It's more that the grip Roy uses in some of his attacks, like his jab, work better with a dagger than a longsword.
.....his sword basically has the reach of a dagger anyway, given how the sweetspots are.
True, but don't forget that his damage output/knockback are crazy high :3 clearly that's from the fact that it's a sword!
I agree that they didn't do nearly enough to help these characters, but they're honestly better than they were in Brawl, at least compared to the top tiers. What they really needed was some sort of moveset redesign, but either they were lazy, didn't want to, or ran out of time. That time was clearly spent reworking characters like Dedede (who became worse as a result, lol, RIP Waddle Dee and Bair)
There were a lot of tier jumps for characters from Brawl to 4, both up and down. Characters that have been somewhere between high-top tiers in every single Smash game (such as Fox and Pikachu) remained great once again. The characters you listed... I don't think their viability changed too much, but I do think their design actually
improved. Kirby is the easiest example for me because of my extensive experience with him, but in Brawl, he was basically Bair: The Character. Most of his power was frontloaded into his Bair, and he also had occasional move usage with stuff like Uptilt and Fsmash, but a lot of the time your best option was to just spam Bair. His other moves were generally thoroughly mediocreHis Bair got heavily nerfed in 4, which made a lot of matchups much worse for him, especially with other characters getting buffed (Mario is the first that comes to mind, in Brawl, Kirby could easily beat him by doing practically nothing but Bairing all game, but now it's a very hard matchup for Kirby) but Kirby's design is more interesting this time, because each of his moves has a use. I use Nair and Fair a ton more than I did in Brawl, for example. I use all his tilts and smashes fairly equally. Each of his throws has its use. His only flawed move from Brawl, that remained flawed, is Dash Attack. That move is pure garbage, and should've been replaced with Ninja Dash Sword Thingy... a burst movement disjointed dash attack would be so nice
But yeah, all of these characters have more interesting designs than they did in Brawl, imo. G&W was also Bair: The Character in Brawl IIRC, and he too has more viable moves to choose from. I don't remember how good/bad Ike was on release, but the fact that he's been patched more than makes up for it. Lucas I'm not sure, but at least his Zair is a hitbox now?!
They made the abominations of clone design
(patched but it is still lazy)
We do not speak of this.
Not sure what you mean here, Roy and Mewtwo are beautiful creatures in 4. Roy was literally just a bad Marth clone, but now that's Lucina's job, and Roy is a
more different Marth clone that plays differently enough to matter. I'm not really sure what Mewtwo's playstyle was like in Melee, but whatever it was, it was underpowered, so yeah. In this game, he's completely unique, and is reasonably strong. I do agree that patches could have been better, buuuut they've still done (mostly) amazing work, helping a lot of characters that needed it, and toning down some things (sometimes too much)
Also speaking of Link having slow moves, daily reminder that Kirby's fastest aerial is frame 6 Bair, same as Link... and Kirby's total startup for aerials is 54 frames, while Link's is only 52... with a sword.
And Falco's is 40, with some disjoints, so eat that
@Ffamran !
