Post Mortem Report of Bowser since launch

[EarthenPillar]

Now I haven't posted anything for a long, long while but I'd like to share an opinion that will perhaps save you and others on your good time should you decide on picking up Bowser and using him in a competitive setting.

I have been using Bowser competitively, exclusively since launch. Played him against all other characters of the cast in tournaments within the South East Asia and have placed top 8 in Singapore region. I have also helped labbers such as Zapp Branniglenn in finding data for a period of time. My most profound finding was the timing necessary to cancel the landing lag of aerial UpB, which has been patched out prior to 2015. I play and lab other characters such as Sonic, Megaman and Peach as well, however for the personal reason of improving my reading game as a fighting genre gamer, I had chosen Bowser as my only pick in tournament scenes and most competitive settings.
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After using Bowser for such a long time, I wish to DISCOURAGE -new- players from deciding on picking this character competitively. At least as a main. Especially if they're aiming to place well in a tournament.

In my opinion, the pinnacle disadvantage Bowser has is the unforgivable startup, active and ending frames necessary to execute animations in his movelist. Bowser also suffers from a pokeable hurtbox:shield size, lackluster in ground recovery, high risk low reward followups, combos & gimping options outside of his grab and reverse fAir.
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Bowser, is indeed a lovely character to play if you want to build your own personal character as a patient player having good reading judgement & timing. However, with the mixture sum total of his disadvantages you will find it much more forgivable & rewarding to play most of the other characters in the roster.
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Now, I know some of our players here will defend the big guy. I can understand why myself. So if your intent is in placing a tournament well, with Bowser, let me share the core GAMEPLAY issues the most of you will face during the later mastery of using this character:

Bowser's gameplay revolves around the player making strict adjustments in the timing and spacing, to decrease the amount of risky commitment required in play against most characters, especially against those with great zoning capabilities or punishing combos & followups. Great players will learn to memorise the stance & distance of their opponents. Bowser has very limited low-risk options and is required to move particularly at specific positions on stages for optimised play, making the character very predictable in high level play.

The game in punishing Bowser, is redundantly abundant in what opponents can do. Some characters in the roster has combos & kill setups only specific to Bowser due to his huge hurtbox, falling speed, poor air dodge and almost no utility of his ground tech against most of the roster.

As Bowser have unfavourable escape options during the opponent's followups as most characters, it is pretty lenient in the misread of your opponent to result into a scramble in their favor, another followup or a combo. The best results Bowser achieves after these is being knocked down, the lost of being grounded, playing offstage or hanging from the ledge. Against characters with good range or low commitment movelists, most of these scenarios enable them to gimp Bowser or setup for a heavy combo game.

This results in a player learning Bowser to mostly revolve around memorising the flowcharts of the characters in the roster and their possibilities in the neutral. The problem, is with similar characters such as Ganon who have this issue, is that the mixup game for the opponent is much greater in the rest of the cast.
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With all of that, the player can win under the circumstance that he or she can dominantly condition, lead & read the neutral, habits, flow and decision making of the opponent. Followed by sharp buffered timing in inputs of punishes, proper clanking and perfect shielding. One would be surprised at how fast a game ends once Bowser assimilates what he knows of the character with his opponent playstyle.

Saying that, I think Bowser is a great character to pocket, if anything, a practical method to hide the playstyle of your other characters during a tournament when facing an opponent you can confidently take down. Outside of that, as tournament results have shown, playing Bowser in tournaments may only provide more gameplay data for the developers to consider refining the character if anything else.

 

[CreamyFatone]

This is pretty spot on, and is a great post.

One thing I'll say though is that I do not think there is much that developers can do in terms of improving this character at this point. You can change one or two things, but I think that the nature of heavy or read-y characters in any fighting game is that the momentum swings harder in favor of that player when they are playing better than the other player.

The satisfaction of playing Bowser is that every victory, every neutral interaction, is a direct result of the work of the player, and not the character. Bowser has the strongest attacks, but it's up to the player to find a way to get in as Bowser has no tools for getting in. You have to get in on the player, in order to get in on their character.

With other characters your ability to get in has to do somewhat with your skill in using that character's tools to get in. With Bowser, that is not the case as he has none of those tools. With Bowser, your ability to get in has to do completely with your ability to predict your opponent's behavior.

A possibly more competitively viable version of Bowser would look like Kragg from Rivals of Aether, who can throw boulders and basically has zoning options, although in that game everyone has amazing options because there is no block and it's way more aggressive.

 

[pitfall356]

If Bowser has no approach options then he should definitely have better "get off me" options. Perhaps if he had next to no lag when he clanked no matter what he clanked with; perhaps if firebreath had less startup/endlag/could be cancelled with shield etc, perhaps if Tough Guy interacted better/more with the entire roster, perhaps if...

Overall he's viable. Maybe not alone, but he's good in this game. Definitely not F/D tier, C tier at worst and B at best. Not a bad pocket or secondary option. Buffing him is hard at this point without creating a polarizing character in casuals/FFA, but he could be much worse off.

 

[Hyrus]

One thing I'll say though is that I do not think there is much that developers can do in terms of improving this character at this point. You can change one or two things, but I think that the nature of heavy or read-y characters in any fighting game is that the momentum swings harder in favor of that player when they are playing better than the other player.

It isn't that the character is somehow impossible to fix. It's that he is over designed to fail.

As the heaviest character, he is intended to eat it. Never mind that he can be comboed massively at low percents to negate the bulk of that weight advantage. His size makes it so many aerials can be spaced more liberally against him and it's easy to sweetspot everything on him. His attacks have massive dead-zones or poor coverage to intercept enemies at odd angles. Once airborne, Bowser has nothing that comes out fast to break a combo. Even his NAir has such a long duration enemies can air-dodge and punish it. And once Bowser heads back to the ground, every single option has massive endlag because he doesn't have autocancel frames or downward angles to cover his corners. Everything's telegraphed, nothing is safe... because he is designed to be juggled. It's too many penalties to compensate for one marginal benefit about the character.

Bowser is a power hitter. But it's like every move of his is designed to have the lag of a smash attack, even if it isn't made to be a kill move. Play some Mario. Mario's USmash comes out fast, has low endlag, covers his entire body and then some and is intangible all the way through. Mario's USmash (in addition to being a reliable kill move) is faster than most of Bowser's attacks, it's gotta be faster than Bowser's FTilt and Ftilt isn't that great of a kill move! And Bowser's actual smashes are BAD. Bad coverage, bad angles, always super unsafe. Your damaging and spacing tools are balanced like smashes when they don't actually behave like them, and your smashes are even riskier.

The designer has a complete misconception about the worth of KO power versus the safety of a move and the ability to build percent. In fact, giving Bowser these super-punishable moves with ridiculous KO power makes it easier for the character to snipe in FFA's and just worse 1v1 in general, because he doesn't have the tools to space and create mixups with his opponent.

Bowser could be patched most easily, along with most heavy characters, by either giving them combo-breaking potential with a faster startup on an aerial or giving them safer options coming back to the ground. It's not ideal but it would be an easy fix. Drop in some great autocancel frames on Bowser's FAir and NAir, drop endlag from UAir, trim landing lag on DAir... boom, up the tier list we go. Now we can get back to Neutral like a normal character. A short hop can suddenly mean a lot more and opponents just couldn't jump in as easily. And standardize air-dodge data while you're at it! Again, designed to be juggled.

Did I mention bad recovery? All heavyweights also have some of the most readable recoveries in the game... because they are over designed to be vunlerable because the designer is a demented monkey child.

 

[TheBeggingBard ~~JoMo~~]

I have to agree with OP on also have to apperciate the work he's done with Bowser. Kudos to you.

Now on to Hyrus ... I believe that Bowser is more of a momentum based character who gets momentum through punishing and his grab. I can be destroying an opponent then after taking the stock to not be able to take the last one. Also having that momentum makes Bowser scary as hell due to his KO power from his UpSmash when grounded or UpAir after a potential airdodge or UpThrow. Also I find that Bowser's UpTilt and upwards angled FowardTilt tends to shut down most aerial approaches that involve lots of shorthops and then if you screw them up just go with the good ole' NeutralAir. Just some thoughts on mine about your comment.

 

[Hyrus]

Also having that momentum makes Bowser scary as hell due to his KO power from his UpSmash when grounded or UpAir after a potential airdodge or UpThrow. Also I find that Bowser's UpTilt and upwards angled FowardTilt tends to shut down most aerial approaches that involve lots of shorthops and then if you screw them up just go with the good ole' NeutralAir.

In my history of matches, USmash just doesn't see much action. It basically hits at the top of Bowser's body height... people just don't go there. UAir is good on hit, but it's limited to being out of an UThrow. I could count on one hand the number of times i've landed UAir in a neutral/juggle scenario.

If you were fighting Marth, who was approaching with aerials and neutralB's, neither UTilt or FTilt is going to beat what he's throwing at you. Cloud? Ike? Zero-Suit? These are all characters with long disjointed aerial approaches that are especially safe on a tall character like Bowser. And Bowser just doesn't have the reach or speed to counteract a lot of these approaches.