I haven't played a lot in roughly two months, just as a note. I look through the Skype chat occasionally and know enough to know what's happening in the overall meta lately.
If there's one thing that will hamper Olimar in the metagame and his overall development, it's going to be his character design.
As a character, Olimar seems to be designed around building up damage quickly with residual damage via PIkmin Throw and solid strings/combos at low to mid percents. In most cases, a good string with a few ticks from side b can result in roughly 30-40% dealt; optimally played, a good string on top of white side-B can result in a good 70-80% damage starting from low percents. Dsmash can do 20+% if both Pikmin hit; not a lot of single attacks can do that much damage aside from some fully charged specials and some smash attacks. Fsmash/Usmash from a red or purple can KO around 90-120%, and if that doesn't work, then the player can wait to build up enough damage for blue Uthrow to kill around 150% as a last resort. Purple side-b is a solid projectile; it works well with Fsmash in zoning out the opponent and acts as an essential tool in regaining ground when you're offstage. His grab range with whites is good, and having a pivot grab with little recovery compared to most tether grabs grants him a useful tool in combating approaches as well as a setup into his combos.
There are a lot of flaws with Olimar's character design:
- Lack of good frame data. Olimar's fastest move is his jab, at frame 4. A lot of popular competitive characters have sub-frame 3 jabs and/or frame 3 nairs.
- Pikmin ignoring the
typical rule of attacks interacting with each other. In short, this makes Olimar's smashes and aerials lose in trades with generally a lot of attacks, but at least this also helps in combating some characters' projectiles and might save Olimar from getting KO'd from some attacks (like Cloud and Toon Link's multi-hit Fsmashes). The few attacks that Olimar does by himself have his hurbox close to it that any disjointed hitbox will win against him, aside from maybe Ftilt and Dtilt.
- Lack of mobility. Olimar has both below average ground mobility and below average air mobility, so it can be a chore for the Olimar player if he (feels like he) is forced to chase down the opponent.
- The majority of Olimar's great moves are ground-based, so the opponent can avoid most of them by staying in the air for a lot of the time.
- Pikmin mechanics. Pikmin can fall out of your line when you're in the air, and whistle may not call them back. Because of the fact that the hitbox is not active until frame 10, there's a blind spot in Olimar's standing/dash grab due to the Pikmin moving a bit forward. Pikmin used in Fsmash still go through the "getting up" animation on top of going back to your line, either by foot or by whistle, so there is a bit of commitment in Fsmash that may prevent it from using it too much. This flaw is special compared to the others in that some parts of this problem might be because of how the Pikmin was programmed, where no other character in the game has this sort of problem. Side-b can activate Bayonetta's Witch Time, but this is less of an actual problem since I don't think Olimar shouldn't approach her anyway.
- Recovery on Usmash and all grabs but pivot mean that you are committed to using them. This is important for the grabs because they're a central part for the strings that Olimar can do.
These flaws make up the main problems that the Olimar player can face in a match:
- Once the opponent breaks through the zoning, Olimar has very little options in what he can do, forcing a "can you outsmart your opponent" situation. A lot of popular close-range characters have the mobility and frame data to quickly get to Olimar with ease. Characters with long-lasting nairs (Mario, Yoshi, Fox, etc.) or nairs with large hitboxes (a lot of sword people) can stuff through Fsmash/purples and just put Olimar into a combo. Characters with great initial dashes (Luigi, Falcon) can just powershield through Fsmash and just grab Olimar.
- If the opponent has the percent/stock lead on Olimar and very solid mobility, then it's very hard for Olimar to land a hit due to his own mobility, forcing the player to wait for a mistake made by the opponent. If the stage has platforms, then
it can become very aggravating due to circle camping. A lot of characters could theoretically do this, though Shulk and Yoshi stand out due to their great air mobility. Cloud just forces this problem in the matchup due to Limit.
- A sense of unreliability, due to the Pikmin mechanics. Note that, again, no other character in the game suffers from this.
- Once you get your opponent to high percents, how can you end the stock? Olimar has a fair amount of attacks that can KO the opponent, but he doesn't have a generally reliable way of finishing off. Some popular competitve characters have attacks that lead into KOs, and the ones that don't have some other way to make that up, like the ability to go aggressive off-stage.
Although Olimar can do a lot of damage with a lot of effort from the player, it also takes a lot of effort to mitigate the problems that Olimar has. The player may not be able to do anything about how Pikmin behave due to how they're programmed in the game. This means that the amount of effort can really build up to the point that the reward of excellent damage output and not much else doesn't seem worth it for a competitive player. Because of this, less people will play the character, which leads to 1) less matchup experience for the overall player base and 2) less overall development for the character.
(1) can help the Olimar players in the first few years of the game, assuming it lasts long enough, but as time goes on, the players will have to keep developing the character for all he's worth because the surprise factor goes away, which is why (2) is a bad result of the amount of people playing Olimar due to the sense of lack of competitive reward for the character.
The only way I can see Olimar keeping somewhat competitive is desync smashes, but I can't see that being a game-changer for his overall development. The first problem of desyncs as a unique tech for Olimar is that it doesn't seem to be consistent or reliable. From the looks of things, you have to start up a smash and get the opponent to hit the Pikmin in the few frames before Olimar can charge up his smash (where he glows yellow). That should put it on the same difficulty of catching an opponent in the 2-frame ledge vulnerability, but my main question is how often can a Olimar player get situations where he can use a desync smash. A lot of situations I've seen and experienced where this happened just lead me to believe that it just coincidentally happened that the opponent hit the Pikmin right when the player started up the smash attack, and not the player making it intentionally happen. And even if it gets to the point where desync smashes are reliable, it just puts an extra amount of effort on the Olimar player to do and still doesn't solve the other flaws in his character design that make him hard to thrive in the current competitive environment.
On top of this, the behavior of desync smashes hasn't been fully understood yet by not a lot of Olimar players (I think), which leads me to my next point that there isn't any sort of place on the Internet that has a lot of Olimar info recorded. This sub-forum is literally dead as far as I can see, and the Skype group and
r/OlimarMains isn't that much better. The player base isn't very large because Olimar isn't very popular in the first place, and the players within that base may not be using the same means of communication (Smashboards, Twitter, Reddit, Skype, etc.) Whatever tech that Olimar has isn't really discussed too much mainly because only a few people know it, it's not very useful in a actual match, or because of what I said above.
.
