mobility specs are pretty good.
His short hop air dodge is incredibly low to the ground + he can still act out before landing.
His full hop retreating aerials auto cancel / end before landing and are a lot harder to punish.
His grab game (i.e. down throw) is pretty solid, at worse you get up-b, at best you get 9s, up air at kill percent or buckets. In other words, stupid.
Dash to shield and his fox trot lengths are pretty solid. He also has an [near?] instant crouch animation.
Majority of his moves are disjointed, however many have sizable hurtbox extensions.
Nigh ungimpable recovery, will kill most characters for trying and can use those abilities to intercept recoveries for stocks in the opposing situation too.
Dash attack, dash grab, jab and now down tilt are all pretty solid ground moves, more than most characters have to play with (in fact it's virtually the same as Meta Knight, G&W just doesn't get the same consistent rewards as he does).
If he was more than featherweight he (common theme) would be kinda top/high tier. He can't really force kills yet he has a small list of very potent kill set ups. Him going for them would usually be a 50:50 for a lot of characters in getting punished but are worth still going for a lot of the time, in G&W's case him trading or losing the 50:50 tends to be too caustic to his success as he can't afford to make many, his disadvantage and difficulty of being combo'd isn't inherently amazing, his aerials are bad anti-juggles, and his up-b only helps on platformed stages or against those being over zealous in their follow up attempts.
If you have balls of fury and can take the heat in the proverbial kitchen of characters having kill throws outright or as confirms or fast long range moves that can kill him at sub 100% you can win [at] large regionals maybe even nationals with him.
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although I've seemingly been anti-Ike hype (I was just being devil's advocate / FAIR / it's an ironic homage to the Meta Knight 20XV story), I definitely feel he's very strong overall and demands a lot of respect. One could consider him a mix between Marth fundamentals succeeding and a faster and disjointed Ganondorf. I think the results for him are going to start coming in.... that fair hitbox buff makes his combo/trap game almost trivial... jab is so much stronger now too.... if For Glory is anything to go by, he's a
winbutton demon.
I think he isn't looking to have fantastic top tier match ups across the board (imo he could be dangerous for Mario, Luigi, Ness and maybe Sonic/Rosa/Pika), but I really don't know what's left for them to buff on Ike if anything other than his specials or end lag on smash attacks (which would be silly). Up Tilt now covers everything around him and reminds me of DA POWER of Snake [hitbox lasts for 3 more frames of his animation!!!]. And between that and his buffed forward and down tilt I wonder if there's any other character in the game with an argument for a better set of tilts... Falco maybe? Pikachu? DK? like... they're really fricken good.
Either way, Brawl Ike-level WiFi domination guaranteed.