Falco's Wavedash

[DrCraig]

Oi,

I'm still a new player and have yet to integrate wavedashing into my play very much, but I can do it with many characters pretty consistently. Except Falco...my main.. I'm 50/50 with it.. it sucks..

Falco has an odd wavedash, and I ask for any advice on learning it. Is there a trick to the timing of it? Whats the best way I can teach myself his wavedash timing?


Sorry if this is a done over topic, I'm not a regular on here and I don't want to be a bothersome causal.

 

[KinGly]

Oi,

I'm still a new player and have yet to integrate wavedashing into my play very much, but I can do it with many characters pretty consistently. Except Falco...my main.. I'm 50/50 with it.. it sucks..

Falco has an odd wavedash, and I ask for any advice on learning it. Is there a trick to the timing of it? Whats the best way I can teach myself his wavedash timing?


Sorry if this is a done over topic, I'm not a regular on here and I don't want to be a bothersome causal.

Falco's jumpsquat is five frames, whereas most characters aer 3 frames (Fox, Sheik, ICs) or 4 frames (Falcon, Marth), so it makes it a bit weird to time if you've been playing other high tiers.

I main Sheik with a Falco in development/for funsies, and whenever I change I have to remind myself to time it differently.

It's a two frame difference which you just have to learn to adjust.

Hope that helps

ninja edit: jumpsquat affects wavedashing cause you want to air dodge on your first airborne frame. That means for Fox you air dodge on frame four, and for Falco you air dodge on frame five. its a 1/30th of a second difference which just takes getting used to.

 

[J⩓мє]

Dealing with the different jumpsquat timings is a jarring part of learning the game, for sure, but it's just something one has to practice in order to play falco.
In terms of how to practice it, 20XX 4.0 beta 3 had a wavedash color overlay which made it easier to visually see when you had a perfect wavedash angle, perfect wavedash timing, etc. Unfortunately the menu to set it up currently crashes 4.0 beta 4 but from the chatter on the 20XX thread an update is coming soon. You could just patch a 20XX 4 beta 3 iso, but it wouldn't be useful for much other than wd practice compared to the other 20XX versions, as it had some crash bugs and stuff.

You could do something wild like use a drum machine program like Hydrogen to sound out the timing or something. However, just practicing wavedashing a little every day, or a few times a week, is the consistent, reasonable, and tried & true method of getting his wavedashes down consistently. I say 'a little every day' to try and advise towards a technique of learning referred to in the field of cognitive psychology as interleaving, which contrasts the practice of blocking, which would be trying to grind on just wavedashes for long periods of time, like hours or so. Here's a link to a study on the concept. Also here's a report on it, from the point of view of studying sciences (the interleaving section starts on page 5), which is less jargon-ey than the previous link.

But I've heard people at tournaments with differing years of experience complain about Falco's wavedash being difficult or comparatively strange feeling, so you're far from alone in the sentiment.

 

[DrCraig]

Thanks a lot guy; You both really cleared it up for me.

 

[J⩓мє]

ninja edit: jumpsquat affects wavedashing cause you want to air dodge on your first airborne frame. That means for Fox you air dodge on frame four, and for Falco you air dodge on frame five. its a 1/30th of a second difference which just takes getting used to.

To clarify why this is, your inputs are applied on the frame after they are read by the game, often referred to as 'frame 0' or the 'input frame' vs 'frame 1'. So the first possible frame that you can input an action for Falco during his jumpsquat is the frame before he is airborne (frame 5), and since the airdodge animation instantly changes your speed regardless of what it was (the magnitude is the same for all characters but the direction is based on your analog stick position), and since speed is applied to your characters position on the same frame (which makes it a backward difference from a mathematics perspective), during a frame perfect wavedash you never leave the ground, and a frame perfect wavedash with the same angle will always move you the same distance (after the jumpsquat).

All of that aside, if you watch Fox VODs, even up to high level play, a lot of players don't get or use frame perfect wavedashes during movement in neutral (this is to differentiate from the wavedashes during waveshine combos, the tight timing requirements of which seems to cause players to optimize their wavedash inputs), which suggests as a general observation that wavedashing feels easier with fox because people airdodge anywhere from frame 3 of his jumpsquat through to 1-2 jump frames. That is to say, during movement in the neutral, most fox players that I've observed give themselves a 2-4 frame window to wavedash, which would be correspond in time (and therefore muscle memory) to frame 3 of falco's wavedash on. As a result of this muscle memory, players likely feel that Falco is harder or 'weirder' to wavedash since half of the frames (frames 3 and 4 of the jumpsquat) they would have conditioned themselves to airdodge in are now completely unactionable, leaning towards 2/3ds to all of them being unactionable if they gave themselves a 3 or 2 frame window, respectively.

PS note: If you use the in-game debug mode to look at Falco's frame data with the animation states up (either with 20XX, AR codes, Dolphin, etc), the jumpsquat animation is indexed from 0 (like arrays in C-like languages), so if you're breaking down falco's wd frame by frame, the in-game display displays the animation frame of the Jumpsquat as: (0,1,2,3,4) where 4 is your first actionable input frame (which would be referred to you by people as 'frame 5 of his jumpsquat'). This aspect of the game unfortunately results in some confusion since 'frame 0' is referred to as the input frame for techniques or actions by the community when discussing frame data, but the game (inconsistently) uses 0-indexing for animations when displaying information about their state.

Edit: changed "after the end of jumpsquat" to "after the jumpsquat" to be less ambiguous