Overrated characters:
Especially Roy. I used to believe Roy may even be top tier or a top 20 character but now after using him for several months I feel differently. Hearing of the plethora of losing MUs Roy has on the Chroy discord as well as directly experiencing it. I refused to believe it at frat because I wanted to believe Roy was as good as he was hyped to be and made excuses like it was just my skill level but watching top Roys struggling with the matchups, that is if they even played the matchup. Most Roy mains, even the most dedicated such as Goblin picked up secondaries due to how awful Roy’s matchup chart can be. Having near impossible matchups isn’t the marker of a top tier as far as I’m concerned.
Roy struggles in certain matchups because of the way he’s designed. Roy’s entire kit is basically designed to anti air, forward air comes out too slowly so it gets stuffed out quite a bit unless you read a jump. It’s frame 10 in comparison to Marcina’s frame 6. Roy’s nair which is the move people gravitate towards isn’t as good when the opponent knows how to shield and parry. In fact they can shield the first hit and parry the second. Even if they don’t the move is not very safe at all. Furthermore nair doesn’t even hit many grounded characters. Try this, put Ness as your opponent in the training room and try connecting a nair as he’s standing still. There are many characters who are shorter than this making it not even possible to hit ever when they’re grounded. Roy’s infamous jab also benefits more from hitting aerial opponents it’s easier to land that way and they cannot shield it. If you compare the hit boxes of Roy and Chrom jab you’ll see Roy’s are literally placed s bit higher. Up special is also an anti air. It has awful horizontal range in front and isn’t the multi hit you may think it is there’s a gap between the first hit and the rest meaning opponents can consistently spot dodge it. What it does have is good vertical height.
All of this leads back to one point which makes it so that Roy really suffers against short characters. Not simply short characters which there are a lot of but also characters that have short hit boxes when running such as Joker, Inkling and Sheik. Chrom at least has a whole sword meaning the dead zones aren’t as big, but as for Roy it can actually become a problem to KO these tiny light characters because he can’t hit sweet spots. Guess who Roy’s worst matchup is? It’s Pichu, a not very relevant character in the meta right now but has every attribute Roy hates. Roy has a bad matchup chart losing to
to varying degrees, however what is the trade off? Which relevant matchups does Roy crush in to makeup for this? The spoiler is none, given that Roy’s weaknesses are so easy to exploit, I haven’t even spoken of his recovery yet. At best you could say
however here’s the clincher: Roy isn’t ZSS’s worst matchup, in fact there’s a character with a better matchup chart than Roy against every character whether even winning or losing. This character is
. Wolf does better than Roy and maybe Chrom as well in every relevant matchup, and in fact is easier to use on top of that since his air acceleration means he’s not as commital with his jumps. Furthermore he doesn’t have to spend hours perfecting a kill confirm which requires DI reaction. Wolf has a reflector to deal with projectile characters, and it’s a good reflector on top of that with other uses such as to extend combos. He has a great projectile with transcendent properties to control the neutral as well. Great frame data and hit boxes which hit low enough to catch the smallest of characters.Amazing smash attacks whereas Chroy only have f smash the rest are not very good smash attacks. Long story short Wolf outclasses Roy. Chrom also has a masochistically bad recovery as well which requires pinpoint precision to recover against a variety of gimping tools such as water and counters. Chroy are overrated, use Wolf instead if you want better consistency.
