This is an unusually contentious subject and different people offer different opinions on what to do. Obviously, if you take the Silent Wolf/battle-hardened/up-the-rankings/winwinwinmoneymoneymoney mentality, you're not going to get a bunch of hate mail from your Mario fans. And if you hop on to the Coin You Up/character purist/wannabethebestmariointheworld mentality, the only person who might be disappointed is
for not being able to Fox it up so much.
But, now that I've said that it's up to you just like everyone else in the thread, I'd better offer my opinion, too:
If I were in your shoes...
Which I sort of am. Almost every low-tier main who starts to learn the game at the competitive level will see the imbalances in the play and figure out a few fun tricks with the upper tiers. Then all of a sudden you find yourself counterpicking your tough matches with top-tier characters. Then a few more tournaments go by and you find yourself playing Foxes and Marths more and more until ultimately ya gotta make a new signature banner because it seems as though you've just lost your main character without realizing it. I've seen this happen A LOT and if you do what I do at work (which is nothing), I spent quite a bit of time digging up information about the global smash community for the SmashWiki. In my travels, I probably counted at least three or four Mario/Luigi mains that played in tournaments for a year or so and now they all play Fox. Vwins from Toronto was a formidable Luigi main and I was looking forward to facing him at an east vs. west coast Canada mad-crazy Luigi ditto. But now he plays Fox. One of the guys from my bi-weeklies was one of the best Marios I had ever seen and had tremendous potential, but then he started playing Captain Falcon. And I'm fairly sure we're not gonna see Azen's Luigi in a tournament ever again.
So if I were in your shoes?? No, absolutely not. Screw Fox, screw hard Mario matchups; suck it up, learn and
know how to win them and I think it'll be more satisfying for you in the long term. Yeah I can play Fox, yeah I can pull of the flashy combos from time to time and yes, it's way easier to beat Peach--but I am a
Luigi player and if my Luigi can't handle a matchup and I chump out and pick Fox just because he's stronger, then what right do I have to even call myself a Luigi player? It really depends on where your passion for Smash lies.
I know it doesn't matter for a lot of people, but you seem to definitely have an attachment to Mario and you're probably finding the same things that I did: Fox is kinda like a drug...it's hard to NOT play him sometimes. However, I also think that Fox play is deceptive in that it can make you seem a lot better at the game than you actually are. There are quite a few Luigi matchups that I still struggle with that are much easier if I play Fox, generally. However, when it comes down to the strange and unusual things in Smash matches that make the game so interesting, I find that Fox falls apart a little bit because I simply don't know him as well as I know Luigi. I don't know how long you've been playing Mario, but when one character is truly ingrained into your head and your muscle memory to allow you to say...cape at the last second for just enough height to land on the moving cloud at Yoshi's Story (or losing control in the air with Ness on Corneria and recovering by PSI Magnet-healing via the Great Fox's guns
), that character is your
best. I'm not sure if my point is entirely clear here, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that at least in
my case, it doesn't matter if I played Fox straight for three months and learned all the tricks to beat all kinds of characters of varying weights, only Luigi would survive the unpredictable occurrences that make or break a match sometimes. Don't get me wrong, assuming nothing goes awry in the Fox matches, the mighty space animal would probably
win more often than Luigi overall, but where it
really counts is in the ability to improvise and truly
control the character in all situations. The more control you have, the better you are. There are a lot of times that I'll be playing Fox and something bizarre will happen (like teching the ceiling underneath Battlefield's surface with a misplaced up+B and not being nearly fast enough to react) and the first thing I think of is: "A Fox main would've lived through that." Thus, the second thing that springs to mind is: "
I would've lived through that if I were playing Luigi." And in most cases, it's true.
On the grander scheme, you have to decide: are you doing this to win just for yourself? Or are you doing it to win for the community and the spirited competitive scene? You know, the fans? And if you're doing it for the community, it's a little bit like deciding whether to release a crappy pop CD that will sell millions of copies over two years and then be forgotten, or release an epic album that took ten years to finish to a small audience of people who will truly appreciate it:
Do you want a whole bunch of fans who know about Eggz, this guy who's gotta be pretty good considering how high he is on the Washington Power Rankings?
Or do you want a small number of Mario fans from a closer-knit community of players who really know what it takes to play him and admire the fact that this Eggz guy, regardless of what number he is on whatever rankings list, is still the best Mario around?
That same authentic appreciation is not something you can get if you run and hide behind Fox; it's the Mario community that decides it and dedicating yourself to succeeding with the community supporting you 100% is what makes the best Mario in the world.
Seriously, try placing top 3 in a tournament with Mario and winning a tournament with Fox and post the results in each appropriate character-specific forum....do you
really think anyone's gonna give a s
hit in the Fox forum? Not. Likely. Your Mario fans will greet you with a hero's welcome, even without taking first place!
It comes down to what you want out of the game and I've learned (mostly from the random abuse scattered all over these forums) that there are
wildly varying opinions on what exactly that should be. I can only comment on my own beliefs and as a character purist, I can respect your decision to play Fox, but I vehemently disapprove.
). In the end you should just do whatever feels natural. Don't feel bad about it.