The first time I played falco, I was unimpressed. Then I went back and learned the game and I played Falco again. Both my friend and I, in almost the same breath, said the equivalents of "****, Falco's a good character" after I was done, and since Falco has been my main. I knew he was good from that second time picking him up (I like the spacies for flavor reasons), but the first time I realized he deserved his spot in top tier was when I saw my first Sethlon video. Watch Sethlon and SK92, and you'll see why Falco is ranked #3 on the tier list. I'll also write out a brief synopsis here:
1) He's pretty fast. Not the fastest, certainly, but pretty fast none the lesss.
2) He has really, really good jumps and really good distance control between short hops and full hops.
3) His air game is amazing, with two kill moves, a spike, and two combo moves. All of his arials have at least decent priority, range, and damage.
4) His lasers are quite possibly the second best projectile in the game (Pit's Lasers are the only projectiles that come to mind as being better)
5) While his smashes are somewhat underpowered, they're strong enough to get kills
6) For most characters, getting grabbed once below 40% means that they're going to have 60% on them before they get to control their character again.
7) His grab game is awesome as his downthrow has so many different tech chases that are pretty easy to manage and his up throw and back throw can put opponents in horrble positions.
8) His horizontal recovery is amazing.
9) boost smashing, boost pivot grabbing, DACUS all work on Falco, and all work really well. In fact he's one of two characters that can hit with a dash attack and then cancel it into an upsmash iirc.
10) He has a reflector.
11) Two recovery moves (even if they both have their problems, having two is a plus)
12) Most moves have very little start up lag or very little ending lag, or both
13) Most moves have pretty good range (that jab... just... that jab...)
14) Moderate weight means he won't die instantly.
15) Two (count 'em, 2) spikes.
16) Several different kill moves
Overall, Falco has an amazing tech chase game, an amazing punish game, an amazing ability to control stages (probably only rivaled by Snake), and is one of the few characters that has both an effective camping game and an effective aggressive game. This last part gives him adaptability and unpredictability.
Edit: good falco playing? Doesn't get much better than
this right here.
