I'm almost done with my thing. I'll make sure to have it ready by Sunday at the latest, then.
I finished my thing!
Edit: If you've read this, please don't just "Like" the post. Feedback is useful, and if you have anything to add or think I'm off on something, PLEASE tell me. Even if it's something like a better way to word something, give it to me. This needs to be as accessible as possible to everyone.
Neutral Game, Advantage, and Disadvantage
Neutral
The Neutral state is perhaps the most important part of any match you play in Smash, so it goes without saying that understanding what it is and how to work it is crucial to your progress as a player. Naturally, the first thing to do is understand
what Neutral is. The obvious answer is that it’s the state where neither player is at a distinct advantage or disadvantage. Not quite the most illuminating statement, so let’s try to identify it in terms of gameplay.
Imagine the game has just begun. You’re playing on Smashville, so you both spawned on the ground, on opposite ends of the stage from each other. What’s the first thing that’s going to happen? Odds are, both you and your opponent will start moving back and forth, weaving into and out of each other’s range, getting a feel for the other’s habits. You’ll probably also see a lot of threats, either from movements or from attacks actually being thrown out. If your opponent is Diddy, he might start walking you out with SH Fairs, looking to poke you with the move to try and knock you offstage. If your opponent is Sheik, it’s very likely you’ll see things like empty Short Hops from her. She might not be actively throwing out an aerial, like Fair, but the threat of that lightning fast move keeps you from diving right into the fray with her. Alternatively, you could be playing against a character like Villager, who will just keep his distance from you with slingshots, Lloid rockets, and trees.
These are three pretty distinct ways of playing the neutral game, but there’s a common theme underlying all these strategies: your opponent is trying to get you into a situation where you’re uncomfortable, where you’re disadvantaged and they’re advantaged. In other words,
the goal of the Neutral Game is to move into an advantaged state.
Advantage and Disadvantage
While these two states are basically complete opposites, they can’t really be discussed in a vacuum. In essence, being in an Advantaged State is having your opponent in a Disadvantaged State, and vice versa. I’ll discuss things mainly from the side of the Disadvantaged Player, since I find it’s a more concrete way of explaining things.
Imagine you’re playing against, say, Fox. He grabs you, winning the Neutral Game, and then he Uthrows you. You now have very few options. You can’t use any grounded options, because now you’re in the air. Looking at your aerial options, we’ll find that Fair, Bair, and Uair are kind of useless now, because they probably won’t hit Fox, since he’s below you. Looking specifically at Yoshi for a moment, you’ll see it’s probably a bad idea to try Dair, since its range is poor. Nair is okay if he gets in close. You could try Down B, but that’s pretty laggy, so it could end poorly. Basically, you don’t have much you
can do, and even what you have is pretty poor. This is the essence of being in the Disadvantaged State.
The Disadvantaged State occurs when you are cut off from most of your options, and those that you have remaining are pretty poor. Naturally, the Advantaged State is the opposite of this.
The Advantaged State occurs when you have cut your opponent off from most of his options, giving yourself an easier time obtaining follow ups.
And that’s basically it. The goal of Neutral is to force your opponent into Disadvantage and put yourself into Advantage. So naturally, the next thing to examine is just how to accomplish this goal:
From Neutral to Advantage
While every character tends to approach the Neutral Game differently, there are three general ways that it is played. Before we get into these general strategies, it’s important to understand some terminology.
Stage Control – The effective areas of the stage that a character controls, either by directly being there, or having threatening access to that area. Stage control can be claimed through a character’s physical location, a character’s potential movement, a character’s attacks, a character’s potential attacks, and projectiles.
Threat – A threat is either a physical option being used, for example, Sheik’s using Fair to swipe at you, or the idea that the character could
potentially hurt you. The potential part here is key, as it allows you to not actually use a move to take up the space that it would otherwise occupy, allowing you to remain noncommittal. For example, imagine Sheik is Short Hopping in front of you over and over again. Technically, she’s doing nothing, so you
could approach and try to hit her. But in reality, she could swing her lightning fast Fair at you at any moment, making approaches risky. The
threat of this move is what keeps you out. This allows Sheik to keep all her options available to her and prevents her from needing to actually commit to the frames of Fair. Contrast this with say, Shulk, who would want to use something like Fair or Nair in neutral. These moves have moderate start up, so he is forced to commit to these moves early and frequently if he wants to threaten you with them. Therefore, Shulk is less threatening than Sheik.
Zone – Very closely related to Stage Control, a character’s Zone is the area he or she is directly occupying with attacks. Characters that tend to play defensively rely on Zones and Zoning (the act of keeping up a Zone) to win Neutral. For example, consider Villager. He’ll fire up a Lloid rocket near the ground, forcing you to shield it or jump over it, but he adds in the use of his Fair to occupy the space above the rocket, so jumping is less effective. This space that he continues to occupy with these moves is his zone, and in order to hit him, you must break through his zone. Zones can also be kept up without the need for projectiles. Imagine Sheik staying jusssssssst outside your range and Fairing over and over again. Again, you need to break this Zone to hit her.
Zone Breaker – A movement option, attack, or some combination of both that allows you to break through an opponent’s Zone. These tend to be fast and have long effective range.
Effective Range – The true range that a character has. Taking Fox’s Usmash as an example, we can see that it doesn’t have incredible range while he’s stationary. But since he can run so fast and Usmash out of his run, the Effective Range on this attack is much larger than the move’s hitbox itself. This concept also applies to aerials, which can be done out of a run (you can jump into one), or drift while performing one.
This vocabulary is not entirely standardized everywhere, but it’s convenient to have terms for these concepts instead of having to use long, drawn out explanations every time the concepts need to applied.
With this vocabulary in mind, we can easily list the three main strategies people use in Neutral.
1.
Walling the Opponent Out.- In this case, characters will tend to use fast, long ranged, high priority moves to take up space, effectively Zoning their opponent. The wall will tend to force retreats towards the ledge, or just hit you.
2.
Threatening the Opponent- This is similar to Walling, except that you tend to not have to actually throw out attacks to zone your opponent. This is very characteristic of fast characters, who use their movement speed to give them large Effective Ranges, allowing them to exert a lot of stage control.
3.
Camping. – This strategy involves the use of projectiles to force your opponent to approach you. When your opponent is forced to approach in this manner, they are typically disadvantaged (airborne, shielding, etc.) since they must maneuver around your projectiles to approach. Characters that camp also tend to have good anti-air or defensive options to send their opponents away after they’ve broken through the projectile wall.
Smash is quite a dynamic game, so naturally people’s Neutral games are not always this cut and dry. However, I think being familiar with these three concepts is a good starting point for thinking about Neutral.
The Neutral Game and Yoshi
With the generalized Neutral Game discussion out of the way, we can move on to thinking about how Yoshi interacts with all of these concepts. In a vacuum, Yoshi tends to fall under category 2 for the Neutral Game. He generally wants to threaten people with his moves, since he lacks a fast, long ranged attack to wall people with, and his camping game is a bit too slow to be relied upon. He also lacks amazing defensive options to complement his projectiles.
However, characters do not exist in a vacuum, so it is essential that we consider Yoshi’s Neutral Game in relation to other characters. And looking at Yoshi through this lens is what really causes me to love the character. Yoshi is
not a character that has just one possible game plan that he always sticks to. Yoshi is
flexible, and he can handle every style of Neutral Game out there. This means it is not easy to shut Yoshi down and give him an impossible match up. He always (for the most part) stands a fighting chance if you’re smart enough and patient enough.
This flexibility comes with some downsides, however. Yoshi is basically a jack-of-all-trades, but a master of none. Since he is flexible in his Neutral Game, he can do a little bit of everything. However, he is not amazingly strong in any of these aspects. Therefore, he is frequently forced to play other people’s games. For example, if Yoshi goes up against a character with a strong walling game, he’s forced to try to beat that walling game. He will not be able to play his own game and force the opponent to change their tactics.
Usually, when a character cannot play their own Neutral Game, they lose the match up, unless they reap fantastic rewards when they actually win Neutral (think of Ice Climbers in previous games). Normally, we’d expect Yoshi to be an incredibly weak character since he is almost always forced to play his opponent’s game, and his punishment game (Advantaged State) doesn’t tend to cripple his opponent. However, Yoshi’s options are generally strong enough to contend with opposing Neutral Games, and he almost always has an answer to what his opponent is trying to do. This makes it so that he’s not actually disadvantaged by having to play other characters’ games, because he’s more than capable of doing so. And on the off chance that you’re playing a match up where Yoshi decides how the Neutral Game will be played, you’ll find that Yoshi dominates.
Yoshi is a very hard character to shut down, and it’s this strength that allows him to remain competitive. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to provide general advice for playing Neutral as Yoshi, because it all depends so much on who you’re fighting against. In general, the basic idea is to use your mobility to get around your opponent’s traps and to put yourself at Advantage. Against faster characters, you’ll need to stay grounded more often, as Yoshi can have trouble landing, so jumping for Short Hop Egg Tosses and Fairs becomes risky since your opponents can just run under you. Against slower characters, Yoshi can control the air with his mobility and long reaching Fair, or set up frame traps through the use of Short Hop Egg Tosses. Against characters that camp, Yoshi can utilize his mobility to outcamp them using aerial Egg Tosses, or just use his mobility to weave through the projectile walls and punish his opponents. He can even jump out of shield now, allowing him to approach characters from the ground.
It’s important to realize that all match ups with Yoshi are unique, and you must be very knowledgeable about all characters to see great success with Yoshi. You’ll want to know what your opponent’s general game plan for Neutral is, where the weaknesses in that plan are, and how Yoshi can exploit them. Smash is a series of minigames for Yoshi, each one a bit different from the next. However, if you’re patient enough and if you put in the time, you’ll definitely see success using this character.
