What's the first thing I should learn to be good at Melee?

[Phantom High]

I'm pretty comfortable with Dash Dancing and working on short hopping on demand.

 

[EPsilon933]

For everyone that isn't Peach, l canceling

 

[DaSasQuach]

Spacing, it's important in every fighting game. If you have bad spacing, you'll never land combos or you'll get punished for bad spacing. Any fighting game can be good practice for spacing, especially Street Fighter. If you want to learn an important tech skill though, go learn L-Canceling, it reduces landing lag time in half and that's extremely crucial to landing effective hits, otherwise you might be punished for attacking without L-Canceling or you'll have no good followups because of the landing lag.

Other common techniques you might be considering are wavedashing and JC grabs. Wavedashing is a good movement option to have, but it's not the most important tool for this game. Jump cancel grabs are good for certain followups or are useful for quickly punish someone for a laggy attack (grabs are VERY good in this game), this technique is easy to learn it just requires a bit of timing.

So first, I'd learn L-Canceling and you don't have to start with short hop aerial attacks when learning L-Canceling, just learn to do it first. Then I'd learn to combine short hopping->aerial attack->L-Cancel, since this is one of the main tools you'll be using. Dash dancing is a good tool, just make sure you can use it effectively and have long dash dances if you can.

 

[20YY SS | Saiblade]

Spacing, Wavedashing, L-Canceling.

 

[Elyssa Xey Hexen]

From my experience the good people at melee are those that are able not able to mess up their punishes and generally have a low failure on their execution.

However, to get either of those two things requires looking at many aspects of the game. My first thought is simply being able to get the tech skill barrier out of the way. That goes hand in hand with not dropping as many punishes and improving your execution success. Once you are able to get a good grasp on the technical side of things you can focus on nitpicking your game-play to make better decisions and strategy in game.

 

[20YY SS | Saiblade]

From my experience the good people at melee are those that are able not able to mess up their punishes and generally have a low failure on their execution.

However, to get either of those two things requires looking at many aspects of the game. My first thought is simply being able to get the tech skill barrier out of the way. That goes hand in hand with not dropping as many punishes and improving your execution success. Once you are able to get a good grasp on the technical side of things you can focus on nitpicking your game-play to make better decisions and strategy in game.

Precisely.