Ness batters up! Ness Smash Switch Discussion

[Kevandre]

Ivysaur & Ness almost assuredly will be my top played characters in Ultimate. I never really liked Ness, but something about him just clicked with me in Smash 4. And he looks just as fun in Ultimate from what I've seen, if not better.

 

[Luigifan18]

Ivysaur & Ness almost assuredly will be my top played characters in Ultimate. I never really liked Ness, but something about him just clicked with me in Smash 4. And he looks just as fun in Ultimate from what I've seen, if not better.

Ness has been clicking with me since Smash 64.

 

[NocturnalQuill]

PK Flash no longer dissipates upon making contact with hard platforms and can instead be held on the ground until the move is fully charged.

Potential edgeguarding tool?

 

[Questionmark222]

Just joined the Ness Discord. My username is the exact same.

 

[TriforceBun]

Hi fellow Ness fans! This guy has been my main (or co-main) since 1999 and he seems better than ever in Ultimate. My ground game usually does pretty well, but here's my big issue with Ness:

Whenever I'm hit off the stage in any capacity, I really struggle to not get smacked around (or into the blast zone). Even ignoring Ness's recovery issues, whenever I'm simply high above the stage and trying to land, the opponent has a huge advantage and can usually get a solid hit in, or at least have some serious stage control once I touch ground. Ness's floaty weight and lack of a reliable dair or some sort of downward attack really make me feel like a sitting duck above the stage. If they chase with an aerial, I can usually air-dodge okay, but I tend to lag a lot when landing. What are his best options when I've got an aggressive opponent ready to up-smash me when I'm coming down?

 

[PK Bash]

Hi fellow Ness fans! This guy has been my main (or co-main) since 1999 and he seems better than ever in Ultimate. My ground game usually does pretty well, but here's my big issue with Ness:

Whenever I'm hit off the stage in any capacity, I really struggle to not get smacked around (or into the blast zone). Even ignoring Ness's recovery issues, whenever I'm simply high above the stage and trying to land, the opponent has a huge advantage and can usually get a solid hit in, or at least have some serious stage control once I touch ground. Ness's floaty weight and lack of a reliable dair or some sort of downward attack really make me feel like a sitting duck above the stage. If they chase with an aerial, I can usually air-dodge okay, but I tend to lag a lot when landing. What are his best options when I've got an aggressive opponent ready to up-smash me when I'm coming down?

This is just kind of a Ness thing unfortunately: being a floaty boy, if you airdodge in the air, you are potentially stuck in the air for ever unable to do anything. I find mixing up your aerial drift helps a lot. Like make out that you're drifting left and then when they start committing to covering the left, start drifting right instead, maybe with an airdodge. Those kind of mixups help a tonne.
You can throw out a nair and attempt to trade positively but obviously evaluate the risk-reward here. If you're gonna die and they're not, don't do it.
And sometimes just airdodging to a platform, or the ledge, can be a safe bet.
A cute little trick you can do with PSI Magnet in this game is to double jump and quickly PSI Magnet and it pushes you horizontally a fair way quite quickly. You can use this to get to the other side of the opponent and BAir them, for example, or otherwise just rapidly move to dodge a hit without pulling the trigger on the risky airdodge.
Sometimes it's best to airdodge a strong hit and just accept that you will get hit by something else, but be safe in the knowledge that getting hit by the first attack would have been way worse than getting hit by the second. e.g. air dodge the up smash and just accept that you might get dash attacked for it. Better to get hit by a non-lethal dash attack and have another stab at resetting neutral, rather than just straight up losing your stock to up smash, right?
And sometimes you just want to land without pressing any buttons at all. Don't give em anything to punish if you don't have to.
Hope that gives you some ideas!

 

[TriforceBun]

Good tips, thanks. I'll have to try out a few of those in Training.

 

[KickleCubiclist]

Hello guys, I’m just starting to play Ness. Does anybody have any tips? Thanks!

 

[MG_3989]

Hello guys, I’m just starting to play Ness. Does anybody have any tips? Thanks!

First of all see if he’s intuitive to you. Ness is one of those characters that you either immediately click with or makes no sense you (according to friends, Ness has always felt perfect to me even before I started practicing him). The absolute first thing you should do is practice recovering with pk thunder from every angle imangiable. You should also get used to your other movement options, most importantly your double jump (a lot of the time you don’t have to use pk thunder to recover, Ness has a great double jump and air dodge).

Next I’d practice short hope aerials, especially fair and nair. Nair is a get off me move and fair chains into itself and other aerials. Practice short hop chaining fair into itself. All Ness’s aerials are good though. His up air is multi hit and it can drag down if you hit it right into combos and kill at higher percents. His dair is a spike and you can spike somebody into the stage and combo them or try to catch them off stage with pk fire and spike them for the kill.

Next I would work on landing pk fire and your grab set ups because Ness’a grab game is extremely important. His down grab and back grab being the best. His down grab leads to fair chains and after a pk fire it does about 30 damage but you have to mind game people into it. His back grab kills most of the cast reliably at about 120 percent even with good DI but don’t use it on heavies until about 150 or so so you don’t stale it. His forward grab is good for launching people off stage and harassing them. You won’t use his up grab. PK Flash his neutral b is a meh move but has some edgegurding uses.

Ness’s smashes are pretty good. His bat has a lot of kill power on the sweet spot but it’s slow. If they’re bad at DI you can hit it on pk fire sometimes. It also knocks back projectiles. His up and down smashes are very good in this game. The main purpose of his down smash is to dangle the yo-yo off the edge and when a player tries to recover let go of it and launch them. His up smash is a great anti air that controls the whole air space around him and kills at about 100. His tilts are nothing to write home about and you’d usually rather be using neutral air but side tilt can kill at high percentages and down tilt can jab lock a player into a side smash if they don’t tech. Up tilt is just your basic get the opponent in the air move. Jab is just a get off me attack but it’s not as good as short hop nair.

Finally I’ll get into Ness’s arguably most important tool, pk thunder. One of your main goals as Ness is to stay in the stage yourself and get your opponent off stage. You don’t wanna be off stage pretty much ever. Use pk thunder to edge guard them. You can bounce them around with the head at high percentages it even kills. You can also gimp their recovery with the tail. Try to switch up the way you move it around so it doesn’t become predictable. It’s a phenomenal move. Lastly you have PKT2 where you hit PKT into yourself. You’re already using this to recover but if you hit somebody with Ness’s body when he’s in PKT2 it kills at obscenely low percentages. You probably won’t be landing those at first but once you get good with PK thunder it can be really useful. Just the threat of it scares people off sometimes.

I think that pretty much covers it. Like I said a lot of this was just intuitive to me but if you can nail down these fundamentals you’ll be a good Ness player

 

[MERPIS]

Hello folks, I am trying to pick up ness and add him to my roster of characters, does anyone have any tips for me?
Wait found some

 

[MG_3989]

Hello folks, I am trying to pick up ness and add him to my roster of characters, does anyone have any tips for me?
Wait found some

Check the above post and a bunch of other posts in this forum. Good luck!

 

[Specs64z]

Hello folks, I am trying to pick up ness and add him to my roster of characters, does anyone have any tips for me?
Wait found some

In addition to what MG_3989 said, Jtails has a pretty good guide on Ness. https://youtu.be/e3_1PsPQEFE

 

[True Blue Warrior]

Hey guys, what’s new?

 

[Swamp Sensei]

Hello everyone!

The Nintendo Game of the Week thread is currently talking about Earthbound. I thought you guys would like to join us.