutely good at any range, he's just extremely glass cannon. Mewtwo schmoves so well, it's really hard to resist playing him. I may not be as edgy as I used to be but I still love wolf a ton. Also he feels like one of the more fundamental characters, but he just gets rewarded too well for those fundies. I can't see myself playing Mewtwo over Lucario, or wolf over Mewtwo, but I love playing wolf too much to count him out entirely.

Big Boys: Ridley is the character that made me learn to not get bothered by being in long combos. He knows how to come back from the brink of death the very second the opponent stops respecting your options. Some people put him in waller, but maybe playing my Pikachu main friend has me feeling like he's too sluggish to be put in with the other swordies. Similarly, Ike is insanely sluggish, and feels like one of the few sword users that can't just throw out sword attacks out all randomly. Nair is good at lower levels of play, but once people start parrying constantly, it's like what do you even do outside of hard reading the opponent as Ike? Anyways, I tried to main Charizard for a while in Smash 4, and he feels great. I only didn't stick with him because I wanted to try out everyone else because Charizard is very simple, and then I just didn't return to him. Charizard being so fun always keeps reminding me about Squirtle and Ivysaur. Originally they were weighing him down because I don't care about them in our of smash originally, but now that I've having more fun with the variety of playstyles and regularly fighting someone that plays PT every time we play together, they have been warming up to me. Honorable mention to Ganondorf and Incineroar. Ganondorf I used a lot in Smash 4 which caught people off-guard, and he's second only to Ike in making me pay attention to the opponents movements if I'm rusty with smash. Incineroar just feels like the spiritual successor to brawl/smash4 Ganondorf, but he loses some points because he feels like he's one of my friend's characters (and I already got plenty of other character choices that this actually matters)

Sword/disjoints: First main was Marth in Melee. So he definitely biased me towards how I play in smash. Though my playstyle has definitely been diluted by playing other characters since then. So for a long time I was struggling to pick between a lot of swordies, but when Sephiroth came out, he basically single handedly obliterated all of the competition. While all swordies feel good, Sephiroth is the only one where I actually love the character itself outside of smash. There's not much love going on for most characters personality/lore wise that I care about, and even in the case of Link, it's not very strong because there's nothing to work with there outside of BOTW being a very relaxing game. Marth is being carried entirely by tippers and being my Melee main. His moveset is just okay, but hot dang there's a huge spike in fun anytime I hit a tipper. Sephiroth's sweet spots are very close in how fun it is to his his tippers and stuff, but Marth is the OG tipper user, and he makes it work. Corrin is a character that no one can seem to love outside of smash, but in smash his gameplay feels so unique and fun. Also being able to combo with a sword character like Corrin is a bit of a shock to the system. Then what really makes him stand out is all the weird micro spacing he can do with all of his moves. Gives me that underdog vibe that makes me want to play him to show how interesting his movement can be. That said, nice to see Corrin being picked up in the meta more lately. I've always liked Ivysaur, but his sluggish movement, with unimpressive recovery has always been a problem for me. Though overtime everything that bothered me about Ivysaur is bothering me less. Also I'm being silly splitting the belmonts up because before I tried to get them into Elite Smash I only ever saw people spamming projectiles with them in Elite smash, and even in tournaments! Projectile spamming is an absolutely horrid way to play them once I tried to learn them. It's all about the whip. It honestly feels a lot like playing Byleth and Sephiroth, but you sacrifice recovery in order to have the cross & holy water to help you limit your opponent's options so it's easier to hit them with your whip.

Turtles: Now I know Toon Link could easily be placed elsewhere like hit & run for example. However I just view him as a turtle because his projectiles are so slow and linger for so long, alongside with how incredibly fast he is, he can use projectiles to cover his approach. I love projectile heavy characters because that implies so many more options, and I love fast characters because again, more options. So fast projectile users are all incredibly fun, thus Toon Link is insanely fun. I hear Young Link is better, but I like Toon Link being more trappy, whereas Young Link feels more like "I'm gonna arrow you across the stage, and then keep arrowing to combo as I approach to get my kill confirm" sorta deal so it's harder for me to enjoy playing/watching young link gameplay. Snake feels like chess in Smash. I grew up kicking people's butt in chess club when I was in school. Years later I still kicked people butts when I decided to pick Chess backup in VR. So having a character that is all about thinking about multiple locations on the map at all times, thinking about how the effects you in the future, adapting to every slight change even if it seemed insignificant at first, and choosing when to commit or not, when to sacrifice.... Yeah I friggin love Snake's gameplay.... and it has explosives! Main thing going against him is I haven't played Metal Gear yet. Though similarly to Joker, his game covers themes that I find interesting. So I gotta play it at some point. Since I don't currently care about Snake, which sucks because his gameplay in theory is perfect, but with so many other characters with "perfect gameplay", ya gotta have a little bit of attachment on top to keep me sticking with you. Rosalina & Luma is a really fun character, however Luma dies just so incredibly fast that it feels like you can't really play the character, especially against matchups that excel at killing Luma. I'm sure if you get over that hump and make it so Luma lives longer sure, but often times it's like trying to play So-Po all game when fighting anyone decently good and it's really hard to try to improve like that. Duck Hunt feels like a more chaotic version of Snake. The gameplay for Duck Hunt is so friggin fun. Problem is he can be hard to kill with a lot of the time, and while I used the zapper to play Duck Hunt as a kid, I really don't care about Duck Hunt dog at all. Especially since his whole schtick is to laugh at you. I'm not here to make people mad, I just want to make an obstacle course with projectiles to see how my opponent can impress me with how they deal with it. Pac-man is a strange case. Initially he felt like he was too basic. Then combo videos made him look complex. Now I learned the items and watched more tourney footage, he feels incredibly basic again and now overhyped for his complexity (still stupidly strong character though)

Zoners: Someone actually suggested I go Olimar, and complimented on how well I was doing with Olimar, and saying how scary it was massively changed my opinion on this character. Olimar being notoriously annoying to fight is the main reason why I never gave this character a serious chance before. I like Pikmin and all, but it's not like a major game series I play, and Olimar is literally just your average joe-schmoe guy(and isn't leaning into the underdog type like Little Mac does). Though I am loving the character the more I play them. Also holy snap his gameplay is so friggin intense for the entire match. Similarly to Snake, he feels very chess-like in the moment to moment decision making and thinking multiple steps ahead knowing when to sacrifice and all that. Just Olimar has less emphasis on stage control, but is significantly faster gameplay, and the decisions he makes are just so much more multi-layered, and doesn't outright shut down most opponent's gameplay like Snake does because of Snake's frame 1 nades and absurdly long, fast, hard hitting normals. So if often feels like I'm fighting my opponent more, rather than just taking half of their options away. Also Olimar actually has combos unlike snake, but it's dependent on what pikmin he has which makes him even cooler than I initially thought when seeing the character. I feel like literally every game is a completely different game with Olimar, more-so than any other character in the roster due to how much there is to consider. So you gotta just kinda think on the fly more often, rather than do that guaranteed combo all the time. Now on the flip side, sometimes it's nice to have things be rather simple. Down B bomb drop is addicting to use even in matchups where the others are probably more useful. Up B likely to use arm rocket, but the others are alright for more niche reasons. Neutral B and side B are the main ones I'm interested in. Laser Blaze & Stealth burst is a combo I don't care for because at that point I'd rather be mii swordfighter 2213 or Sephiroth. Doomslayer's Charge Blaze & Missile is a lot like Samus who was a main at one point in Smash 4, but I like Gunner's movement and normals more (as much as I want to have an excuse to play Dark Samus). I'm addicted to anything that homes in on enemies in games, so hard to resist missiles and pick flame pillar which apparently has some nice combos (and kill confirm with charge blast). May go Ray MK III swap Charge blast for Grenade launch for maximum projectile spammage like I'm playing Custom Robo. Unfortunately, while this moveset is extremely fun against other projectile heavy characters, it is not fun against the majority of the cast (and often times feels like I'm cheesing since grenade launch often is a very cheesy move).

So yeah, it's always hard to pick a character. I love the whole "don't get hit" mentality of many archetypes, they just got about it in different ways. Only balanced and big boy type characters don't have a huge emphasis on not getting hit, I love their emphasis on reading the opponent really hard. Again, I do love every character in the roster. These are just the characters that seem like they might be easier for me to main (but of course, perhaps I'm going about finding a main the wrong way). Like playing Captain Falcon, Terry, King Dedede or Hero will cure depression because they are so goofy, but it'd be impossible for me to play them seriously in any capacity.... Despite being able to do so well with them even if I've never labbed them =p

These two I have the highest hopes for currently since they seem to have somewhat fundamental playstyles and make me focus more often than others
Lucario - More-so than any other character in the roster, he forces me to remain calm and focus no matter whether I'm at 0% where I usually get overconfident with most characters, or about to die with crazy damage buff. Which is funny because he's also the character that makes the highest adrenaline despite that calmness (I had a bit of fun testing my heart rate monitor at one point. Makes me get to 140 with high aura moments).
Inkling - Similar to Lucario, they always make me try my hardest, but in a different less calm way. I'm currently about mid-level being held back by my inputs, so I can only get splat roller if I condition people to get hit by it, so no worries about spamming roller.

Others that I'm strongly considering:
Ridley - Easiest character to swap between casual and competitive playstyles. His sluggishness (despite fast movement speed), and combo food forces me to watch the opponent, and expect that I'm going to take a lot of damage. Downsides being that every now and then I get a little too greedy trying to do a devastating combo/attack with Ridley. Also I don't know how to do neutral against my pikachu main friend who moves like ESAM since he loves waiting just outside my range until I throw out an attack no matter where I move around, and if I'm too passive he just t-jolts to get a free punish.
Mii Swordsman - Seems more normal than other characters I'm listing here, but the biggest problem is that he might rely on his specials more than others.
Joker - He feels mostly fundamental despite having cheesy things like low-risk projectiles, counter, hurtbox shifting like crazy, and arsene being broken.
Meta Knight - Old main that has a very strong emphasis on bait & punish. However, no one really plays like him, soo I feel like he might not have as many transferable skills to other characters.
Wolf - Feels very incredibly fundies. However he feels like he gets rewarded waaay too much for what he does that it feels like I'll learn the wrong things since I can get similar results by doing something wrong.
Mewtwo - Very fun character that has a bit of everything. However, no one really plays like Mewtwo, so I have no idea if they are a good pick or not.
Sonic - Tons of reading the opponent and creative ways to mix things up. However the stigma is so strong against him that I feel like just him being on stage makes it so people play worse, thus they don't even try to play him properly.

Then there's some characters I find will be very unlikely to help me
Fox - He feels like an easy win button. I feel like I can just go up on people and mash on them, and just linger just outside their range. Maybe with more time I can get over that ridiculousness, but until then it's very distracting to get rewarded so strongly playing Fox
Pichu - Unlike the strings of Fox, Pichu has true combos for days. He can use a projectile to get in, but him taking damage is like getting a slap on the wrist for relying on a projectile. Also it's very hard to get used to having no range whatsoever on a character. Also there's the emotional aspect of not wanting to step on my pikachu main friend's toes picking this character

Then there's some projectile characters I want to pick up at some point, but I plan to pick up later because I feel the projectiles will distract me from learning the basics first. Having better control over my characters is a higher priority right now


Any suggestions?

Overall, I was just too exhausted to properly train in Smash this month, and it's really dang embarrassing how bad it got.

In the first half of the month I made quite a bit of progress with Sephiroth, but I didn't take many notes, so I kinda forgot a large chunk of what I learned during that time. Especially since I was getting a bit tired from trying to overload my schedule too much trying to get everything done. Then in a moment of weakness from exhaustion, I decided to look at tier lists again like a fool because it's so dang addicting thinking about who to main.
That said though, it shook who I wanted to main quite a lot though:
Joker kept getting recommended a lot for some reason. Especially since people saw me talking about how I like being fast with Sonic, they were like "no go Joker instead. PLEASE". Still seems mind-boggling to me because I look at good jokers kinda give so much pressure that it kinda feels like they shut down what a lot of characters do, and you're just getting slightly tapped a lot. Though I've had fun using Joker. Though it does feel like he can play himself at points since his moves flow into each other so easily (except up air drag downs that I need to practice a bit more). Still have a hard time getting into the character though, and I've been watching JohneAwesome's playthrough of it, and just feeling like maybe I should just go and get the game myself, because I feel like it really is a game where you don't get the feel of it unless you are actually playing it. I'm afraid of touching that game that will take hundreds of hours, especially since I'm trying to complete another game that was supposed to be significantly shorter than that.
New perspectives I've had in what I want in gameplay and in a character. Using nair to combo no longer feels absolutely dreadful, and now it feels amazing. I dunno how this happened, but because it has, I'm very tempted to pick them back up again. Then I kinda like the character's & games "Play hard, rest well" kind of attitude, and the story of Splatoon (even though I haven't finished Splatoon 2's DLC, and don't yet have 3). Thing is, Inkling and Joker both kinda have this hit & run while having rushdown elements on them. So was having fun swapping between the two. Inkling just feels a lot more fair compared to Joker's just non-stop harassment paired with the delete button that is Arsene. I do like seeing what my opponent likes to do after all.
After playing them, it was a bit harder to want to go back to Sephiroth for a bit, because of how sluggish his attacks are, on top of the people I play with are addicted to seeing combos, so they don't get as hyped for Sephiroth as with other characters unless I delete them out of no-where.
Mondays I've been doing a game log sort of thing, so Rain World gas been on my brain a lot (Game is way longer than expected, and it's exactly what I needed! I want to play it outside of the specified game log days so badly!). Throwing spears feels like doing Sephiroth fair, and it's so satisfying. Though for all the other themes in Rain World, it just keeps making me want to play Lucario. I got shocked when someone suggested I go Lucario, but it was such a blast when I did go Lucario.
I've been thinking about what do I really want to do in smash? I want to do cool stuff, and I want to make sure my friends have a good time. Ridley kinda fulfills all of that since he's such combo food, and he has so many randomly devastating ways mess with opponent. This month I kinda realized, that I do actually love Ridley more than I initially thought. Easy to just look at him and be like "he's just big scary dragon". And while yes that's a huge draw as to why I love him so much, there's a lot of other more subtle nuances that make me love him in and outside of smash. So been tempting to play him more as well.


In the second half of the month, it all came crashing down and didn't really get any progress with Smash whatsoever. Basically was partying with some friends, but this led to me being exhausted for a week. Helldivers 2 came out and wanted to hangout with friends since I haven't hung out with them for a bit. Then proceeded to play waaay too much helldivers 2 (70 hours. Dunno how much of that is AFK 'cuz servers broke though). Was too tired to get myself to stop playing. It was only yesterday where I finally had my fill of that game because when you get to the higher levels, you are rather limited in what you can bring because roles need to be filled to make it so you don't have to concentrate super hard. The game also requires everyone to be trying hard in order to play the game at all on the highest difficulties, and the game starts to feel grindy since you need so many samples (and I guess medals, but later guns don't interest me 'cuz I love shotguns and the call down support weapons). Definitely gotta catch up on a lot of IRL things because of those Helldivers shenanigans.
Glad to see the Magicka devs doing well that Helldivers became the #1 game on Steam. Still has that trolly co-op action going on that I love. Not as much as in Magicka, especially in higher difficulties of Helldivers, but it's still quite common and hilarious. I still can't believe I have that many hours on Helldivers already, since I got around 360 hours on Magicka, and that was one of my go-to games for years.
Definitely will be addicted to Helldivers when mechs get added to the game 'cuz the MechWarrior series got me addicted to mechs..... We need a character with a mech in Smash. 2 types. One with the typical Japanese skating mechs like from Armored Core, and one with the stompy walking wall of metal death like MechWarrior... I can see why people want Susie from Kirby, and Ray from Custom Robo.

Main lesson to be learned: Get more sleep so you are efficient with your time.
Secondary lesson: Be careful of the temptation to swap mains. That is something that will never ever stop happening if you always give in the temptation to swap.

Next month I'll try to get some more specific notes about what I have learned/improved on. Hopefully this is just a one-off for the journey to improve.... and not just the journey to improving just being all wibbly wobbly all over the place due to the multitude of various things that can influence your motivation and how you play, along with all the other things.

Yeah I'm getting a bit nervous about my character picks again. Sephiroth I'm not too concerned about because people can usually get in and beat the crud out of him if I make mistakes. Pretty much everyone likes to play the combo characters so they totally can. I don't know of any matchup that Sephiroth wouldn't really let the opponent play (I mean I played DDD against a Sephiroth and it was not a pleasant experience, but I kinda chalk that up to DDD being DDD being super slow, and I feel DDD mains expect that sorta thing)
Snake on the other hand still feels like he lets people play, but since everyone is so combo heavy, I really do feel like I'm cheating when I use the frame 1 grenade. Makes me wonder if there's other things that he has that don't let other people play the game normally.

Though what I'm really concerned about is the other characters I'm gonna play. Thinking I'm going to leave Meta Knight for next smash, since I'm already playing a fast edgy swordsman that wants to keep a specific distance from the opponent. Meta has always felt like he lets the opponent do everything though. Pichu I feel lets the opponent do stuff because he literally has no range on his stuff. That said, I feel kinda bad while comboing people with him, since it really does feel like it's cutscene mode (minus me being bad at combos, so I drop them quite a bit).

However, I've basically decided to go play Sonic as my go-to secondary. Problem is I dunno how much he lets the opponent play the game. Obviously in tournaments he will time people out. However, I'm just going to be fighting my friends, some of which are tournament goers. Gotta get really good, but it's not like I'm going to resort to tactics that'll make the game boring to play/watch to win. Right now I feel like I can swap things up on the fly with Sonic, but I dunno how much differently people have to play their game compared to "normal" characters. Only time I really felt like I had to change up my gameplay for Sonic was back in Smash 4 when I was playing Meta Knight, since Meta Knight is usually can keep up with everyone else so he can do his bait & punish kind of thing, and I just haven't fought a lot of sonics in Ultimate to really see how he effects other characters.

Or am I just worrying over nothing again? =p

Things I improved upon with Sephiroth in January 2024:
1. Memorizing frame data & combos - I still probably have to go back a bit and give myself more refreshers, but now I have a more thorough understanding of Sephiroth. Before I was just kinda coasting on just naturally playing him, which was plenty to get into Elite Smash with ease. However now I'm really feeling just how absurdly hard Sephiroth is going to be. Realizing that most people don't really know how to punish his misplaced stuff that well because it's hard to. Going to start using nair a lot more, and also going to stop being lazy about forward throw all the time (It's cool, and really funny) since down throw is great as well so I will use my throws properly now.
2. Getting more familiar with all of his unique movement options - Spent most of the time just getting used to the movement differences between his normal movement, and having OWA active. First day I was starting to panic a bit because I realized it really did feel like I was controlling 2 different characters now that I was actively trying to do more precise things.
3. Got a lot of Shadow Flare practice - Since the main opponent I face is a Bayonetta main, I am a bit discourage from using shadow flare all the time since they can just time a witch time on my shadow flare to reverse the situation (especially since they are very good at timing it as long as it's not 2 or 4 shadow flares). Now I can get it to work often on Bayonetta, so if I can get it to work on her, then I don't feel so bad about using it on the rest of the roster.

Still struggling to decide a secondary. I realized I wasted a tremendous amount of time speculating who to pick for a secondary. On the bright side I eased a lot of doubts I had in my mind because I thought of many reasons why I have the handful of characters I plan on picking now. Also, even though I strongly want to play Kirby, Lucario and Ridley, I am now at peace with the fact that they should just stay pockets/casual picks, and focus on them in a future smash. Also realizing Kirby shares a lot more in common with Meta Knight than I thought. They are still very different, but I still will prefer Meta Knight over Kirby every time.
Summarizing how I feel about the 3 now:
Meta Knight
Emotional reasons - 1. He's the OG main that I fell in love with. Even before he got into Smash, and he kinda got me addicted to duels in the first place 2. Fan favorite for my old smash group to fight, and new group loves him 3. He's still one of the coolest characters stylistically and gameplay-wise in the roster.
Gameplay reasons - 1. He's similar to Sephiroth in how he behaves, yet he's just focused on shorter range and being more evasive. Kinda blew my mind when I realized this after watching a particular Meta Knight vs Sephiroth match between top players, seeing them both move the same way defaulting to the same distance from each other. However, this made me look at their matchups and realized that majority of their matchups they struggle with are mostly the same. 2. He reminds me to practice in the lab because the up air/down air combos are so addicting to perform
Pichu
Emotional reasons - 1. He's the one that cracked my hard shell of always saying I didn't like adorable things when I was growing up. To say that he is one of the most adorable characters I've seen is an understatement. 2. He's always high adrenaline everytime I play. He could help me deal with pressure.
Gameplay reasons - 1. He forces me to be aggressive, unlike most characters I love to play. It's unfamiliar territory, but it will let me have another perspective on how to use my other characters 2. Shortest range in the game, so he gives a better understanding on how to predict shorter range characters when I play Sephiroth. Also if they are a character that doesn't care about Sephiroth's range, Pichu will have the frame data tocombat the likely fast frame data that character has. Pichu supposedly covers Sephiroth's matchups the best out of these 3 characters 3.
Sonic
Emotional reasons - 1. He's the most likely to make me want to be competitive with a healthy mindset of the three. Since Pichu, Meta Knight, and even Sephiroth all have this little nagging feeling in the back of my head that "I have to try my hardest no matter what kind even if it's unenjoyable" of mentality from my past, and it's a bit hard to shake that feeling. That part of the reason why I was so lazy about improving in Ultimate after the first year until now, because I was afraid I wouldn't get the balance of relaxing and trying my hardest right. Anyways, Sonic is just doing what it takes to win, but while people are gonna get annoyed with that just because of what they've heard about them just stay positive and keep going. After all, there's more going on than what they probably see anyways. That said, I haven't had any haters so far (except for Elite Smash of course. Amuses me to see people SD 3 times before I even start moving. In the past this kinda thing made me feel bad. Nowadays, I just chuckle to myself and realize they'll learn how to deal with emotions later.) 2. Excuses to play Sonic music. They always get me in a good mood
Gameplay reasons - 1. I am addicted to mobility and having options in games. Sonic has the most speed, and movement options 2. He makes me remember that every character is trying to do cheesy stuff to win in the game because everyone wants to get in favorable positions. Just he starts out with the favorable position just by existing, so getting his is mainly him reading the opponent wrong, and I love how creative you can be with your approaches.

Snake I do plan to use more in the future, but I was so in the Sephiroth mood that I didn't touch him this month. However, people want matchup experience against him, and I love his gameplay, so it'll happen at some point, but there's too much crucial stuff I'm learning with Sephiroth now to test Snake out. I'm playing VR a lot more now to force myself to relax, buuut I often like to play Chess in VR, which will make me want to play Snake more. People weren't kidding when they say Snake is "chess in smash". Perhaps one day Snake can become more than a tertiary pick once I play the Metal Gear series. Tackling my game log on mondays, so that'll be a bit. At this rate though, it'll probably be next year since I'm doing Rain World first (which is much longer than expected, and I'm addicted to it now), Stray + short VR games to take a break from a long playthrough, then FF7 -> FF7 remake -> FF7 Crisis Core -> Rebirth (as per suggested order to get proper context for Sephiroth).

I just wanna say, it's so nice not feeling sick like I was for the majority of 2023. Feels nice to be improving again, and getting absolutely everything done.

Planning on sticking with my main man Sephiroth for the duration of this year. He was always perfect on paper in every way since he came out, but now everything is clicking with him. Gonna spend at least 3/4 the time playing smash as him to try to push him as hard as I can. The meta has changed so much since he first came out, so I gotta add some of those things to my gameplay to catch up since I got dragged away from smash for a bit.
I will probably forever struggle to stick with a single character, so I will probably use Snake as a tertiary character. I realized I like projectile users more for trappy gameplay because I played a bit too much chess growing up, so Snake feels like playing chess... but with funny explosives

Last thing I'm trying to figure out is which speedy close range fighter I want to play for a secondary to have a vast contrast to Sephiroth
1. Banner buddies with Sephiroth, and I love the vast range contrast between the two 2. Pichu in Melee is one of the things that made me love adorable things.... Let's just say I really love the little guy to put things lightly. 3. From what I hear, he covers Sephiroth's matchups the best out of the three, not that Sephiroth needs anyone to cover his matchups. 4. Constant adrenaline for intense gameplay. I may prefer playing Lucario for that feeling because you get to calm down when he's low aura, but Pichu is like high aura Lucario all the time and it's great!
1. Character I wanted back in melee along Ridley and Sephiroth (but didn't think Seph would get in), so I really love this character a lot 2. "Fan favorite" amongst my old smash group, and new smash group seems to like him too (but not so vocal about it as old group, or like my other characters) 3. I struggle to get into the combo mindset, but the up air/down air combos are extremely addicting (even though I'm still practicing them, since I struggle to do it in live matches) 4. When I think of competitive Smash, I think of Fox (who I'm not playing), or Meta Knight which no one else seems to use but people know me for.
1. I find it funny that back in Melee I hated Sonic with a passion ('cuz "edgy" teen), but nowadays I find my personality and outlook on life being a lot similar. So I actually really dig the character now (even though most other characters in his games are usually more interesting). Also "Open your heart" kinda pumps me up to go beat whoever I'm playing whenever it pops up =p 2. Impresses the new smash group very often, and it makes them panic a lot, and I love making people panic. Though I almost feel like I'm cheating because his speed is so fast that people never seem to be able to react to his options 3. At this current point in time, I feel like I'm always coming up with new random combos on the fly. However I am a little worried because from what I hear, the competitive side for Sonic does a lot of Side B to win from what I hear.

All the other speedy fast combo characters are really fun to play and I do well with, but I will lack motivation since I don't care about them anywhere near as much as these three. Fox and Joker feel the easiest to wreck people with by far out of the characters listed here.

Gotta say, I was expecting him to be far more boring due to everyone saying he is ball and campy. The only boring match I had for the whole month was vs a Bayo main friend (though to be fair it might have been because I've played against bayo so much that I needed a break form fighting Bayo, before I realized I was getting annoyed and cleared my head a bit). We were basically at a standstill for a little bit because they decided to be very defensive and it took every ounce of my patience to find a way in. Spin dash/charge in general is a bad idea since they can witch time at any moment. Her side B has a disjoint so I have to be extremely careful of my approach. Then of course she won't want to throw anything out due to sonic's speed.

Favorite matches were some sonic dittos since they keep up with each other, and fighting Meta Knight (but might be biased since I like fighting a good Meta Knight when I play any character).


Playing as sonic in general feels really fun. Maybe it's 'cuz I've only played him for about a month, but he really does feel like Fox that replaces laser and reflector for spin dash/charge and homing attack. Just it feels like more of a mental battle because with Fox it feels more like players are taking turns at who is doing damage, whereas with Sonic it feels like it resets to neutral constantly all the time (and I do love me some neutral).
I've always enjoyed playing big boys trying to swat away fast opponents thinking they can just be untouchable for an entire match. However, playing a Sonic it just feels like I'm being a bully by never letting them play. Honestly a lot of the time I feel like I'm abusing the fact we are humans with limited reaction times when playing sonic.

I will say spectating Sonic is vastly more fun now, because originally I just glanced at and was like "blue ball guy go fast", but now that I know his moves, it makes me realize how many options he has all the time since I originally I thought that while he was super fast, he was as braindead simple as Ike or Bowser (and I love them for their braindead simplicity).

The biggest turnoff for playing Sonic for me was just the mere sight of him on the screen annoys the hell out of people. There was a significant increase of people rage quitting, playing tilted, and/or going into super try-hard mode to remove me as soon as possible. It just always feels weird to me, because I've always loved fighting sonic (but of course I don't see him often, and when I do it's usually when I play a swordy which I hear he struggles with. I didn't struggle when I fought swordies though). It feels it's rarer to find people who are just trying to play "normal".
Though second biggest turnoff that doesn't deal with people I encounter would be if the opponent tries to be ultra defensive, it feels like I have nothing I can do to open them up without comiting to a hard read due to most things being negative on shield, and the things that aren't too bad on shield you can see coming or is predictable based on positioning. Other characters don't quite have this problem. Fox/Sheik has laser/needles camping to force an approach, Pichu has t-jolt to cover the approach. Meta Knight theoretically has this problem too, but he's always so up close and personal with the opponent that his intimidation usually lets me in so I haven't had this problem with Meta outside of fighting the best player I know.

One thing that surprised me that I loved is that I found out spin charge isn't stupidly free since people can just hit you out of it at any point (minus the hop). With the way I heard about it, it sounded like something that beats out literally everything. So learned it was a tool you have to learn to use. Still a tremendously useful move, but not the automatic brain dead win button that people were making it out to be.


Unfortunately couldn't get as much practice as I'd like. During a decent portion of the month I saw a recommendation for the IDW comic since youtube saw me lookin up sonic guides, and I figured sure why not give it a shot. Saw some silly stuff at first and thought "eh, just a silly comic nothing more" so my emotional guard was down. Then saw a character that got a bit too relatable and got me into depresso mode about something that was on my mind for a while because I was slowly realizing over the past few months that while bad stuff wasn't in my life anymore & tried to forget, there were aftereffects that were effecting me today. So this character was just a big huge slap of realization across my face. Gotta say, I wanna look at more IDW comics if there's more where that came from, though I have a feeling it's probably the exception. Thing is, I haven't gotten super depressed like that in so many years since I'm pretty happy with my life nowadays, so it was quite the surprise. Funny thing about all this though, reading the Sonic IDW comic made me love certain other characters in the Smash roster, more than it made me love Sonic.
Then last week I was so sick that I had to stay in bed, just even sitting at a desk for a half hour made everything feel so much worse. Thus, no sonic practice in a condition like that.


Anyways, Sonic super friggin fun. Definitely going to play him casually at the very least though he has a strong chance at being main or secondary. However playing him kinda made me okay with trying to main Pichu again, and he still has tough competition with Meta Knight

Trying to do spin charge/spin dash just gets me hit out of it regardless if I charge it or not since it seems pretty reactable, which goes against all the guides I looked at. If I do it too close to people, I can't react to their options because my reaction times have always been hot garbage. It's kinda hard to follow up with anything that isn't fair out of them. I do like using spin charge as a movement option though, even if it always feels unsafe if not used as a option for when I read someone.

Saying this incredibly loosely, but it feels a lot like trying to play Fox for the short time I've been trying to dig deeper into how to play Sonic. They just both seem to be very read heavy characters that just overwhelm with speed. However it feels like with Fox it's either Fox doesn't let the opponent play, or Fox is stuck in a combo and can't play due to Fox not sending stuff as far and having the best fast fall speed. With Sonic it feels like both players are constantly on the move since all his stuff sends pretty far away, and he moves a lot with his moves, but it doesn't really feel like either player is totally locked down unable to move at any point.


Also it feels like projectile characters have a chance to fight back against sonic compared to fox, since they can't just out camp fox due to fox having a reflector. Heck, now that I think about it, projectiles usually feel like nothing with the other speedy characters I've tried to get good at before. Pichu's t-jolt is incredibly oppressive to cover approach (Pika's more oppressive since it doesn't hurt itself though). Meta Knight's fast fall and multi jumps makes it so projectiles can be avoided with ease. Inkling and Yoshi both have easy to use projectiles to counter the enemy projectiles, but Yoshi is floaty & fast, Inkling is just a small target that shifts their hurtbox like crazy. Joker just invites people to pointlessly throw out projectiles, and him just being a combination of everyone else here minus Yoshi's floatiness since Joker is among the fastest fallers.


Also, people play so much more differently when they fight Sonic. Been some people being memers, others just going all out from the very start, and others that are very visibly being tilted at just the sight of Sonic. Of course, this could just be me just reading the opponents more. I feel like I have to watch the opponent more when I use Sonic compared to most characters I've been using lately. Perhaps that'll change when I understand spin dash/charge better.

Also gotta say I don't think any other character in the roster has made my emotions shift from "we chillin" to absolute sheer panic so frequently and quickly as much as sonic does, it's kinda funny. Normally characters stick to one or the other feel for the most part =p

I'm gonna stop being such a wimp about using schedules in fear of people interrupting them. Also because I know 1 month per character so I can get a main is going to be the really slow way of getting better at smash, but I think at this point it's really the only option I have if I don't want to burn out by forcing myself to one character for a whole year. It's going to be a slow process, but eventually I'll find a proper main.

Gonna start off simple:
Week 1 Learning combos, and basic game plans of characters. If I am already familiar, then make it feel more natural while looking up new things to learn.
Week 2 Watching back my gameplay and comparing with competitive players
Week 3 Learn more advanced techniques/strategies there are for the character
Week 4 Doing challenges with the characters
If I can manage to fix my schedule so I can do all this for a long enough time, while learning more of chess, blender, all while doing what is needed in real life, and playing new games (like TOTK lately), then I might be able to add more time or make it more structured depending on what happens.


As for the character I'm plan to play for month, I kind of did an arbitrary order since I don't really know if an order would matter.
January 2024- Sephiroth since FF7 was originally released in January. Might be tempted to use Cloud after playing the game though. After all, back in Smash 4 the only reason why I dropped him is because he was so incredibly basic that I wanted to learn the other characters better before going back to him. Then I never did, and always forget about him because I have no emotional attachment to the character. Still though, I view myself as more of a Griffith Sephiroth person than a Guts Cloud person.
February 2024- Extra month going on a "honey moon" with a character that I truly think has a shot at being my main
March 2024 - Meta Knight since his debut was in Kirby's Adventure which was released in March.
April 2024 - R.O.B. in April since Bedman came out in April in Guilty Gear, and kinda reminded me why I love R.O.B. so much... Even if the two characters are quite a bit different.
May 2024 - Inkling in May since Splatoon 1 released in May.
June 2023 (Right now as of this post!)- Apparently Sonic month is in June according to Sega twitter? Sure why not
July 2023 - Lucario and the Mystery of Mew was released on July 16th.
August 2023 - Snake because I dunno where to put him.
September 2023 - Pichu since Ridley has to be October for Halloween spookiness. September comes the closest to Pichu day (which is October 2nd apparently)
October 2023 - What better character to have for big scary monster month than Ridley?
November 2023 - Apparently this is Zelda month. Also I put some hard thought into the 3 Links, and with BOTW & TOTK coming out making me even more biased, this is the Link I have decided on for Ultimate.
December 2023 - Quake 2, Doom and Custom Robo came out in December. Besides, gotta give everyone "presents" with all these missiles and bombs.

Again, don't know if there's anything I can do with an order. Like if I should have a slow transition between styles. Or have it be vastly different, or if it really doesn't matter.


Also after playing with some characters I realized how much I don't really want to play them long term.
Kirby has some pretty sick combos, but his sluggish speed and lack of projectiles really makes it pretty obvious what he probably wants to do. He has some neat things but other characters just look so much cooler doing what they do. Final nail in the coffin was watching top Kirbys play, then watching top Meta Knights play. Maybe in a year I may give him another shot since he still is a character I'm not all that familiar with outside of casuals.

Yoshi is a character I might pick back up in the future in a year. I was struggling to get egg toss to hit below him consistently, and his massive hurtbox shifting felt so "dishonest" that it left a bad taste in my mouth since it kinda felt like the King K. Rool effect where you're doing dumb things and getting away with it. However, I could learn to love it, but I would have to reframe the brain to like that about Yoshi.

Pichu is back on the table since after playing all the more fast paced/rushdown characters, they feel like they exploit the every loving heck out of the fact that we are only human by going into threat bubbles which felt "dishonest" when I first was picking up Pichu. However, remembering that's kind of the point of rushdown characters, I'm re-learning to love it since Pichu is the most extreme example. Also I'm unlikely to use Fox at this point because after comparing top fox (mainly Light), and top Sonic play, and looking at many guides for both Sonic and Fox, Fox just feels too basic compared to Sonic. Pichu feels way too different compared to the two of them so I can't pick one over the other for that yet... Too bad I won't be able to bring myself to play Pikachu for multiple reasons, even though I know Pikachu is just clearly better competitively.

- The Links was a hard one because I do like the combo focus & overwhelming pressure on Young Link, The projectile focus & ground speed with floatiness of Toon Link, and the hard hits/remote bomb of BOTW Link. After playing with Rosalina, Isabelle, and Snake for a while, I have just fallen in love so much harder with the remote bombs that BOTW Link has now. Also playing Joker (90% fast fall), Ryu (40% fast fall), and Pichu (31.5% fast fall) made me really really miss the 90% fast fall I'm used to having when playing a Link back from Smash 4 along with his absurd Nair (that Toon Link doesn't have), and his Dair spike (Toon's is hard to hit, with Young Link being unable to). Also playing various swordies and big boys also biased me towards the heavier longer range Link. Then the cherry on top was BOTW & ToTK gameplay relaxing the heck out of me, and remembering why I love those games so much. So from here on out, BOTW Link is the Link that I have chosen. Originally I was going to ignore the Links until the next smash, but apparently I had a couple nights that had me thinking in certain ways so that I was able to think things through. Since it's been a few years of the game being out, I know the differences and fought them a million times to know what I want out of a Link. The only down side to BOTW Link is there will be pressure to do the bomb drop combos which don't really interest me, but perhaps I can learn to love it after doing it a few times like Meta Knight's up air combos.

After playing some Tears of the Kingdom, I felt the need to play some Link again. Decided to go look back at some footage from day 1 of smash Ultimate to realize just how much I've been coasting off my knowledge of Smash 4. Then combined with a lot of other things, I have a competitive spark lit again. So going to improve anyway I can again.

Figuring I'm gonna play a lot of Ridley since he feels like the most "fundamental" of the characters that I wish to play that won't get me distracted. Also he rewards advantage state, and punishes more heavily for allowing himself to get caught in disadvantage due to being combo food.

As for other characters and why I probably will take a break from them:
Inkling is probably the biggest rival to Ridley for "most fundamental", because you run out of ink so incredibly fast that you can't just spam projectiles, so they must have a purpose every time you use it. Their normals don't seem that crazy or out of the ordinary at a glance. Even if that nair is a weird combo tool, or bair being a decent tool. Roller is basically the cheesiest thing I can think of, but that doesn't work on people without conditioning. Biggest thing against them is that their combos might be distracting since they are the 2nd hardest character to combo out of the characters I wish to play with being beaten out only by meta knight.

Sephiroth I feel like I hit a plateau day 1 with him to be totally honest. He just feels so incredibly natural to use because his preferred range and general playstyle when I'm not the most sure of what the opponent is going to do is exactly how I like to play with all characters, except he rewards it heavily. However, it's hard to really know how to improve with this character. I know I gotta work on the nair combos, being able to hit shadow flare, b-reverse, and do flick shot. Outside of that, I don't see what I can do that doesn't come from just reading what the opponent does faster/better.

In theory Kirby is great because he forces me to deal with being in opponent's threat bubble all the time before I can attack them unlike Sephiroth. However in practice, it's just too hard to resist the urge to go for the super troll stuff with him like hammer, up B, and inhale/copy. Effective on bad players, but will never work on good players. Reminds me of how I get when I play Game & Watch, Captain Falcon, or King Dedede, I just can't take the characters seriously.
Lucario is also shortish range for what I'm used to, He was my old labber for trying to get better at general mechanics. Though overtime I feel like he's more of a tool to get better at b-reverse tech, and forcing me to get use to high pressure situations with high aura, and to remember that even at 0% you can still do things that will help you later.
Meta Knight kind of hyper fixates on the up air combo too much, and I know if I try to main him it'll be the only thing I want to practice with him since it's one of the most satisfying combos to do within smash. Also off-stage gameplay is just easy mode with him.

Been picking up Sonic lately. Used to play him a lot like Fox. Now I've learned him more in-depth and he has so many more interesting things going on with him that I didn't realize before 'cuz the animations all make him ball. Playing him has made me really question what "fundamental" means. Since he just feels like a more complex Fox at this moment. Basically keeping unrelenting pressure on the opponent, and punishing any mistakes that the opponent has, and just overall exploiting the heck out of the fact that we are only human with a certain amount of time we can react to things.


Are all pretty dishonest characters that play smash in their own ways and I feel like I don't need to explain. Funny thing is though, zoner vs zoner are usually my favorite matchups in smash, I blame growing up with chess.

There has always been a massive skill difference between my friends in Smash and in Chess because I used to try really hard to improve all the time in the past. However I got so complacent for so long that my skills have declined so much, but it's hard to get myself to focus enough to brush up on everything and learn new things again.

For a long time I didn't care about my skills declining too much because I figured it'd never pop up again. However, now people got really inspired by how well I was doing, and now are trying to improve really hard, and they are taking my advice (which is how my pikachu main friend started whooping my butt). Now they are getting annoyed by me never taking it seriously, and I've basically lost the ability to take it seriously. So it irritates them by my bad performance, and them feeling like they didn't earn a victory.

This is something that has been going on for years, but today was just a looooong chain of events of just non-stop things just re-enforcing that I need to do something to fix this. I actually got depressed for once because it got so bad. Better now that I vented this, but ya know, I'd like to prevent this sort of thing happening in the future. I got other skills I want to learn as well. Like I'm learning blender now, I wouldn't want to get complacent with that too and limit the amount of cool stuff I could create in blender. So being able to focus in Smash & Chess would help me with other areas in life.

I was using 1322 (Charge blast, Missile, cannon jump kick, and bomb) because at the time I thought it fit the character best and was gonna test the other options later.

Cannon jump kick looked really cool at first, but after using it a while, it was making me very confused why it exists when up air and down air exist, and only being a couple frames faster OoS than up smash (and covering a much smaller area). Still, got a few spikes off it, and I especially like spiking people that hang on ledge too long because they weren't able to react to me running up in time. Like the risk faaaar outweighs the rewards I've seen with this thing, but perhaps there's some combos to be had with it that'll make it worth it. For now planning on doing Lunar launch because I realized that with cannon jump kick, the offstage gameplay is heavily limited. Lunar Launch will let me go deep after people (also ID software thing to rocket jump anyways which is nice brownie points). Perhaps one day I'll break down and use arm rocket for style and mobility.

Grenades I tested a little bit and it's shocking how effective they are, especially when combined with bomb drop so the opponent can feel like they got no place to go in some situations. Being very cautious about the way I use it though. I'm sure a lot of people have seen clips of Mii Gunners just spamming it at ledge on some poor fellow with bad recovery. I want to get good to be stylish and know the game more.

Haven't touched laser blaze because still got PTSD from good Falcos and Mega Men that know how to abuse the heck out of messing someone up by making them flinch. Quite annoying moves that are so fast that it feels like it's going to be hard to have counter play to it since it's low commitment. Could change in the future, but I really do love charge blast (almost as if one of my favorite things about maining samus in early Smash 4 was keeping charge shot charged).

Missiles I haven't spammed too much yet because my brain is still in Samus mode, preventing me from using them as frequently as I see some people do. They will probably always be my go-to. However, I'll have to give flame pillar and stealth burst a shot at some point.

Not going to be too surprised if I end up using 1332 by the end. It just seems like the most interesting build for Gunner because of the versatility, luckily it also happens to be really friggin good.

Tried to narrow it down to 1 character per playstyle, which is so hard since a lot of characters play differently. Started off with me just trying to make me feel confident in duo maining Sephiroth and Snake. This already narrows down a large chunk of the roster.

So I then realized, that there were a lot of characters that are just too vastly different from those 2 that will tempt me to go play them. Figured I'd go add Ridley to make it a trio because despite not trying too hard to main him at any point, he does have the most hours in him currently.

In Short: Sephiroth turtle Snake trapper Ridley Big body/grappler Lucario All around/"normal" Kirby brawlerDoom Slayer zonerMeta Knight footsies Sonic hit & runYoshi rushdownInkling rushdown & projectile gameplay swap? I dunno

Explanations:
Snake: Trapper - Chess-like gameplay, and kinda digging the game and Snake from what I've heard about them. Other trap-like characters I don't care much for. Rosalina was a hard contender, but I have to learn to get around losing Luma every few seconds if I want to use her as a main or something, because if Luma is always dead there is no unique gameplay from her. Isabelle can be a trapper, but she's kind of a few other things too. She felt outright horrible until I watched some pros play her, and realized she can be played aggressively which shocked me. Some of the combos she got are kind of fun, but I only scratched the surface with Isabelle and I had a blast once I started being aggressive with her. If I were to drop Snake, Isabelle might be the only replacement if I were to even get a replacement for Snake.
Sephiroth: Waller/sword/turtle/whatever you wanna call it - What I want out of a sword/long range disjoint user is to just hit people from a range where they can't hit back, and then just do that over and over again. Sephiroth does this the best, so while he may not be normal swordie type gameplay, he does what I want from a sword user.
Ridley: Big body - However he also feels similar to sword users. Before I learned of how absurdly good his nair is, I found out that Ridley moves quite similarly to Marth with his air speed because I fought a Marth that was fighting similarly to me at the time. So while Sephiroth takes care of sword characters, Ridley does too, but in a different way. Then I just love playing the biggest thing on the field, and Ridley is as big as they come. The other big boys I either don't care much about, or is Ganondorf who has the "king of disrespect" reputation. However Ridley steals his Side+B and buffs it. Then combines warlock punch with Marth's shield breaker, sacrifices the special attributes to have the most insane single hit damage (that often shatter's my opponent's brain as I always see their gameplay shift drastically when I land one.... Something that maybe only once per day, buuuut always feels worth it when it happens).
Lucario: All around or "Normal" - No one is truly completely normal, but Lucario feels more normal than most. Not about to replace Lucario with Pits for this (and they are kinda covered by Seph + Ridley anyways). Wolf is the only one I might do for this role, but Wolf is more gameplay, because while I like the experienced badass thing, Lucario kinda reminds me emotions exist and will effect you and your opponent's gameplay. So more of an emotional pick, but I have a hard time seeing myself truly dropping Lucario forever. Also, compared to Smash 4, Lucario feels really really bad in this game despite being faster. So I feel like he makes me a better player by the mental hurdles he puts me through that will usually catch other characters off guard when in similar situations.
Kirby: Slow, but combos of death - I've heard some people say it's brawler, others pressurer, but glancing around at what people are trying to label the characters that are like this, I can't get anything specific. Mario bros, Falco, and Steve all fit here, but I prefer Kirby over all of them by a long shot. The characters that were very close to that were Ryu and Kazuya, and they were the ones that initially made me think about this category since I like to use Ryu for a bit whenever I realize my thumb are not aligned properly on the analog stick. However, after enough time thinking about it, I can probably get away with not worrying about that too much with other characters. So while Ryu's "the fight is everything" is inspiring as heck, and it amuses me greatly to imagine Kazuya's white suit being Kiryu while playing Baka Mitai amuses me greatly ('cuz was a big chess meme at one point), I feel like those things will wear off overtime. Kirby's charm will probably never wear off. He may seem simple, but he's got a lot of things going on to make me love him... Also, Meta Knight without mask skin gives massive brownie points for Kirby.
Mii Gunner Doom Slayer: Unrelenting projectile pressure. This is why I learned smash off of Link, you can always do something at all times no matter where you are. Since I can't play the Links in this game because it'll cause an endless rotation between the 3, I gotta pick someone else. R.O.B. is quite an anomaly because yeah he has long range options, but with how ridiculously good his close range options are, it almost feels like he's fine being up close and personal with the enemy a lot of the time. For a zoner, I don't feel like I'm zoning much with R.O.B. when I play him, especially against aggressive opponents. All other zoners I don't care for outside of Samus. However, while I do like floaty characters like Sora and Jigglypuff for example, the floatiness of Samus just feels weird. There is one character that has a nearly identical moveset, with a couple changes. That's Mii Gunner, who I initially dismissed until I saw how good the Doom Slayer costume looks. Doom is the brother series to one of my childhood favorite games Quake 2, so safe to say I love the heck out of doom. (Though, still haven't played the original for more than 15 minutes, and while I own Doom 2016, I only played the VR version). So I figured I'd give the gameplay more of a chance despite being a Mii, and my god, it's like it has all the pros of Samus, but removes all of her cons. (Though the single punch from samus is changed for a normal jab, and up tilt is now a kill move instead of that weird leg spike thing). Also I can change out the moves if I want.
Meta Knight footsies - No one else plays like him at all, any anything even remotely close are characters I don't care about. He's a crowd pleaser, he makes me feel awesome every time I play, hard to put him down. He is the character that is the mascot of improvement and duels for me as well. That said, his up air combo is so difficult and tedious to learn, but he doesn't really have any real true combos outside of that. The fighting game characters are easier to learn combos for than Meta Knight I swear.
Sonic hit & run - I like going fast, and no one does that better than Sonic. Would've liked him to be rushdown, but looking into him a bit, he just does not play that way. So he's in his own category as well until I can figure out which style of gameplay I prefer. Also lots of nostalgia, and I like his positive "it doesn't matter" attitude.




Now here's where things got really hard for me to choose between characters. All of the above categories are pretty pick up and play sort of deals. Speed characters usually require knowledge of setups for the character, so it's much harder to just pick up and play. So when I play casually, they usually don't get picked as much unless I'm handicapping myself since the barrier to entry is higher on them. Sooo my knowledge of what these characters can do might be totally wrong.
Yoshi: Rushdown - So I was struggling for a very long time. Sheik I always viewed as the character for master over control over you characters in Smash, but I don't really care about that as much as I used to, and Sheik was mostly an exposition dump from what I remember her. Character could be cool though, but until I replay OoT, she's gonna be boring. So Sheik was the first to go. Pichu was next to go, but while they were basically my username origin, and one of the few things that made me go "wait, I like adorable things? Preposterous!.... It's just... A joke character! Yeah that must be why I like them". Also gameplay makes me extremely happy whenever I play them. However, when I was practicing to duo main them with Sephiroth at one point, I realized that I didn't quite like how they played (that could change in the future though), and that I really don't care about them outside of smash in the slightest. So they were next to go.
Then looking at the other characters, there was only one other character for the rushdown spot remaining and that was Fox. Character that got me into Smash (and thus Nintendo) in the first place because he was so cool in 64 and Melee. Very fun gameplay, crowd pleaser. Kinda try to be a leader nowadays to get my friends off their butts to do stuff, so while Brawl onwards made me realize he was a bland character all along, at least now he's got something to make me like him. Still, compared to Yoshi, he's lacking in character and I've had more time in games that had Yoshi in them. Super Mario World, Yoshi games, Mario kart/party... and shouldn't bias me as much as it does but Asriel being a Yoshi main in Deltarune does bias the heck out of me to want to main Yoshi. Also Elliana is my main in Rivals of Aether, so fast, aerial, heavy character that has a command grab, and hard to deal with projectile? Yoshi sounds like easy mode Elliana! I started comparing the heck out of Fox and Yoshi's moves and overall feel. I knew Yoshi had fast frame data, but didn't think it was on par with Fox's, and it's even better in some areas! Fox felt overall quite basic with a lot of his moves, and his most fun moves/combos to hit that I tried felt better with the counterpart for it on Yoshi. Then Yoshi has command grab, projectile that continues his aggression, armor, and just interesting moves, and I had to pick Yoshi over Fox. This was the only nailbiter when it came to picking characters for a certain playstyle. So if I swap anyone out, it'd be these two, but honestly, I'd probably end up using both because I can't imagine dropping Yoshi now. When the gameplay just feels so perfect between 2 characters, the feels will make the final call!

Inkling Swapping between rushdown and projectile pressure - I've heard some people say they are rushdown, others all around, others hit and run. However, I like the idea of hitting opponents with projectiles, then rushing in to wreck their face. In hind sight as I'm writing this, I'm aware that is how some people play Yoshi, sooo I may have to drop one, I'm not sure if I can though. Their gameplay makes me competitive, and unlike a lot of other fast and/or top tier characters, Inkling actually makes me think more competitively as I play them, compared to other characters that let me auto-pilot. I realized Joker was pretty much the only other character I cared about that had this similar style of play. However, since I haven't played Persona 5, all I got to go off of is him being stylish, and understanding that he's basically a therapist going into the worlds of people's minds with his friends to heal people's hearts or something. Which I'm totally down for, but I do not have the nostalgia for them that I do for Inkling. Splatoon revitalized my love for shooters since I played too many for a long time. Also, was surprised that Splatoon was a much more feelsy game than I was expecting considering how "competitive gamer energy" the characters can be. Joker has amazing gameplay, but overall Inkling makes me have more feels and determination to stick with the character and get better. It was a hard pick, but not as hard as choosing between Yoshi and Fox. Again, 2 characters with gameplay that feels perfect, but feels making the final call.

So the other day a friend and I were talking about mains and characters we love to play as a lot. Mentioned I learned to love playing Ganondorf as a jokey casual pick because back in Smash 4 I used him 'cuz I watched grandstanding for glory where Lythero uses Ganondorf and it inspired me to play the character. So we started talking about Smash 4, and we decided to go look up the times we had:

However, upon looking at my hours, I was absolutely shocked as Meta Knight had 39 hours, Link 20 hours, Samus 12 hours, Lucario 9 hours, Ganondorf 8 hours. Yet I had 2,777 hours power time, 319 play time. Link & Samus were early mains to get used to the game. Meta Knight and Lucario were the two characters I would come home with everyday to practice in the lab. However, Since Lucario was second, I was more determined to have proper movement, so I was in the lab and being strict with my practice compared to Meta Knight. So I actually played a crud ton of Lucario but never actually played people with him. Ganondorf was a character I never used, just screwing around with every now then when playing people so it shocked me to see him be #5 most played. This just made me realize how much labbing I was doing because I always had bad execution in Smash 4 and it bothered me.
Of course a lot of the time in Smash 4 is just unlocking the dang custom moves, I knew they'd bother me until they were all unlocked. Finished all other challenges before that one, and I still had to go for so long X_X

Then I compared to the powered time with Ultimate and saw 2,054 power time, 708 play time. Considerably more time playing than Wii U, but it makes me wonder if play time is just being counted for when you in any mode including training mode. It really shocked me because I thought this whole time I played Smash 4 far more since it was literally the only game I was playing when it was out. Ultimate on the other hand, I play off and on every now and it has to contend with Chess, MechWarrior/BattleTech, and VR as my primary go-to games, alongside with friends dragging me to other random games as well. I guess working 60 hours during Smash 4 era effected my game time more than I thought.

Now I've looked at my Ultimate hours plenty of times I'll list a few the top ones here really quick:
Totals - Arena time, quickplay time
#1 29:15 Lucario - 17:40 Arena 11:35 quickplay
#2 29:01 Ridley -18:45 Arena 10:16 quickplay
#3 25:43 Meta Knight - 17:40 Arena 8:03 quickplay
#4 15:16 Belmonts Richter 1:06 Arena 12:15 quickplay Simon 1:02 Arena 1:53 quickplay
#5 14:11 Sephiroth 7:13 Arena 6:58 quickplay Current main
#6 13:38 Pichu 7:13 Arena 6:25 quickplay
#7 12:08 Byleth 6:47 Arena 5:21 quickplay
#8 11:22 Ganondorf 3:29 Arena 8:53 quickplay
#9 10:52 Wolf 7:30 Arena 3:22 quickplay
#10 10:09 Mewtwo - 8:20 Arena 1:49 quickplay
#11 10:08 Aegis 1:31 Arena 8:37 quickplay
#12 9:33 Samuses Samus 2:02 Arena 0:12 quickplay Dark Samus 2:55 Arena 4:24 quickplay
#13 8:48 Ike 3:48 Arena 5:00 quickplay
#14 8:47 Marth 2:20 Arena 6:27 quickplay
#15 8:14 R.O.B. 5:31 Arena 2:43 quickplay
#16 7:08 Kirby 2:32 Arena 4:36 quickplay
#17 6:37 Robin 1:04 Arena 5:33 quickplay
#18 5:47 Inkling 4:18 Arena 1:29 quickplay
#19 5:20 Snake 4:23 Arena 0:57 quickplay Current secondary (possibly future main)
#20 5:15 Hero 3:33 Arena 1:42 quickplay
#21 5:09 Joker 4:48 Arena 0:21 quickplay Currently testing more to see if I want to main
Just makes me wonder if it counts training mode time at all, because the majority of the time I play smash I am in the lab (even though I really don't feel like being there)

Lucario and Meta Knight were old Smash 4 duo mains for a while, and I only mained them because strong emotional attachments, because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to pick a main since I kept falling in love with random characters. However, once DLC started coming out, it was hard to stick to the training program with those two since a lot of the DLC are so fun to play.
I was on the Ridley hype train for a while. Absolutely shocked he turned out to not be playable in Smash 4, but he feels like some perfect hybrid between Marth, Ganondorf, and Meta Knight who I all play quite a bit, with a couple uniquely Ridley things. One of the very few characters where I feel like I will be playing proper "fundies" for the longest time, but he will just randomly sneak out some cheese KO or high damage with a hard read at any point. If I ever let my emotions pick a character to play/practice, Ridley was usually the one until Sephiroth came around, and also feeling helpless as to do anything in the neutral against Pikachu main friend who looks like he plays like ESAM when I see him play.
Belmonts were specifically because I was getting addicted to getting characters into Elite Smash since I already had 8 characters in there. They kept being 1-2 matches away from Elite Smash, so I felt like I had to keep playing them while I still was warmed up with them. However, I would keep running into Roy players 'cuz Roy is pretty popular. One of my favorite matchups in the game, but they'd usually be in favor of the Roy since I have to play differently since I can't use projectiles to cover my approach as easily... All my friends are baffled when they see my Richter hours since no one ever fights my Belmonts unless I'm playing random.
Sephiroth was a character I wanted back in Melee since he was one of the most "badass" characters ever, Alucard being the other. I'm sensing a theme here. His gameplay just feels like a combination of lots of my favorite things from other characters. up+B being essentially a long range dimensional cape that is a little less safe. Shadow Flare being crash bomb (favorite thing about Mega Man) being on steroids. Byleth/Belmont long range disjoint (reason why I mained Marth in Melee). Down tilt slide like Cloud/Joker. Then a scary way to heavily punish something (in this case down smash + flares). Overall in Smash he just feels like the embodiment of how I feel after "mastering" a video game. I claim he is my main because on paper he has everything I could want out of a main outside of actually being from a game I've played (I basically just watched him be a super boss in Kingdom Hearts, Crisis Core cutscenes, read wikis, and saw advent children), but something feels off. Snake always making me think and adapt, with friends nudging me to play combo characters has me wondering if Seph is really the right character.
Pichu I picked up specifically to be Sephiroth's secondary, and to get me to use a combo character (and he's adorable, and basically the unintentional origin of my username). Very fun character, but there's also a lot of things going against them that make me question if I want to use them regularly.
I love swordies (I blame Link & Marth teaching me smash). So Byleth being a DLC swordie, and they feel great. Wrecked people with Byleth dittos on day 1 and it was fun. Later on I'd play Three houses for 6 hours (haven't found time to play it more) but absolutely loved solving people's problems in it, and liked the combat a bit too. However, One Sephiroth came out, I eventually ruled Byleth out because tried to stick to only one long range disjoint character.

Ganondorf is casual fun only, but still keeping competitive stuff in mind. Also everyone loves fighting Ganondorf, so he gets requested a lot.
Wolf I mostly played back when I was working so many hours I was too tired to concentrate. He's actually the one that made me realize I was overworking since I would just get wrecked constantly at the time, then suddenly be untouchable for a while when my brain suddenly woke up. Kinda made me stop playing smash to get sleep because of that, and then when I came back to smash with proper time and schedule, there were other characters I cared about more and haven't touched him. Gameplay-wise he's amazing, minus vertical recovery being annoying. Character-wise, he's not that interesting to me anymore, so hard to want to play him.
Mewtwo I wanted to play until I felt "competent" with, and which I succeeded with and he's amazing. However, if I take a break from him over a month, it's almost as if I never played the character before. This can happen with some characters, but Mewtwo is the absolute worst case for me when it comes to this and I don't know why (I mean his moveset is wacky for sure, but gotta be something more).
Aegis is literally another Elite Smash addiction where I get 1-2 matches away from Elite Smash. Honestly, dunno why because I always felt like I was winning no problem with them, so shocked they never got in Elite Smash as of right now.
Samuses are because I knew someone that mained Dark Samus, but they were bad, so I taught them a lot of things since I mained them in early smash 4. Fun character, but losing combos from Smash 4 just kinda killed the character a bit for me. Then realizing charge shot is my favorite thing about them, it makes it hard to want to play them over Lucario.
Ike is the character I play to get into the competitive mindset if I've been gone too long because he's so insanely basic. Also was trying to get him into elite smash at one point
Trying to relive the "glory days" where I used to 3v1 people all the time with Marth (because no one else practiced, but at the time I didn't care lol). I try to re-learn the tippers in Ultimate, but just like Smash 4, every time I try to use Marth, the muscle memory from Melee keeps making me whiff. Existence of Sephiroth basically makes it so Marth only is if I want to attempt to get Marth into Elite Smash.
Easy mode character I played in early Ultimate. Throw something out, and it just works (unless I'm fighting Shulk for some reason). Was looking at options for a main. I just don't have a strong motivation to main him (despite him always watching me play games from the corner of the room while I grew up)
Elite Smash addiction. That is all. However, some things recently have been nudging me to give Kirby a serious try to see if he might become a main/secondary.
Most competitive smashers I played were all people I met from Splatoon. No other game series came close to having players as dedicated and try hard as the Splatoon players (doesn't surprise me too much since it's one of the few games series represented that promotes players to be try-hard competitors in a fast paced game). Having fun playing Splatoon as well, I felt like it was an obligation to play them. I was too tired to understand them when the game was new. Much later I would pick them back up once I got sleep, and now they absolutely wreck and can easily take out characters I normally struggle with on other characters.
Snake has always been described as "Chess in Smash" from sooo many people. Since Chess is my only other go-to competitive game, feels mandatory to try him, especially after seeing more of the metal gear series to find out it's not just another bland gritty story trying to be edgy, and is actually a really awesome series (that I haven't played yet). Gotta say the chess mentality is quite accurate, and his explosions are hilarious. Only problem is everyone hates fighting him right now, and it reminds me I'm an exception because I love fighting zoners.
Hero just spawns happy times, and cures depression with his absolutely ridiculous down+B. However, it feels like he can play with fundies in mind outside of that so he's more than just a gambling character.
From what I know, Joker is a stylish anti-hero therapist that likes to show off and I totally dig it. He also has a move set that's almost as if it got ripped out of my brain and put into the game, just with OP gun & Arsene snowball mechanic added in. Like Sephiroth, he's a character that on paper should be everything I want in a main, but something feels off. That said, been picking him up again recently, so he might be a main at some point.


Hot dang, I didn't think it would be this long of a comment. Did help me think about a lot of things differently though. Really shocks me to see so many hours on the game, especially if training mode really isn't counted. Makes me wonder how many non-smash games I could've knocked off my backlog with all this time lol. Heck, I could do the whole Metroid series in one go with just Lucario's hours alone lol. I'm just really stubborn, I need the pixel perfect schmovement, and I'm not there yet, and it bothers the heck outta me!

A Bayo main wants me to play Bayo as well. After they understand that while I think she's cool, she's just not my style since not a fan of cutscene combos as I like to react to what my opponents are doing so the hits feel more rewarding, and she's one of the very few smash characters who game I haven't played yet so no nostalgia attached. So they suggested that I play Joker. So I figured I'd try them out again. Not much nostalgia, but at least I watched up until a part where some kid was having a little too much fun on top of a high school roof. Also Joker has that underdog feel because I never see anyone use Joker, and all Joker's I've faced so far are basically trying to abuse Arsene's strengths, so they are lacking in a lot of areas of how to get better at the game. Also I didn't see much of MKLeo's Joker, it just didn't interest me much, and I don't even know any other top Jokers at this moment.

I don't think they realize what will happen when I play Joker. Shocked they didn't complain about Arsene at all (since they complain about many other character's gimmicks in the game a lot). However, I don't think they truly grasp how versatile and annoying Joker's gun can be. It's one reason why I dropped the character in the first place, since I once played a gun-camping Joker when I was playing Incineroar (and we recently got an Incineroar solo main to the group, I don't want to subject him to that pain).
All that said... Joker has been pretty fun, and the Bayo is kinda regretting fighting my Joker, and I haven't even been using the gun much. Still, they don't have the massive hate towards Joker like they do with Inkling, Sonic and Yoshi to my surprise. Was trying them out since I'm trying to find fast close range characters recently that I care about. Joker's so easy to dodge & maneuver with all moves just feel so natural to flow into each other, and I can only imagine if I start actually looking into proper combos. I just sorta feel like when I play Joker, that it's always "my turn", and other people can't really do anything because his options are so oppressive.

Still gonna duo main Sephiroth and Snake because their gameplay is much more interesting to me, but Joker has been quite fun and will probably use him a bit more for a bit for a little bit. I doubt he'll be my go-to speedy guy.

Planning on improving my main man Sephiroth again now that I'm back from my "vacation" of trying other fighting games. However, I have some new perspectives and I'm looking for another secondary since I struggle to keep myself loyal to a character for over a month. I tend to improve faster when I duo-main so my mind is more fresh when going back to a previous character. When solo maining, I tend to want to quit smash because I glance at other characters and want to play them, and then it feels like a chore.

I'm sure there are better options for what I pick, but those pesky emotions do influence how I feel about a character so I'm limiting it to these options.
Lucario - The "normal" character so my fundies stay strong. Though his aura does compliment my mentality a lot where all characters I will focus on analyzing the opponent first, then start playing much better when higher % when things are stake.Wolf is someone I might pick up to fill this role, since he is cool, and feels pretty fundies, but pesky emotions are probably always going to tell me to play Lucario instead. Also because of his movie, Lucario reminds me that I'm not some sort of unfeeling robot, and that I need to take emotions into account, also to always focus on improving as long as it's not taking a toll on other parts of life.
Ryu - Heavy emphasis on inputs/combos, but not having to also think about the overwhelming speed of faster characters. Also makes me extremely aware of my stick placement. Shortish range compared to Sephiroth, so perhaps he could cover his matchups? Also always focusing on improving, instead of the goal of winning is like the entire thing about Ryu.
Snake, Isabelle, Rosalina- Throw something out and then control it is a really fun playstyle and is a step up from playing zoners that are so fun (I did learn the game off Link in Melee after all). Just so my mind thinks in a completely different way, making it so I have an easier time wanting to swap between Sephiroth and one of these.
Yoshi - Something easy. Perhaps what I need for a secondary is a break from trying to improve Sephiroth so hard. So go play something adorable that doesn't require a ton of effort. I love fast aerial characters with a projectile, and he's got stupidly easy combos, and you can just kinda toss something out and it just works. Also a bit of bias from Asriel from Deltarune being a Yoshi main.

Something fast with combos - I love fast characters, but struggle with combos. If I play a combo centric character, I'll probably have an easier time getting in the mindset for doing combos with Sephiroth. Their speed will keep my fingers warmed up so I can press buttons fast enough, making Sephiroth's significantly easier when I go back to him(in theory at least... mainly just those pesky nair combos). Also I need to improvement my movement a lot, and they move a lot so more practice.
I love all their gameplay a ton, and there's a little something that makes me want to specifically play each one of them. Meta Knight is mascot of improvement while I was growing up, has that mentor vibe, and is cool as heck. Sheik also has mentor + cool vibes but also is like the mascot of someone who has good inputs in smash. Joker has cool vibes, and I like the idea of stealing away people's emotional problems so they feel better. Fox is all about the legacy of wanting to main him, since he did introduce me to smash(and thus nintendo) back in 64/Melee, and his gameplay is really fun while being a crowd pleaser, but his character is kinda boring from what I can tell (I haven't played the games in a long time). Inkling has that competitive spirit to them, and I seem to make better decisions when I play Inkling, also a sucker for things that look adorable that contrasts with lore of an apocalypse or similar things. I love Sonic's "It doesn't matter" attitude, and if I were to be a geek and have a theme song from smash it'd be "Open your heart", and while I love speedy characters, no one is faster than Sonic, and he has so many cool flashy moves and combos, and part of me wants to go "I will be a cool sonic, not like the ones that time out". Pichu is the current secondary because of how he is the polar opposite to Sephiroth in range, but I overall like the adorableness of the character, and may have inspired my username subconsciously.



Honorable mention to swordies since they are easy to pick up, but most of them I don't care for but have such fun gameplay. Though Sephiroth is already a swordie, so I feel like I'd be retreading a lot of the same ground if I did another one. Also Ridley who is the most fun long range disjoint character, but while he's very different from Sephiroth, I feel like he overlaps a bit too much with Sephiroth. (also, Pikachu main friend makes me feel helpless with Ridley. He can just react to literally every option!)
Though I'm not sure if I'm just mistaken in this line of thinking though.

I'm getting Guilty Gear Strive sometime soon. However, the character I plan to main in that game is Jack-O because Halloween theme and a mask I really like (reminds my of a protogen's visor face thing, dunno why my brain loves that look so much). I also love the split personality thing with the calm thoughtful side + playful childish side.

Also the Jack-O pose is a nice reminder to do flexibility exercises IRL because it's such a meme, and I like listening to Ordinary Days V2 from Lethal League to relax because of that "Absolute Queen" video. I've been making good progress on getting abs like Sephiroth, but still a ways to go (I still standby that if you main Sephiroth, you gotta have abs like him!). Maybe flexibility like Jack-O will be easier and faster to obtain? Currently I can do the pose, but just barely because it's quite hard. Planning on trying to do Jack-O pose (and maybe other poses) comfortably by the end of the year.

Also, I struggle with inputs and I either get too frustrated/bored when practicing in smash lately, so I figured I needed a break. Figured now is a good time to try a more traditional fighter and Guilty Gear just is nice to look at and has music that I love. Jack-O is supposedly the 2nd hardest character (Zato being hardest supposedly), so Jack-O might help speed up my fingers since she'll have to press a lot of buttons to do minion stuff. I'm sure there's better characters for this, but one thing at a time, this is mainly just a bonus for playing a more traditional fighter.


While I have played quite a few different archetypes, I never got the chance to do a minion based character before since I'm usually looking for someone cooler, or using a character that helps build fundamentals faster. So Jack-O is definitely going to be a bit of a shock to the system, on top of going from a platform fighter, to a traditional fighter. So I've been picking up Rosalina & Luma recently to get used to that style, and they've been surprisingly super fun. Never would've known before because it's supposedly one of the least mained characters in smash. Luma isn't quite as stationary as I originally thought it was. I forgot how hard Rosa & Luma can hit too and was expecting less damage, and more ping pong action.

While messing around with Rosalina, decided to goof around and try to do some squad strike with a few teams imitating Guilty Gear characters for funsies while I was distracted by someone knowing I wouldn't be able to concentrate 100%. Was weird playing Hero (Faust), Incineroar (Potemkin), Min Min (Axl), Byleth (Ky Kiske) for a little bit. Also since it was against CPUs, made me realize that when there isn't a human on the other side to read, I have no idea how to fight my main Sephiroth (who I was pretending to be Ramlethal). Doing this really made me appreciate the roster for both games a bunch.

Can't wait to play more, been needing a break. I just hope I don't get too carried away by learning new characters instead of perfecting Sephiroth =p

Street Fighter - The OG fighting game. Played Vega for a short time a long time ago, but never got good at the game. Maybe now is the time. Also Ryu is fun as heck to play in Smash. There might be another character I might want to play as well in Street Fighter now.

Tekken - Kazuya was also fun as heck to play in Smash and did a couple EWGFs in Tekken 7 when it went on sale when he was announced for smash. Also Tekken has lots of options for all it's characters, and I'm addicted to having lots of options. Jin and Yoshi are other characters that are tempting to play.

Guilty Gear - Visuals great, music great, the character selection looks so good and the gameplay looks so vastly different between characters. Characters of interest: Sol, Ky, Axl, Potemkin, Faust, Zato, and Happy Chaos. However, I'm definitely going to try to main Jack-O first. The meme with the Jack-O pose, along with ordinary days being one of the music tracks I like to chill to, makes me think of Jack-O. So she's usually one of the first characters that come to mind when I think about Guilty Gear. She also seems nice, and I love the mask thing she's got. Also her gameplay looks really fun.

Rivals of Aether - I keep forgetting this game exists. However, smash-like game that keeps the good bits of Melee, and adds in some other things. I'd probably try would be Clairen, Sylvanos, and Elliana.

Pichu - Not just because they are friends with Sephiroth on the banner. I struggle with nair combos with Sephiroth, which I've heard is very important with higher level play for Sephiroth, and I've always gotten stressed when I can't outrange people with my characters (I blame learning smash off of Melee Marth). I assume this could lead to a predictable style, so playing Pichu who gets outranged by literally everyone in the roster could force me to get used to being in dangerous territory more often so I don't freeze up. Also playing Pichu makes me extremely happy consistently unlike anyone else in the roster, so should be easy to stick with them and make me want to play smash more.
Lucario - Similar to Pichu, except more balanced because his aura is so weak in this game because of the nerfs and everyone killing him early. Still doesn't feel like he has much range for the speed he has. High Aura Lucario has always made my heart pump quite fast. Pichu maybe constant stress, but Lucario weaves in and out of stress based on his %, making me more used to sudden changes in situations.
Meta Knight - I was known as THE meta knight player back in smash 4 and early ultimate. The character still is fun, so it's tempting to go back. Especially when thinking about Pikachu vs Meta Knight matches against a Pikachu main friend that used to be worse than me quite a bit, then I taught him how to play better and now it's hard for me to touch him. Problem with going back to meta knight is that he revolves around gimping opponents or doing the up air combos a bit too much that I feel in the far future I could get bored of him competitively. However Meta Knight could force me to get used to the process of mastering harder combos/inputs since he revolves around up air combos so much though.
Sonic - Similar to Pichu, just no where near as emotionally intense which has it's pros and cons. Also I've always liked it when some smash players have a song that they like to play when things get serious in tournaments to pump themselves up or something. Open your heart would be the one I'd pick (only other off the top of my head that rivals that spot is Sephiroth's theme for obvious reasons). Problem with Sonic is that he seems to be more campy once you get to higher levels of play, not letting the opponent play. I'm not exactly going to tournaments, so I'd rather no blueball my friends.
Inkling - Also similar to Pichu, except Inkling feels sorta like an opposite to Sephiroth since the have an emphasis on close range combat, but are able to do long range stuff. Also the ink mechanic could be a good lesson in being safely aggressive.
Wolf - One of the most "normal" moveset in smash. Might be good to get better at the fundamentals with him if I don't want to use Lucario.
Sora - Overall just fun character because he's aerial, has a blade, and has projectiles. However he is slow so I have to make use of his advantages. He is the only floaty that I would consider playing frequently as well. He seems to be a lot more reliant on frame perfect combos and strings than other characters.
Ridley - There is a lot of overlap in gameplay with Ridley and Sephiroth. Large disjoints. Huge but lightweight. Option to counter shields. Projectiles that take a while to charge. Multi-jumps. So if I want to go the route of having a similar playstyle, Ridley would be the go-to pick (Byleth would be the next one after that). I understand having similar characters, but I like the idea of playing characters that counter certain weaknesses.

Shoutouts to characters I'll probably never have the chance to play enough to get good with: Ryu/ken/Kazuya for making me aware of my stick placement. Ike for heavy focus on the opponent due to his simplicity. Snake being tempting because people consider him to be like playing chess. Belmonts for being reverse Sephiroth and trading a good recovery for projectiles that help them get in on the opponent. Joker being a tempting snowball character that looks stylish. R.O.B. being very easy to pick up.

Smash 64 - Only played 4 matches at a friend's house. Didn't know Nintendo well at the time (despite owning a NES). So I only recognized Pikachu, Kirby, Luigi, Mario, and Jigglypuff at the time. However when I saw Link, Samus and Fox, I was like "who are these people and how can I know more!?"making me interested in buying the game. Fox stood out above the rest because he seemed like the most badass character around.
Melee
Initially tried fox but at the time I didn't have the reaction time to handle smash. Then later on when level 9 CPUs were the hardest challenge I could fight, it was just too annoying to deal with their perfectly timed attacks, especially with perfect blocking. So I dropped fox.

Learned Melee with Link, and he was waging war with Marth to become my main in Melee for years until I eventually ended up sticking with Marth since his sword moves were better. Trying to use projectiles on CPUs in Melee was annoying because they reflected with perfect blocks basically every single time. Sometimes I used to pretend to be Sephiroth when I played Marth in Melee. Then I totally forgot about that until Sephiroth's reveal because there weren't even any 3rd parties in Melee so I thought it was impossible. At some point I did try out Mewtwo, but since he was (and still is) my worst character in Melee, I quickly learned out you shouldn't love a character for how strong they are. Later on I'd learn to love Mewtwo for other reasons and his story is cool, but it was never the same as how I viewed him when I was a kid. Pichu gave me an epiphany because I thought guys were never supposed to like anything "cute" at the time, yet there was Pichu who made me extremely happy whenever I played them. Though I shrugged it off because "eh, I only like them as a joke character, no other reason!", though pichu's cuteness would leave an impact on me throughout life. Nowadays I'm fine with cute things, I partially blame pichu in smash for opening my brain up to that. In an alternate timeline I would've tried to main Pichu in Melee. Just about every other character in Melee felt too weird for me to want to play.

Brawl didn't let me have much time to play with characters since I got it really late and Smash 4 got announced soon after I bought it. I wanted 1 character in Smash, and it just so happened to be Meta Knight. I knew I would main Meta Knight, so I just focused on 100%ing the game, and figuring out who my secondary would be before Smash 4 got released so I never got to play Brawl Meta Knight much. However Brawl meta knight feels so good, so it makes me sad to see what happened to him in later games (glide + tornado movement options, and him having a bit more range was so nice). Figured pretty quickly Lucario was going to be the one. However, since Smash 4 was coming out, I wanted to learn the differences between the spacies (with an emphasis on Wolf because cool and didn't think he'd come back) and play Snake because I figured he wouldn't come back as well. This is where I learned how to be good with Fox and fight humans because the AI was actually pretty good in Brawl compared to Melee. Gave me a big boost up against people in Smash 4.

Smash 4
This is when I started trying to be competitive, bought the Wii U specifically for smash. Throughout Smash 4 online was just me absolutely shredding through any player I came across unless they lived and breathed the game, which only happened once every few days.
Early Smash 4 - Learned the game using Link, and would duo main Link and Samus for a good chunk of early Sm4sh. I learned how to use items properly with Link here, and I grew to be addicted to watching the sudden shift in opponent's behavior once I have a fully charged charge shot. To this day, my Samus in Smash 4 and Ultimate has not lost to any of the spacies. I know you want to reflect that charge shot so bad, so I'm just gonna punch you in the face instead!
Testing phase strong main candidates:
Charizard and Cloud felt so perfect, but their simplistic nature and ease of use led me to feeling like I mastered them outside of frame perfect stuff so I got bored and went to look at other characters. Then never got the chance to go back to them.
- Dude, the small miis were so friggin fun to play in Smash 4. Ultimate they are very sluggish by comparison, but at least a bit fun.
Robin - Sword + magic = fun character. Extremely simple character that is easy to pick up.
Mewtwo - I had to try him again, this time I loved him. Got decent enough to hold my own, but didn't spend the time to feel like I "mastered" them.
Duck Hunt - Satisfies that itch of throwing tons of projectiles for various reasons that Link provides me. However he's so insanely hard to play because you have to focus on the can as well as what you normally would with most players. Thought he'd just be another dumb character, but you actually have to make so many decisions constantly with him that he's very tempting to main.
Greninja - Like playing Sheik, just you can't toss things out constantly, so he feels more calculated. Though for a large portion of Smash 4 he just felt too weird for me.
Shulk- I like outranging opponents with huge swords, and I love stance changing things to confuse my opponents. He felt so good.... outside of the fact that he was so insanely slow in sm4sh.
R.O.B.- I had a blast playing him, though due to not being confident in myself at the time, people complaining about fighting rob on top of feeling like you're in disadvantage for years got to me so I dropped him.
Fox - Had to try the character that got me the most interested in smash again... Only to play him for a couple weeks before moving onto the next person.

testing phase weak main candidates that didn't make the cut for one reason or another: (btw Palutena was so bad in Sm4sh, so it feels weird see her be top 5 in Ultimate). I did try the other DLC but they didn't really strike me at the time. Also I didn't try to main them I would play a lot of Ganondorf, Ike, and Captain Falcon. Funnily enough Ganondorf was my secret weapon because I could only short hop with Link and Ganondorf at the time because my fingers weren't fast enough. Making Ganondorf one of the speedier options, then on top of that I just read everyone like a book, and then he just thrives because of that.

Then for a long time I went into a period that I like to call "asylum training". Basically growing up if I wasn't good at a game, I'd just skip sleep to get better at it and it always worked. However Smash and other fighting games require more of you so you can't get away with that. So I spent an ungodly amount of time playing Meta Knight and Lucario, all while barely having any improvement if any at all because I was too tired to improve.
Not realizing that was the problem yet, I decided to do something different to not be so demoralized by lack of improvement. Started doing 100 matches with every character in the game. However, I would soon get dragged away from sm4sh for other non-smash games, but at least I got a few:
I was teaching a Pikachu main how to play better, figured I'd pick up their character to give them a better understanding of how to play them. We had some pretty even dittos but I was slightly better. He has perfect control over his character, mine was sloppy because inputs were never my strong suit. So I just beat him in neutral a million times and did the simpler but reliable combos. Now in Ultimate he's the best player I've ever faced, he goes to tournaments and moves like ESAM does. This time with Pikachu would in turn make my time trying to learn Pichu in Ultimate terrible because they are actually much more different than I originally thought. Pikachu having so much more range to cause whiffing as pichu is the biggest reason.
Zelda - Picked her up because my niece wanted to main her. Thought she'd be simple, but she ended up being much more complex than I thought because she had a stronger emphasis on doing combos in Sm4sh. Now she just has an easy time with everything in Ultimate. Still gotta space perfectly, and do teleport cancels to be truly terrifying though.
Sheik - I could lose all day with Sheik and still have a blast. Good thing too because she's so friggin hard to play since you need those combos, and my fingers are not good enough with inputs for her yet.
Corrin - I love playing swordies and Corrin is really interesting. In Ultimate you can make him do some really wacky movement. In Sm4sh he was absolutely hated by anyone who fights him because of the DLC hate which was weird to me because I'm used to seeing people praise my character selections, and no one ever hated fighting my meta knight and would often say Meta Knight was amazingly fun. Corrin's counter definitely needed a nerf though.
Mario - Picked to help my Pikachu friend with the matchup since it was one of Pikachu's few bad matchups. Mario be super easy, versatile and OP. I can see why Pikachu struggles now.
Lucina - Wanted to play something simple 'cuz sad. Was originally going to go Marth afterward. Had some fun matches, and it made me realize how popular she was because of all the dittos I got.
Kirby - I didn't actually get to finish the 100 matches with him as he was the last one I did the challenge with. Let's just say Kirby has some difficult things to him and it leaves me scratching my head when people recommend him to newbies. Promoting cheesy strats to start, then having the rug pulled out from underneath you when you gotta start doing combos and his crouch and stuff in order to improve, all while him being too slow to deal with a lot of things opponents can do.


Ultimate:
Learning Ultimate - Link and Meta Knight. Used Link to get used to stuff, then brought in Meta Knight and just decimated everyone who would fight him. I would then not use Link for most of the game because I can't decide between the 3 Links to play. Smash 4 Link basically doesn't exist in Ultimate, and he feels like he got split into BOTW Link and Young Link. Former taking more from his long range hard hitting sword play, the later taking his combo game to the extreme. I would off and on play Meta Knight throughout Ultimate.
Testing out Main candidates strong choices:
Ridley - He feels like a weird perfect combination of Marth, Ganondorf, and Meta Knight, with a little bit of his own unique flair. Ended up accidentally using him the most because I would pick him if I didn't specifically schedule to train with a specific character. Still tempted to main him, I miss the Ridley + Pichu duo.
Dark Samus - There are differences with Dark Samus and Samus, but for the skill level I'm at, the difference is negligible. Dark Samus fits the moveset better imo (but with the melee moves Samus has been getting in her games lately, her moveset might actually fit her now). Anyways, the moveset feels simpler and more OP in this game.
Pichu - At the time of writing this, still one of the hardest characters for me to play properly. However they give me such an unrivaled amount of joy that I can't say no to them. Something about being something so tiny, and being afraid of being hit by any stray hit is so fun. Makes every fight feel like you're up against a huge boss as well.
Mewtwo - I finally put in the time to make my Mewtwo be able to kick people's butts with ease, and my gosh I love the schmovement you can pull on people. Still a very strange character though. Not sure why his moveset has such a strong emphasis on using his body though.
- Mostly characters I played in the past at some point that I now put time into so I feel so good now. Yoshi I always wanted to try ever since Melee, but finally gave him a shot because he feels good in Ultimate. However he feels too braindead with how easy everything works for him for me to want to use him normally. Wolf and R.O.B. feel stupidly OP in this game while everyone else feels really good.
Testing out main lesser candidates:

I would then try to go back to the grind by playing Lucario for a long long time because he was the character near the top of my main choices that was the most "fundamental". This was when I finally decided to spend time trying to speed my fingers up so I could consistently short hop because I was tired of constantly full hopping slowing me down so much. However, some friends started missing my Meta Knight during this time because I would forget to bring Meta Knight out sometimes because I was focusing on improving Lucario so much.

At some point I would then play Dark Pit just for something different and accidentally got him into Elite Smash because I got plenty of sleep and just did not care that day at all. So I was able to focus, and not panic about getting into Elite Smash. It was food for thought as I continued to play Lucario. Then Sephiroth got announced, so I decided to play Mii Swordfighter imitating Sephiroth until Sephiroth was released using 1221 (not meta 'cuz no chakram), and accidentally got him into Elite Smash. Then Sephiroth got released and easily got him into Elite Smash after a few matches. With 3 characters in and getting Sephiroth in so easily, I started getting addicted to getting characters into smash. So after Sephiroth hype died down I started off with King K. Rool because I figured he'd be the easiest, and despite not playing him much, I got him in after 2 matches. Then got Inkling into Elite Smash winning every battle, but took more matches because when I wasn't used to Ultimate I played them too early before I was ready to play them. Then would continue to get Bowser into Elite Smash after 3 matches, and DK soon after that all in one day. Not panicing because I kept going "I already got this many in, I feel fine, so if I lose it's okay". I would then try to get many characters into Elite Smash, but only Sora got in because I started panicing about getting characters into Elite Smash. I struggle to play when something is on the line, hence why I think Sephiroth is so good for me, because I never panic with him.
As for the ones who couldn't make it into Elite Smash:
It actually shocks me how often I've been floating around 1 game away from elite smash with Samus and Dark Samus.
Everyone plays the Belmonts wrong, like holy crud. With how everyone talks about them I thought they were supposed to spam projectiles and stay away, but that's far inferior to using a projectile to cover your approach. I find a lot of roys when playing belmonts and I can't resist the belmont and roy matchup. There's also quite a few good roys I run into as well.
Not too hard, just Elite Smash panic too much. Also if I lose one match, I cannot refuse rematching the person, which makes me lose tons of gsp, making it so more matches to get into Elite Smash are required because of the win ratio. Just about all of these are within 1-3 wins away from being in Elite Smash.

Now the few good players that I used to play with play other games. All the players that want to play smash now, all are waaaay under my skill level so I crush them everytime unless I want to do some sort of handicap. Leaving only Elite Smash. So I've been trying new characters out, playing 1 hour a day for most days of the week. At this moment going to try to get Pichu and Lucario into Elite Smash since they force me to panic a bunch, but if I need a break from that I just go try to get characters my friends main so I can get a better informed suggestions for them.

When everyone is in Elite Smash, I go back to Sephiroth again. Which may never happen, but if it did, I wouldn't really have a strong goal other than learn how to do cooler looking stuff.

Little Mac would be the first on the list though because the most regular player "mains" him.
Mr Game & Watch would be next (and I already play an absurd amount of his other main Lucario... What a weird duo main combo)
After that going for Snake because a Pikachu main friend wanted help with the matchup, and I'd never play Pikachu over Pichu (even if Pika is so much easier. Pichu just makes me happier). Also, I've heard many a time that playing Snake is like playing Chess, and Chess is the other game I dedicate time to improve at. Would be nice to see how accurate of a statement it is!