Guys I am seriously struggling with the Falco Matchup. It's been like that for ages now and no matter what I try to improve it never works out for me and I lose to Falcos I really shouldn't lose to (I do better with other characters even tho my other characters are way worse).
In short: I'm doing something terribly wrong.
Problems I noticed:
I'm not getting much % from hits, whilst Falcos always punish me way harder out of any opening they get
I don't convert anything out of shine knockdown, on the contrary I usually eat an attack after they get up and get comboed afterwards
I rely a lot on the neutral game and neutral game against Falco is just so different. I try to maneuver around lasers using platforms and I also try to WD ooS or powershield but it never pays off. As soon as I get in the air (fulljump) I get punished. It feels like they constantly rack up damage and need just one opening to get a combo going whereas I need to work really hard for that opening and cant convert nearly as good
I also don't get much edgeguards/gimps because most of the time Im busy getting comboed or trying to find a way through lasers
and my shine oos game is horrible so I need to work on that.
I don't have a video at the moment (should have one during the next few days tho) but any general advice in the Falco MU would be highly appreciated
Well obviously Fox's punishment is a huge part of why Fox can keep up with Falco. Ideally you want to get a grab on him so that you can go with your most optimized and consistent punishes so always try to eventually convert whatever it is you hit him with into a grab. An easy one is FJ drill -> grab when you FJ to go over one of his approaches or if you manage to FJ over a laser at him. Another good way to convert into a grab is bair -> up tilt -> grab at certain percents that I can't remember off of the top of my head right now. This one is really strong IMO because your FJ and bair are really good at walling Falco out so the situation should be coming up often. You can also do nair -> shine and then catch his wakeup options with a grab or shield his get up attack and shield grab hims for it. Speaking of which, if you aren't converting off of a shine knockdown you should learn to react to his get up attacks with you shield and then react to his rolls by running after them. You could also stand outside of his get up attack range and then punish his other options, but this means you have to stand kind of far away from him which makes punishing roll away harder since it'll take longer to get to where he ends up. Once you get reacting to his wake up options down, your shines should start leading to grabs more often which means that now you have quite a few ways of landing a meaningful hit on Falco that should come up pretty frequently.
Once you do land the grab, the follow ups depend on where on stage you are and which stage you're on. On FD, you can CG him til about 40 or 50ish regardless of his DI. After this point, on no DI after the up throw, you can turn around up tilt into a variety of follow ups depending on how close you are to the edge; if you're near the edge, after up tilt you can hit them off stage with either a nair or bair and start your edgeguard on him. If it's closer to center stage you can regrab after the up tilt up to around 70 I think when they DI the up tilt to go off to the side. you can keep doing this until you eventually get them off stage so that you can kill them. If they keep DI'ing your up throw you can keep regrabbing until about 60 or 70 and then nair them off stage.
Platform stages are a bit trickier; you pretty much can't CG outside of a few instances, so after grabs your usually better off up throwing them (as long as it doesn't put them on a platform) and then either up tilting in to stuff at lower percents, or nairing at higher percents and tech chasing off of the nair. If you grab them in a position where your up throw would put them on a platform, you're probably better off forward or back throwing them off stage so that you can start edgeguarding him. If this happens at low percents where your forward throw wouldn't put him off stage, I like back throwing them and then tech chasing off of it because tech chasing off of back throw at low percents is pretty solid to build percent and reposition for a better punish down the road IMO, especially if they're trying to DI on to a platform expecting you to up throw them.
Neutral vs Falco is weird; Falco controls neutral with his laser, but he's pretty slow, so in the time it takes him to shoot a laser you can do a lot of things. One of the big things you should keep in mind is how much Fox can drift in the air once he's FJ'ed. Add in a double jump, platforms, and wavelands, and you've got a pretty good set of options to avoid his lasers while safely preventing him from moving forward safely. The ideal range to stand against Falco IMO is roughly the length of a BF platform; from this range, you can FJ bair when you think he's gonna laser, and if he does you can react to him, drift towards him, and space a bair so that it hits him but he can't get a CC punish. If he approaches you with an aerial or a laser, you can instead drift away from him and bair him as he whiff's his laser/aerial in a similar manner. If he doesn't do anything (i.e. does an empty SH), you can either DJ up to a platform to be safe, or you could waveland towards him and shine which is pretty much impossible to react to and is safe even if it misses because you can just FJ out of the shine and go back to walling him, or you could just land and wait for him to do something else. Having said all of this, you said that any time you try to FJ you get punishes for it; could you elaborate on how it is that your getting punished? FJ'ing is an extremely powerful tool when fighting Falco and you should be getting a lot of mileage out of it so if you aren't it'd probably be helpful to know how it's going wrong.
EDIT: A bit more on playing neutral against Falco that I kinda spaced out on; walling out Falco with FJ'ing is a only part of of it, the other part is abusing his slowness by taking advantage of close quarters interactions where your speed is a huge deal. Getting into ranges where he can't reliably shoot a laser because you'll nair him in the face for it is a huge thing to keep in mind and to try and actively achieve. Also from these ranges you should be weary of him preemptively sticking out a move to stop your nair, so keep an eye out and try to react to his lasers and punish them, but if you don't see him do the laser, don't just nair at him anytime he jumps because if he does a retreating dair or something you just got put into a combo. Also, FJ's help with getting into these ranges because you can drift and waveland and double jump and use different combinations of those three options so that you have lots of control in that situations where as Falco is pretty limited.
EDIT2: calling @
D
Druggedfox
; we've been playing ad talking about this matchup quite a bit recently so he could probably offer some clarification and corrections on anything that I may have gotten wrong.
Hope this helps =D
