I love how people forget how amazing Link's MC (momentum cancel) is. Along with proper DI and momentum canceling, Link can live to crazy percents. Sure that's up to the player to be able to have these skills, but really. All he has to do is DI properly, and Bair. He's also a heavy character. At top play, Links can live to high percents unless the obvious happens...getting gimped, but that's been covered already.
I'm going to stress this, because Links do need to Step it Up. DI can mean so much to Link.
Link is also beastly at racking up damage and killing. He has plenty of kill moves (his dair is just broken) and Falcon HAS TO RELY ON GIMPS/EDGEGUARDS FOR KILLS. Really, what's he going to kill with? Knee is terribad (i know they happen, but let's be realistic. It's not as guaranteed as say Link's JabJab>Dsmash or just Dsmash in general) Falcon Punch is a joke, and his best kill moves are Fsmash and Dsmash, which both have hefty start up and ending lag.
No, Link is not beastly at damage racking.
Boomerang and Bomb can form a wall for about three moves; then the opponent will get in, or force you to, well, do something else (most likely reposition, which means not attacking, which means losing DPS).
To state it generally, he has situations from which he cannot attack. Plenty of them. Because of his lacking CQC game.
And it is lacking, it's lacking so hard I think you didn't catch what CQC is supposed to mean. Link has a good dodge, but that's all he has. He doesn't
have a jab, he's got a tether
(read: frame 11 or slower) grab, his dash nor run speed will ever save his ***, and he hasn't got good shield push on the options that can come out in time.
When the opponent gets in, Link has
screwed up, and has to get out; that's all he can do. It's all he can do because the opponent gets free pressure when they're inside Link's sword. The opponent suddenly has all kinds of crap to mixup with their grab because of what's safe on Link's shield.
In ideal conditions, the tether makes the shield game different because range is not a factor, but time is; changing what the opponent has to do. But when these conditions are **** on (as your opponent is wont to do), it takes away the fundamental of the shield grab. And that's bad.
Link wants to play by redefining range to work relative to his sword, and taking actual CQC entirely out of play. His trouble is that unlike Marth, he doesn't have tons of vertically massive hitboxes, pretty much losing to the aerial component of this game in the transfer of his home 2D mechanics to an orthogonal rewrite of it (2D). As far as I'm concerned, Link's air physics do not do him any favours. He basically trades juggle vulnerability for early deaths to everything else - and being always one beat, at best, behind the opponent's movement, even if caused by your own knockback.
... wait
before I get too off-point (with Link's tier place in general), let me close that up.
Link is bad at damage-racking. If he were ever good at damage racking, that is because, and that's precisely when, you've got a successful Link on your hands. But the guts of the claim is that if the opponent sees through Link, and realizes what he is crap at, he won't let Link use all those moves, will move right through them, and Link suddenly isn't even attacking anymore. At least, he's not attacking and doing his lifespan a good turn.
Link's projectile game and onstage game alone make him better then Falcon...
Falcon can only rarely be caught out of position. Except for the moves which he *cannot* beat (because Sakurai didn't think it important to give every character at least one answer to super damaging safe moves
...), Falcon's always got SH NAir (MOVING Nair), jab, *dash away*, and, if in the air, UAir. With a little bit more stability, he's got grab and DA.
Link goes all in with wanting things to work for his playstyle just right, so far that his needs often can't be met, and he falls apart - while he picks up barely any power in exchange for it (
i.e. no one gave him MK's Dsmash). Falcon is only keeping the opponent slightly off-balance the whole time, and one wrong guess is still major punishment, but it's always there for the player. It always works.
Between two crap characters that are never giving their own strengths to the player, what matters more is at least letting the player take on his opponent's thinking - taking advantage if you DO, by your pro-star powers of psychic insight, see the next choice coming. For both characters not being able to force their own playstyle into the MU for long (garbz tier), there's too much lose-lose for Link, and slightly less lose-lose for Falcon.
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I prefer the idea of mastering Link to Falcon because I like the idea of upkeeping those ideal conditions, more than my recognition that the difficulty of it is greater than settling for Falcon's (difficulties).
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