I just thought of something.
Few of the top/high characters in Smash 4 have notable movement options. They don't require learning of a lot of advanced movement tech or difficult tech otherwise to do well, they're easier and more straightforward to use than someone like Falcon or Roy. It's difficult to apply Meta Knight's punishes correctly and play him properly, but once people did, he became a staple high-tier. He was commonly considered to be a bad character for a long time beforehand, he didn't really have results until a lot of upsets happened and people realized how good he was.
Proper movement is difficult to learn and utilize in Smash 4. You have to learn things such as extended dash dancing, perfect pivoting, how to pivot grab correctly, tomahawking and sometimes platform tomahawking, and how to be mobile with your aerials and cross people up while generally being safe on shield. These are difficult concepts to apply in actual matches, but that's when they start to really become rewarding and strengthen a player's neutral a lot.
They're technically difficult to execute and require insane patience and a focused mind to begin to properly implement.
These concepts are absolutely necessary for someone like Captain Falcon or Fox, and one of the next steps of pushing Roy is learning these options and pushing his excellent ground and air mobility.
Falcon has a lot of mobility tools, with a lot of different learning processes and applications that take time to develop. He has some absolutely terrible matchups that become much better for him once he uses all of these tools in conjunction. It all contributes to a high learning curve, and only a few Falcons dominate tournaments despite him being a popular character. When we do see those Falcons, they're beasts. They show they have the tools to keep up with the best characters in the game, and constantly do amazing things. It's something from both the character and his players.
Because of this, I don't think we should be discouraged. We have a much less popular character, with a similar high learning curve, and our dedicated Roys are all climbing the curve and learning new things. The idea of an optimized Roy is scary, and we have yet to see one.
The thing about these tools, is that characters such as Falcon, Fox, and Roy benefit from them much more than anyone else, so you're losing out on a lot if you're not actively trying to learn and implement all of them. Roy is probably the only high-mobility character in this vein where utilizing these tools isn't really recognized as a staple.
Another Falcon thing, is that in Melee, he really started to rise from more players once his mobility options and tech chasing were explored. It's safe to say that we need to learn both to push Roy in Smash 4.
Roy's grab range sucks, BUT with pivot grabbing his mobility makes it have insane grab distance, so it really opens up his footsies and grab game.
His punish game is really underutilized, the amount of true combos and setups he has are massive, but they're all difficult to optimize.
He's one of the only characters who can tech chase, and he's probably the potent best at it.
All successful PM Roys have movement tools utilized to their fullest and really squeeze out the power of their combos/strings, which is why they win tournaments. That's just not applied to Smash 4 so far. Every semi-competent PM Roy can tech-chase, but how many Smash 4 Roys do you see doing it? How many Smash 4 Roys do you see doing a lot of things like the stuff in here:
Let me ask you guys this:
How many Roys do you see who can:
Neutral:
- Extended dash dance
- Perfect pivot for spacing
- Pivot grab
- Use solid Out of Shield (OoS) options
- Ledge trump setups and properly covering the ledge
- Perfect shield
Punish:
- Tech chase
- Consistently punish ledge options
- Push throw combos to 20-35 damage or more
- Regrab off most sourspot hits
- Kill confirm from nair 1 or sourspot up air
- Edgeguard properly
- Frametrap hard and consistently, like with landings
- Get tons of mileage off nair/uair/utilt into massive combos/strings
- Read for usmash/fsmash for the earliest onstage kills possible
- Blazer Out of Shield (OoS)
- Differentiate from forward and down throw properly, have mastery of both
There's more, but this should be a checklist for improvement if anything.
Ryo just doing a good handful of these things won Submerged Smash convincingly with primarily Roy (only Roy on a lot of rounds) and the sets are on YouTube.
We don't have an optimized Roy yet. But that's my goal. I still have a long way to go, but I'm properly realizing a lot of these concepts more and more as I play. My performance is rapidly improving, and I'm excited for two upcoming tournaments on the same weekend. I plan to eventually have all of these things down.
I hope some of you guys are okay with joining me on the ride :D
TLDR:
Honestly, the best thing to gain out of this is the above checklist, to give constant goals and a lot of potential improvement for Roy players.
