Samus has a potent neutral, but it walks a fine line and in some MUs is pretty fragile. Samus is her best when she's keeping you at midrange; her midrange game is borderline suffocating and very few if any characters can compete with her at that range, and CS is ridic in this game so charging that is good too.
Samus's "problem" lies in how her neutral requires so much space -- the double edged sword of having a midrange game as good as she does [and the mark of a well designed character, in contrast to popular belief] -- her neutral game requires sequences like: space backwards - input move - space back - input move and if this continues without the Samus finding an opening then she will be at the ledge (without roll as an option) and in a disadvantage. The reason why this plan works in the first place is that Samus was blessed with one of the best burst options in the game which serves as a total mixup to "create space" - but other parts of her neutral must succeed first before the opponent is going to be conditioned to get hit by dash attack (or dash grab).
Against big framed characters or slow characters, Samus's neutral is solid. Zair is murderous against big characters and slow characters are the easiest to trap into a midrange game. The best illustration of where neutral becomes fragile is in the Fox MU, where "space back" tells the Fox to "close space" and a bad sh zair by Samus can easily turn into a dash attack for the Fox (it's somewhat ironic how the two characters who contest Samus in terms of how good their dash attacks are - the the other being MK - use them so well against Samus).
The funny thing about the Fox MU is that while Fox can sneak underneath a sh zair the easiest of the cast, Samus's zair on hit is destructive against him past mid percents because it'll force a tech chase with a very narrow window to avoid the CS followup. Samus does have somewhat of a hole in her neutral in her ability to cover fullhop approaches (she can pretty much only do this with fh fair) so characters like Fox and Bayo benefit from that (and Bayo doesn't give a **** about fh fair).
But while Samus in some MUs is walking a fine line in neutral, the reason she can make most any MU work is her reward on hit. I've toyed with the idea for a little over a year now that Samus has one of the best advantage states in this game. The problem with that is that there's no real way to rank something like advantage state when it's so multifaceted -- but, she has high damage combos, landing coverage and juggling [with the beautiful move that is uair], powerful tech chases at all percent ranges, the ability to release CS at any point when the opponent is in disadvantage--the best chargeable projectile for killing--and strong ledge/edge guarding made better by how she can work in tandem with a ~40 frame active hitbox (bomb)--esam has called it one of the best advantage states--but it's hard to rank advantage states and Samus doesn't have a straightup kill confirm from grab or anything like that. Regardless, if/when Samus finds an opening in neutral, she will capitalize (unless you're Esam and you suck) and a well optimized Samus needs very few (2-4) neutral wins to get the opponent to kill percent.
Btw, I've always maintained that Esam's Samus sucks and is bad for the character because the only exposure people get to the character on stream is coming from him, but he won combo breaker with her and beat Ally so idk if I can say that anymore. It's looking like Salem is going to start using her more, though.
A couple of other things:
-Samus's jab is really good past percents where jab 1 is unsafe on hit. Jab 1 has disproportionately low FAF for its range and comes out f3, it's like a low lag low reward interrupting move with ftilt range. Jab combo does 11% and tech chases into CS with a very tight window for escape right at the percents where it starts comboing, and jab 1 forces tech chases at high percents as well. Falling uair to jab 1 to fsmash is an underused kill confirm.
-it's mu dependent, but bomb drop > weave > falling uair on top of bomb is a good landing option that only runs into trouble with characters that can intercept bomb startup with a move (like Cloud uair).
Edit: also, why the hell do some people come to Smashboards just to whine about Smashboards and then when that isn't enough go to twitter to whine some more about Smashboards and how they're "done with it" even though they're regular visitors? This is beyond annoying, find something better to do.
Samus's "problem" lies in how her neutral requires so much space -- the double edged sword of having a midrange game as good as she does [and the mark of a well designed character, in contrast to popular belief] -- her neutral game requires sequences like: space backwards - input move - space back - input move and if this continues without the Samus finding an opening then she will be at the ledge (without roll as an option) and in a disadvantage. The reason why this plan works in the first place is that Samus was blessed with one of the best burst options in the game which serves as a total mixup to "create space" - but other parts of her neutral must succeed first before the opponent is going to be conditioned to get hit by dash attack (or dash grab).
Against big framed characters or slow characters, Samus's neutral is solid. Zair is murderous against big characters and slow characters are the easiest to trap into a midrange game. The best illustration of where neutral becomes fragile is in the Fox MU, where "space back" tells the Fox to "close space" and a bad sh zair by Samus can easily turn into a dash attack for the Fox (it's somewhat ironic how the two characters who contest Samus in terms of how good their dash attacks are - the the other being MK - use them so well against Samus).
The funny thing about the Fox MU is that while Fox can sneak underneath a sh zair the easiest of the cast, Samus's zair on hit is destructive against him past mid percents because it'll force a tech chase with a very narrow window to avoid the CS followup. Samus does have somewhat of a hole in her neutral in her ability to cover fullhop approaches (she can pretty much only do this with fh fair) so characters like Fox and Bayo benefit from that (and Bayo doesn't give a **** about fh fair).
But while Samus in some MUs is walking a fine line in neutral, the reason she can make most any MU work is her reward on hit. I've toyed with the idea for a little over a year now that Samus has one of the best advantage states in this game. The problem with that is that there's no real way to rank something like advantage state when it's so multifaceted -- but, she has high damage combos, landing coverage and juggling [with the beautiful move that is uair], powerful tech chases at all percent ranges, the ability to release CS at any point when the opponent is in disadvantage--the best chargeable projectile for killing--and strong ledge/edge guarding made better by how she can work in tandem with a ~40 frame active hitbox (bomb)--esam has called it one of the best advantage states--but it's hard to rank advantage states and Samus doesn't have a straightup kill confirm from grab or anything like that. Regardless, if/when Samus finds an opening in neutral, she will capitalize (unless you're Esam and you suck) and a well optimized Samus needs very few (2-4) neutral wins to get the opponent to kill percent.
Btw, I've always maintained that Esam's Samus sucks and is bad for the character because the only exposure people get to the character on stream is coming from him, but he won combo breaker with her and beat Ally so idk if I can say that anymore. It's looking like Salem is going to start using her more, though.
A couple of other things:
-Samus's jab is really good past percents where jab 1 is unsafe on hit. Jab 1 has disproportionately low FAF for its range and comes out f3, it's like a low lag low reward interrupting move with ftilt range. Jab combo does 11% and tech chases into CS with a very tight window for escape right at the percents where it starts comboing, and jab 1 forces tech chases at high percents as well. Falling uair to jab 1 to fsmash is an underused kill confirm.
-it's mu dependent, but bomb drop > weave > falling uair on top of bomb is a good landing option that only runs into trouble with characters that can intercept bomb startup with a move (like Cloud uair).
Edit: also, why the hell do some people come to Smashboards just to whine about Smashboards and then when that isn't enough go to twitter to whine some more about Smashboards and how they're "done with it" even though they're regular visitors? This is beyond annoying, find something better to do.
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