Picking up Melee again, a little lost on what fundamentals to focus on

[SUNGJINN]

So I took an 8 year break from playing Melee due to all of my IRL Smash friends losing interest in playing competitive rule-set Melee casually. I just installed Slippi and want to focus on improving, but am finding myself a bit lost in unranked due to getting absolutely **** on by pretty much anyone with any bit of technicality.

I have been messing around with Unclepunch training a bit, but find it hard to apply tech to real games since the speed of opponents is overwhelming me, and I realized it's also mainly because the only thing my friends and I really focused on when originally playing Melee was simple tech like wavedashing and dashdancing, and I never took the time to learn the fundamentals.

I know this answer will change depending on the character that I pick (so far it's looking like I'm going to either main Marth or Falcon), but what are some easy things I can focus on fundamentally to give myself a good base to start building off of? I know neutral play and understanding the basics of each matchup are a good start, but I'm a little lost about what specifically to look at, or where to go from there. Anything helps! Thanks in advance.

 

[2CO]

I think it's important to understand the concept of punish game, and to practice getting punishes. Everyone whiffs moves, and you can rack up a lot of damage just by recognizing these whiffs and acting accordingly. Maybe you already know about this though. The youtube channels SSBM Tutorials and RadarSSBM have some good tutorials as well, here's a couple that focus on fundamentals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TuJTa46yYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEQ7NTHPSeo

There's a lot of stuff to learn though, so it can be quite overwhelming. I'd say try to focus on different skills on different days, and if you want to keep track of exactly what you want to learn/have learned, you can use a task board like Google Tasks.