Does anyone else feel as though this game comes down to character match-ups, i.e. character match-up > skill? I can play a handful of characters, a few of them well. When I come across opponents that hit me like a wall I can usually find another character that fares much better. Feels as though this game is all about exploiting advantages.
That tends to happen when Smash Bros. has more than 5 primary matchups to study and practice over your four or five year career for Melee. Yes, I suspect Smash 4's competitive community will fall back on its Brawl roots in this regard. Lots of matchup study, lots of time answering the question "can my guy handle this absurdly good character?", lots of counterpicking characters to cover disadvantageous matchups. But if you're not balancing matchup study with consistent entries at events, you're going to lose to players who are better at the game.
There will be many "red yoshis" if you catch my drift. People that come in with an under-developed character that they've been working on religiously, and thwomp their regionals because nobody knows that matchup. You see this already on a regular basis at locals. With a cast of 56 characters (soon to be 58) there's no getting around this. Smashboards just highlighted a Samus player who spent all of this game's life playing her.And a week before that I watched a great Diddy player buckle to his knees trying to figure out the new Bowser in Grand Finals, play like it was his first week with the game with missed punishes, incorrect monkey flip pressure, it was a mess. Then he went on a twitter tantrum about how unfair the new buffs were after being throw comboed twice between five games. Once for damage, once for a stock. The rest of the set was solid fundamentals for the Bowser, and undeniably cautious and auto-piloted play from Diddy. Bowser doesn't win this matchup but his strategies for it are a year old. The Diddy was convinced that he would lose, and so that's what the outcome was.
This thread is bound to devolve into a flame war about "whether smash 4 takes skill", but the topic is still worth considering. And who knows, maybe Smash 4's Brawl Metaknight has yet to be discovered and we'll be spending the last years of this game's competitive cycle focused on that one matchup, and the eight or nine other characters who don't go lower than -1 with him/her. Would this be a preferable scenario to our current free for all where seemingly everybody is viable? Maybe, I mean, people still miss Brawl for some reason or another.
