78 entrants for Wii U on Saturday, more coming due to sign-ups eventually being fixed. I'm pumped!!!!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LQxBPlcwIpdro1M2yDCMuy79mLlSOeMhUHdtU4sOKbg/edit#gid=0
I'll see how I fare with just Roy and how I can improve afterwards. My next four days are going to be a lot of pure grind.
Yo, thanks for the shoutout
My Roy has leveled up quite a bit recently and I've learned quite a few tricks from this forum so thanks to you guys. My state has an Arcadian on Saturday and I'm really hoping to show everyone what Roy can do.
As far as Roy buffs go, my list has two things:
1) Down-air sweetspot. My god the sweetspot for this move is so small, it's laughable. It could almost be the entire blade if you ask me, the move is so slow (hits on frame 16). In my opinion, this is Roy's worst move, the only move comparable to this would be down smash. I've only ever seen Sethlon use dair, and he somehow makes it look good. I think he got 3rd at the last Shockwave, check these out. The commentators say, "Sethlon doesn't play Smash, he plays Roy" lmao.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFXOgPi6_N5To-wNxD-rhP1AGkuoUYYkj
2) Marth and Lucina's jab hits on frame 3, just imagine how AMAZING this would be for Roy. His neutral is decent imo, but this would totally take care of that and give Roy a true "get off me move."
Yeah, I'll go for something cool to spike and then just pop them back onto the stage with the sourspot a lot of the time lolol. It gave the funniest stage spike once, I hope I upload it before the next patch since it's in a sea of replays. I would agree it's likely his worst move, and I agree with some of Sethlon's uses of it but not most of his. It feels like there isn't really incentive to use dair or dsmash, besides trying to directly force usage out of them.
The recent shockwave is on my to watch list, I'm pretty glad Sethlon beat Denti, iggy, and some other Bayonetta and it took Mew2 to knock him into loser's and Awestin to knock him out of tournament iirc. That's pretty impressive, and I recall him being back-and-forth with Awestin beforehand and having at least one win against Mew2 in the past.
His gameplay's looking a lot cleaner as time passes, for sure. But I'm not gonna let him leave me in the dust >
Sending some kind of email is the wrong thing to do and puts you in a bad mentality
Pining for buffs won't help. Learn matchups and outplay your opponent with the tools you have lol
Yeah, I feel like people have this needed perfect vision of their character, and they get so caught up in it that they can't work with the tools they have. I gave into that mindset and faltered. But I'm out of it for now and going to train hard to see what I can do in the next four days.
Yeaaaaaah at this point, it's up to the balance team to decide whether Roy is worthy of buffs or not. While I do believe that constant complaints have gotten certain characters buffs and nerfs (Ex: Mewtwo, MK, Ike, Sheik etc.), it may not have as big as an effect as we may believe. It's a tad depressing to speak about Roy buffs because it's entirely possible that this may either be the last patch, or that Roy will be untouched in the patches to come. When talking about Roy's buffs, the whole discussion becomes completely hypothetical. Theorizing is always nice, but too much theorizing get depressing after a while. Think of the whole "the grass is always greener on the other side" mentality. That's what I think of Roy buffs and tier lists atm. "Oh, look at Mewtwo! I bet you that if Roy had buffs that big, he'd win a national too!" Stuff like that is just discouraging. The best thing to do right now is to use Roy to the best of your ability and mitigate some of the glaring flaws he may have. We can't control how and when Roy will be buffed, but we can control how well he could perform in tournament play.
Anyway, I want to move onto a entire topic completely. I want to talk about a topic I have barely seen in this thread: Roy's personality.
Barring FE6's lack of amazing writing and character depth (mostly due to the older, awkward translations), what type of personality do you think Roy may have? His personality type may not vary for some people as much as I think it does, but I'll give you my thoughts anyway:
While I do feel that Roy isn't incredibly written as a character (again, blame video game writing and poor translation), I do feel like some things are implied, such as his insecurity.
For example, in one of the supports with Lance, he says the following line:
"I’m not particularly smart, and I don’t have much charisma, either. So I have to gain trust by experiencing the pain that everyone else is…"
Such line implies that he is insecure deep down inside. Not very surprised at this. After all, he's just a fifteen year-old boy. Imagine if you had to lead an army at the age of fifteen. Must be pretty heavy handed stuff there.
How does this line imply that he is insecure exactly? Can't find any other quotes atm (haven't played FE6; I've only seen playthroughs), but Roy is capable of being a good tactician. How else would he be able to stop Zephiel if he wasn't a good tactician? Lol. He is also perceptive to the point where he finds out the bard character's identity; the bard guy doesn't even have to say. Roy just comes up with his own conclusion. Has to take some amount of intelligence to figure out someone's identity or to stop the big bad from taking over the world, right?
Now this is where things start to get reaaally subjective. I at least added a line from the game to back up my last argument, but this part is pretty much my opinion at this point: Roy feels kind of stern to me for some reason. I feel like Roy has a stern personality because of the way he is usually depicted in artwork. I almost always see him with a serious look on his face. Whenever I see Roy smile, he doesn't look incredibly happy, he just looks pleased. I especially think this of Roy because of Eliwood. Eliwood appears to be less stern to me because he is usually smiling and when he isn't smiling, he looks a bit uncomfortable. His eyes are still wide open; the eyes look emotional, but the eyebrows' position and his mouth do not. It's almost as if Eliwood doesn't want to be angry.
Because of the way he's depicted as Smash, I feel like Roy is the type of person to transition from a calm and composed character to a hotblooded and easily excitable one when in war. Before fighting, Roy to me still behaves kind of similarly to how he behaves in FE6; if you look at Roy's Melee and SSB4 render (the SSB4 render practically being a "remake" of the original), he looks relaxed. He's not doing a crazy or dynamic pose. He's just standing with his sword tucked in his sheath. Whenever his victory screen arrives, he goes back to his calm state. He doesn't yell or swing his sword around as violently as he would do in battle.
Lol look at me. I'm such a geek. What am I typing this long character analysis for? XD
Yeah, I got pretty discouraged by Mewtwo. I thought I'd be really happy hearing about Mewtwo winning a major, but I just felt really irritated. Abandango winning a national with Mewtwo when he thinks Roy is bottom 5 and pretty much a useless character made me really, really salty for no good reason and agree with all the negativity that's been piling up. But I'm over it now. Whether we see treatment or not for Roy, he still has things going for him such as being the most mobile swordsman, and a swordsman packing that much power for that frame data, which is pretty cool and unique. I don't know whether Roy has anything going for using him over other swordsmen besides liking his design and character or not, but I'll let others worry about that if they want to. I just want to play Roy, give to the community, motivate other people to play Roy and improve as players, and have a good time.
When I hit certain lows, I act in a contrary manner to my goals, which is why I need to work every day to find a healthy balance between my extreme highs and lows.
I feel that Roy's inexperience and insecurity give him a lot of room to develop, and he becomes a very capable leader through the last stretch of the game, giving him great character development that most lords don't measure up to. I'm not saying that other lords can't be as entertaining to any given player, but they often aren't given as much room to develop in a similar way. Many don't grow as much as Roy does throughout his story. Take for example Eirika and Ephraim, they don't really grow as characters or learn anything important to improve themselves through the entirety of FE8. Eirika doesn't really grow into a stronger person, Ephraim doesn't learn anything from his recklessness and brash nature.
It's basically Mary and Gary dream team up to find the pocket-sized dragonballs to restore the world's balance and beat up their effeminate best friend who became a bara demon by using holy toothpicks in comparison to his stature that still trivialize him as a villain.
FE8 has many contrived plot devices and odd pacing, with a lot of primary focus on lore, side kingdoms, and their characters, which hurts potential MC development even more.
Roy's banter with Zephiel and Idenn is pretty entertaining, and I really do enjoy some of his supports. He's pretty humble and down-to-earth, enough to set him apart from other Fire Emblem main characters.
Roy's character is much better in the newest FE6 translation, and the writing is much better. Characters of nobility speak in a more eloquent (and at times, entertainingly snotty like in Clarine's case) manner, mercenaries and bandits speak in more rough tones, and the characters who fall between a medium of the two have an interesting balance. The exposition of Elibe's geography and how the different groups or characters progress between chapters is a lot more rich, and just.... so much is nicer. The menus look a lot nicer, and the writing is a lot nicer than before. I have yet to finish this new translation, but I've been nothing but impressed so far after so many playthroughs on the old translation. Everyone feels much more in-character.
As for writing: Do I feel Roy is a well-written character? Definitely, he has objective factors within writing that make him a good character, but just good. He's not a great or amazingly-written character in literature overall, but no lords in Fire Emblem are. They just aren't life changing characters who spout an amazing line every time they speak, they're just good/okay-ish at best.
As much as people praise Hector's character, and while I love him (enough to value him as one of my top 5-10 personal lords, but not hop on the train where people invalidate other lords because of him), he's pretty much just a cliche brute who doesn't say anything truly provocative, and he has some neat development as a character, but it's little and unappetizing. How quick Hector is to kill when he's first introduced was a bit off-putting and made me uncomfortable, similar to the bloodlust of Camilla, Reina, and Hans in Fates. It feels weird when people try to justify that kind of bloodlust.
Western players care more about violent or constantly energetic main characters than how well-written a character is, which I guess I kinda understand but can't bring myself to respect.
I'm used to lords being either downplayed or overhyped, and if people want more interesting main characters or don't like a lot of the ones in Fire Emblem, there's honestly other strategy RPG series out there such as Shining Force and Super Robot Wars to look into. As it stands, I really like Roy's character and design a lot more than anyone's in Smash, and Smash isn't exactly host to the most amazingly-written or designed characters in the universe, so I will proudly play Roy until I die.
As a side note, I really love how Smash 4 Roy seems more loyal to FE6's canon than Melee. It's cool that both have their own depiction of what a Master Lord is, since his armor doesn't change on promotion.
In Melee, he has noodle arms, some weird brownish-red spiky hair, some weird metal headband, and he's short and skinny.
In Smash 4, he's more well-built (take a look at how built Roy is in his FE6 sprites), he has bright red messy hair, he has a cloth headband, and his expressions are more defined. He also has more FE6 palettes than just ones for Allen and Lance, he's got 6 other freaking characters. I never thought I'd see the day he'd get official Marcus, Eliwood, Cecilia, and Zephiel palettes on top of his gold and Allen+Lance ones, they all look really nice.
even if red and gold don't look nearly as good as before......
So I was looking at Sethlons Match vs Bayonetta and I think that MU may be alot less jarring as Sheik as Roy can shut down one of Bayonettas options and force the pace of the match to a degree in his favor, timing required. Roy should win if Bayonetta tries to Heel Slide as Roy can just Blazer super armor though it. The air version might be harder to read.
On your note Lady Kuki, Roy yelling is an important part of Roy for me. His Melee yelling is better than his Smash 4 ones, but over all his VA did such a great job in Smash 4 that I consider it better. I mean look up Ike's english VA, he clearly forgot his Ike voice and Roy's VA comes back almost 15 years later and does it perfectly.
Rage Roy vs. Bayo is so funny. Kills her at 80 or less with up smash LOL. Roy has a lot to establish control on the ground, and if he stays there and forces Bayonetta to play his game, it puts a lot of work into the matchup. I'm more comfy with the matchup as time passes and don't really mind it. I'm just annoyed by the power creep of Witch Time and how it affects the matchup, but everyone is annoyed by it anyways. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Our counter helps against her, too, we can counter her recovery hitboxes and bullet arts. Swords beat guns pretty handily.
