Yeah, I just don't see the productive value in comparing a small subset of moves between each character. It's interesting food-for-thought but when you're trying to see the merit of a character you look at ALL of their moves, not just their tilts. Ganondorf's utilt may be largely situational but usmash and uair pick up the slack as anti-airs.
In a vacuum, any move can be good or bad. Now, how they fit together with the character is what matters. It's why something like Peach's Fair when you think about it isn't really a good move. With Float, with her attributes, and with who and what Peach is, it's a really good move. Likewise, Sheik's Fair is considered a good move, but on someone else like say, Fox, it wouldn't be a great move. Fox would lose the ability to semi-spike for gimps and setups, he would lose about 3% to 4% with Sheik's Fair, and he might not be able to carry people off stage or even on stage - this is very debatable due to his high running speed - due to his below-average air speed and much higher fall speed.
This is why someone like Zelda suffers when not only are her moves bad, they also don't work together well with Zelda. The sad part is that Zelda has probably one of the better Dtilts - she was cr. LKing way before Ryu was ever in Smash -, Nairs - used to be much better than Falco's, but is kind of overshadowed by it now -, and probably the safest Dair spike because it only spikes and does not have a "normal" hit like Captain Falcon, Falco, or Ike. In contrast, someone like Samus might have "bad" moves, but her moves work together very well despite some dysfunctional things like Up Smash's hit angle shenanigans. That's good and definitely much better than having bad moves and bad synergy
There's another scenario where a character has good moves, but some of them overshadow the rest of their moves. Captain Falcon, pre-patch 1.0.6 Diddy, and Luigi come to mind where they have about 3 to 5 phenomenal moves and the rest are good to average. That can kill them, especially in the eyes of the audience who feel like all they're doing is spamming and that they're brain-dead. Captain Falcon's jab for instance is so good there's almost little it can't do while the rest of his normals end up being overshadowed or become very situational since jab overtakes them. In other cases, some moves are good, but because of silly things like the horizontal disjoint on Up Smash. The fact his Up Smash is just as slow, but takes much more time to recover and is, therefore, less safer than Ganondorf's is an issue I want addressed. A faster and if it has to be, a weaker, but much more easier to anti-air - through partial invincibility or sheer speed - Up Smash for Captain Falcon would do wonders to improve his Up Smash as a worthwhile option and as a more proper move instead of having a disjoint to cover up the fact it's slow, it doesn't have much range outside of vertical, and even then, because it's slow, anti-airing with it isn't exactly ideal. It's sad because you can look at frame data or just feel it out for yourself and start wondering why Diddy players didn't use Bair more, why Luigi players didn't use Up Smash to anti-air more or just abuse Down Smash's short recovery, or why Captain Falcon's Dtilt isn't being used when its hit angle is amazing.
The best scenario is someone like Fox, Falco, post-patch Diddy, Marth?, Ryu, and Mario who all have good moves, but none of them are borderline game-breaking or too good and overshadowing the rest of their moveset. Sure, their Specials might not all be good, but Specials themselves are, well, special; they're supposed to be situational or focused on few things while normals can overlap or work together much more easily. This is the ideal situation for all characters in all settings, 1v1, 2v2, 3v1, FFA, etc., where all moves work wherever and whenever without being stupid or bad wherever and whenever. It's also pleasing to both the audience and player as the audience gets to see tons of moves being used and the player has so many options you will have to guess what they will do next. This is why characters like Fox, Falco, and Ryu are so dangerous as they pretty much have an answer for everything from purposely tapping you to demoralize you to instantly killing you. I love it when Fox players use Blaster pointblank after an expected Fair or Bair D-throw followup.
Well as long as Fox doesn't hit Puberty II (or Puberty I as the case may be given his voice), then we don't have to worry about any sudden growth spurts changing his neutral game. I mean, I think it's clear that limb length is intentionally one of Falco's features meant to set him apart from Fox It's also significant that Foxes don't think they necessarily win the footsies game against Falco.
According to Star Fox: Assault, Fox is supposed to be the about height as (ret-conned) Little Mac at 5'8" or 1.73m while Falco is supposed to be 6'2" or 1.88m. If we follow Assault, Falco's supposed to be taller than Solid Snake by 4 inches or 6cm as Solid Snake based on his MGS1 height is only 5'10" or 1.82m. If you pull up
any video with Snake vs. Falco, Falco's standing on his tiptoes and barely as tall as Snake who's slouching. Again, if we follow Assault and assume Samus is based on her not-Other M height of 6'3" or 1.9m, Falco's supposed to be about as tall as her, but he's not; he's shorter than the Pits who are apparently supposed to be 5'3" or 1.60m and Palutena who is supposed to be the same height as Fox and Little Mac according to
this height chart assuming the numbers are centimeters. In other words, character height in Smash is BS except to show that yes, Luigi is taller than Mario or other simple things than actual lore. Also, Tuen's Smash 4 height chart:
smashboards.com/threads/character-height-a-rough-start.402759/.
If Falco was indeed as tall as Samus, he would be stupid when it comes to footsies and he's already stupid with footsies. Also, I'm pretty damn sure pheasants are smaller than foxes... Falco should be like Peppy's height at the most which incidentally, Peppy's also the same height as Fox. Fan-freaking-tastic...
I'm not saying Samus' dtilt is better than Falco's, but that Falco's doesn't outclass it because they work differently and are used for completely different purposes. Ike's dtilt is definitely closer, but still a different move. Due to the higher damage, if Samus' dtilt lag was reduced by say, 10 frames (from 31 to 21), it'd become unpunishable and would no doubt be one of the best if not the best dtilt in the game. Same thing if it killed but remained unsafe, and if it did both, it'd be approaching Brawl Snake's utilt levels of overpowered. Right now I think it still stands as a good dtilt, coming out on frame 6 with plenty of disjointed range and doing 12% with "only" medium cooldown. None of Samus' tilts are amazing but they're all good, and few characters have that (Falco is another one who does who I overlooked originally).
Neither am I. There's a reason why I went into detail on how Falco's Dtilt works. As said before, moves can be good and bad depending on how they're viewed. It's difficult to compare moves even when they're almost the same. Case in point: Mario vs. Dr. Mario's moves. You can argue who has the better moves, but how they use their moves could change everything. Unless a move is just strictly worse like Fire Bird is to Fire Fox or a character was intentionally designed to be a much weaker and pathetic version of a character, you can't even say Lucina strictly has much worse moves than Marth. Part of it is true, but part of it isn't. This is also a reason why I don't like it when people say things like Falco is a worse Fox, Roy is a better Marth, Shulk is an inconsistent Ike, or Greninja is a poor fellow's Sheik. It gets worse when it's dumb comparisons like Bowser is a worse Toon Link. Never heard of it here, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone believed that.
The reason why I suggested that Samus's Dtilt have lower recovery or kill much sooner is that you kind of expect a 12% explosion to kill - freaking thin pheasant tail feathers - and with how advanced Samus's gear is, you don't expect it be "pathetically weak" and have a lot of recoil which it doesn't, but it takes a while before Samus recovers compared to the Falco, Ike, and Shulk. The other reason is "Screw it, why not?" With all the complaints some Samus players are spouting, it's getting annoying, so let's give them a treat... Also, I don't remember what the formula is for the current shield stun and I'm feeling lazy, so I don't want to figure out its on-hit frame advantages at 0%, 50%, and 100%. Samus does have some under-tuned moves like Down Smash, but really good moves like Uair when it connects fully, Bair, or Screw Attack. My problem is that logic makes me question things a lot which is why I would advocate for Falco having a much weaker Dtilt because of logic and why I would advocate for Samus having a much stronger Dtilt because of logic. Ike's Dtilt being weak at least be justified because I don't think you can have much leverage swinging it like that and Shulk's being slightly slower makes sense since he has to "unsheathe" the Monado before swinging. At the same time, it's a freaking laser sword. It should be hacking off and cauterizing your legs.
