Competitive Star Fox Assault

[HAXage]

Years ago there was a post on here asking if Star Fox Assault's multiplayer had any competitive potential. I chimed in pointing out that my friends and I have been playing SFA competitively almost since its release, but since the scene was limited to a pretty small local area it didn't go anywhere much.

Long story short, thanks to a couple of guys from the East Coast our community has migrated to the Dolphin emulator and we've even started playing matches online, and competitive SFA has rebooted in a big way. We have weekly game nights on Sundays and organize tourneys occasionally - here's a highlight clip from the last tourney we played:

Our forum can be found at sfacorner.forumotion.net. We also have a (far more active) Discord server at

Spoiler: *click to show Discord URL*

https://discord.gg/014uChv6fUMphOW1x

If anyone has any questions about why SFA is such a great competitive game, feel free to throw them at me. We're a very small group at the moment but we're all pretty obsessed with SFA; some of us have been playing since the game's release and we have a pretty extensive meta and competitive ruleset.

Anyway, if anyone is interested, I encourage you to sign up on our forum and join our Discord server for some games on Sunday nights - no experience necessary, just have netplay working!

 

[finalark]

SFA used to be THE game my friend came over to play when I was in middle school. Sadly, I left my copy at a friend's place, said friend moved and I never saw it again.

If you'd like to describe the meta game, I'd be very interested in learning more.

 

[HAXage]

Sure - basically, we discovered many years ago that if you ban Wolf, take out vehicles and play on-foot matches only, the game becomes very heavy on positioning and tactics, and rewards wise play and good decision-making. A player who thinks more and makes the right decisions every time will always beat a player who just happens to spawn next to a big gun and doesn't know what they're doing. Since you can't be everywhere on the map at once, planning far ahead and factoring in the time it takes to get to where you want to go also has to be a part of your decision-making process. Tech skill - being good at movement and aim - is also an important part of the game, but you can't win a game on tech skill alone, you also need to make good decisions.

Since positioning is such a big deal, your character's mobility is very important, so Falco is at the center of the character metagame. He doesn't completely dominate the game by any means, however, and the other characters all have attributes that can be desirable depending on how you prefer to play. Controlling the two "red" weapons (homing launcher and missiles) is a major part of any game, as well as properly using your barriers, both to thwart your opponent's pushes and make your own pushes. The rest of the game is just learning how and when to attack and defend, and using other weapons to the best advantage. That about covers the very basics - you can analyze the proceedings of a competitive SFA game to a pretty deep level, and there's rarely only one "correct" decision to make at any point in a game.

We have rules for best-of-X sets that cover stage striking and character selection, much like Smash.