So, since this thread kinda...well fell asleep for the past few days, new topic? I'm getting more and more comfortable with Banjo and enjoy playing him online. The more I play, the more I wonder how others feel about the competitive aspect of Banjo? Is he a viable pick?
I think I can offer some insight here because Banjo is one of my mains, and I have a rather optimistic view on the character despite widespread pessimism among other Banjo mains and players who don't use him.
He's definitely an all-arounder, and depending on your mentality, this can either be a great strength to capitalize on, or a rather significant detriment that may hold you back: very little in his tool kit is particularly overwhelming such that he's able to do anything much better than another character on the roster, and he's surprisingly unintuitive to get used to despite a simple moveset design, but the versatility in his playstyle, the number of subtle mix ups he has with his grenegg item play, and breegull blaster lending itself
very well for combos and kill confirms gives you a lot of flexibility in approaching different match ups depending on the predominate archetype of the opposing character. As long as you have solid fundamentals and a keen sense of situational awareness, you have many good tools that, IMHO, serve their purposes well enough in most situations and match ups you're likely to encounter.
If you're interested in learning Banjo more, here's some helpful advice that will hopefully expedite your learning process of him:
1) learn his ledge trapping and how grenegg plus egg shots cover various ledge options. This is the only area where Banjo is particularly oppressive against the majority of the cast, and stage control is HUGE with Banjo. Be sure to also capitalize on his many 2-framing moves such as dtilt, dsmash, and fsmash (in order of easiest to hardest to land, but also lowest to highest reward).
2) get comfortable catching grenade eggs in a variety of ways: tilts and aerials, plus z catching and dropping them to set up traps depending on the situation. Think of how Tweek uses
and his banana, but with more constrained mix up and combo potential because of grenegg's detonation timer and, to an extent, Banjo's lackluster aerial mobility limiting his capacity to follow up sometimes.
3) learn to use Breegull Blaster for low and mid percent combos, and kill confirms at higher percents (his main one being BB > Utilt at about 100 - 120% on most of the cast). However, if you REALLY want to get more advanced, there's a new tech with BB called Kazooie Fast Cancel (KFC) that allows Banjo to true combo into fsmash and wonderwing for MUCH earlier kills. There's a lot of intricacies here, so I advise checking out Banjocord for more details, where we'd be happy to answer your questions.
4) Use a "less is more" approach when playing Banjo. What I mean by this primarily is, in neutral, don't feel compelled to always rely on grenegg and egg shots/BB to wall people out. Use empty hops for tomahawk grabs, to see how your opponent reacts and tries to punish your jumps (and counterplay that appropriately), and use your 3 jumps in a way to be ambiguous with your approaches and landing aerials, for example.
There's a lot of solid conditioning Banjo can do, but it does take time to get used to and make the most of that. Where I think Banjo players struggle most (and misconceptions about him derive from) is that they feel they ALWAYS have to have a projectile out, but they're too laggy in both start up and cooldown to spam like traditional zoners can with their projectiles. Ftilt, Fair, bair, nair and uair all have their place in conjuction with smart item play and projectile usage to pressure opponents into the corner for a ledge trap or edgeguard, and dtilt sends at a disgusting low angle for tech chases (where he can do jablock dsmash or usmash off a missed tech) when it doesn't gimp or edgeguard.
5) Practice your spacing of wonderwing to snap to ledge. Unlike popular opinion would have you believe, I think this move is better used defensively to discourage edgeguards by the opponent (or as a tech chase, mix up, or whiff punish tool otherwise), but nothing sucks more than bonking against the ledge with a misspaced wonderwing and getting hit by a Palu up smash or Lucas down smash.
For match ups broadly speaking,
is susceptible to rushdown because of his bad air speed making him combo food and rather easily juggled (the latter can be mitigated with diligent mix ups of your resources to a large extent, however), and poor OOS options and mediocre fdata relative to these characters, but at the same time, the majority of rushdown characters have pretty awful disadvantage states, especially off-stage, which makes otherwise quite oppressive match ups like
a fair bit more manageable. In general, you'll want to lean less into projectile heavy play and a bit more into his brawler side using your own disjoints
then use your projectiles to keep them in disadvantage and apply pressure to achieve your win condition in the corner.
The only truly bad MUs for Banjo that a counterpick would be advisable for are
and
; the former just having an oppressive aerial game that makes Banjo's life hell in disadvantage (not to mention an invincible bair and DA that can ruin your WW reads at times), and the latter two tending to be very slippery and mobile to make meaningful neutral wins quite challenging.
Zoners can be annoying, but they tend to struggle killing efficiently if you're playing those match ups correctly (save for some exceptions like
) and Banjo is quite heavy as it is so he can live a while a play a good keep away game once he gets the lead.
He also has a field day with most heavies, although
and to a lesser extent
require you to play a bit more carefully.
TL; DR: Banjo is a well-rounded, versatile character with definite weaknesses (bad OOS, heavy with very low air speed, slightly lacking damage output and fdata, etc.), but can be largely compensated for with good patience and applying more of a conditioning heavy, bait and punish playstle and adapting that as needed depending on the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing character. It's also useful to play against the
player rather than the character in many situations because of the versatility he has. For viability, I think he's an upper mid tier currently with a decent chance to move into high tier if the aforementioned KFC gets developed and applied thoroughly once offline returns. Idk who your main is, but either way, I hope you continue enjoying your playtime with the bear and bird!
