getting grabs is hard. I think ness wud be soo much better if his grab range was marths. It makes the lack of an actual approach easier to deal with since they wouldn't be so willing to sit in sheild/cc.
but anyways
some ness stuff:
Ness in the air can make him very good and very ****ty. I think his aerial game is where most of his potential lie. The fact that he can quickly change direction/momentum/acceleration in the air is something that most characters don't have which can prove to be very useful. But how important his double jump is makes it a risk to double jump away due to the possibility of losing your jump which easily leads to a loss of stock. Anyways, as any ness main should know, when you djc and fastfall at the same time, you fall deceptively fast. Which leads to the first thing:
theres this spacing when you fullhop interrupt djc dair on someones sheild where you can autocancel the dair and they'll be in too much shield stun that you can dash away without being shieldgrab irregardless of where you land in their shield. (atleast i'm pretty sure) alot of shield grabs/oos attacks can be baited this way.
2nd thing, another aerial spacing thing. But when techchasing, I have been able to fulljump and react with a djc dair to both tech in place/no tech AND one tech away option. Like you hover over where they wud tech in place but a little towards the techaway option you're covering. If you see them techinplace/notech you can djcff dair straight down and catch them, or if you see the roll you can djc di fair and catch them with the dair at the end of the their techroll. (I can't remember which characters this works on, but i've gotten it pretty consistently without really actively thinking about it). OTG says this kind of thing is very common AT for ness in n64. idk about that
another thing I was thinking about which is similar to the other, is instead of the fullhop, you can just kinda empty short hop in the area between where theyd tech in place and where theyd end up in a tech roll in one direction and be able to react to 3 out of the 4 tech options with the same djc aerial. I haven't tried this, so idk if it works as well as the full hop one, but i don't see why it should.
always space your dash attack to try to hit with the last hit of it. It helps so that if they shield in time you'll be out of reach for their shield grab. And they can di/cc/get that weird pop up thing if they get hit by the first two hits. So spacing for the tip of teh dash attack is best imo
practice djcffl fair so that: you don't go higher than ness's standing height, you get a decent amount of horizontal distance, you can get all the sparkles out at the end. The last part of it is most important, but not because you're generally gonna wanna use all the hitbboxes of the fair. But being able to get them all out of a far low, djcffl is very useful. Especially since you can fast fall at any time of the fair hitboxes. If you can get your djcffl far enough it can be a safer replacement for dash attack in some situations. (specifically when predicting dash away) as well as really improving your oos game.
And yea technically you should be practicing how to get good with djc since it empirical to ness's movement. But even after i was good with djc I had to practice djcffl fairing this way because intuitively my djcffl used to go a bit higher and shorter horizontally, while not being able to get most of the sparkles out unless i delayed the dj(which is bad cuz it made the djcffl slower and higher). Mofo showed me this way of doing it, and it's pretty useful.
do you guys know about the AT where: you're in tumble in the air and you do an aerial at the very last moment before you hit the ground, you don't have to tech/nor do you suffer lag from the aerial? It's really really easy to do with ness's dair, for some reason the timing for it is alot more lenient than most other characters. It's pretty good albeit small thing to start doing. (I don't do it yet, but mofo does it a **** ton.)
but yea random info dump. Play around with these ideas, see if they work for you
on another note:
I still don't know whether its better to tech chase with sh ac dair or shffl dair
edit:
did not expect this post to be so long
anything to procrastinate studying for finals lol