Young Link Secondary

[Wazurau]

My Main is Falco but I've recently taken a great liking to Young Link due to my deep childhood connection to The Legend Of Zelda games. I've watched tech videos, looked at match ups, watched axe play YL over and over but, I wanna hear some stuff from you guys. If any of you are YL mains or use him as a sub and are pretty good with him, what should I be practicing? What strats should I be using? Whether in the neutral game or in specific matchups.

 

[G. Stache]

Hi friend! Kind of new here but I'll do my best to answer that question. For one thing, use YL mostly for floatier characters. He has good matchups against jiggly, peach, and luigi if you ask me. So if your Falco is suffering from those kinds of people, then YL is the guy for you. His projectiles are surprisingly better than regular Link, his aerials are good enough to warrant using on a regular basis (though for Uair and Dair, have your L-cancelling ready. Also, I honestly don't like YL's forward air, though I do use it at times, so let's just call it situational), and his down throw is really the only throw you should be using, unless your using up throw onto fast fallers. Speaking of being better than regular link, YL also has a lot more mobility than his older counterpart and has a better juggling/combo game. Now that his pros are out of the way, let's cover what YL suffers from. Right, well...time to stop beating around the bush. He can't KO for the life of him besides 3-4 finishing his moves (Dair being the best). Why he has such a good MU against lighter, floatier characters is because his bomb into dair is his best (and most infamous) combo and easily hits the likes of Peach and Jiggles (and I'm only theorizing, but it should work on Luigi and possibly marth as well) with a well-placed bomb throw. Other then Dair; Nair, Uair, side smash, and dash attack can work to kill people with relative ease (key word, relative) but are all kind of a hassle to hit besides Uair. Another thing you should work on utilizing with YL: grapple and wall jump. YL's recovery is absolute trash without it and without those two tricks, your basically saying 'please edgeguard my arse!' bomb jumping is also an option, though I don't recommend it. Other then that, just work on getting a feel for YL. He's a great character imo and very underrated. If you have any other questions, don't be afraid to ask (though I'm relatively new to Melee, so I don't know everything about YL just yet). Hope this Helped

 

[MagicScrumpy]

Young Link really isn't very good in most relevant matchups. If you want to win against most of the characters in the S and A tiers, you really have to outplay and outsmart your opponent bcause Young Link isn't a very good character.

I'm not sure how Young Link would be as a secondary to a Falco main because Falco can manage all of the stuff that YL can and do it better. The only common matchups in which you might want to consider YL over Falco are versus Jigglypuff, Peach, maybe Ice Climbers, maybe Samus, and maybe Luigi. Even then, Young Lnk struggles in these matchups. For example, I would personally pick Falco over YL against Jigglypuff and Samus because they are both very good at threatening your space. You and Samus both excel in the mid range, but Samus has better tools in the mid range than you do, so playing against her can be troublesome. Jigglypuff is very good at threatening your space so that you can be punished for throwing projectiles.

Young Link is horrible at killing, so he's really only good against light or floaty characters. Against characters like Fox and Falco, you have to rely on gimping (which Young Link is pretty good at) because Fox and Falco outclass YL so hard that there's not really that much else you can do. Just use Falco for those matchups. Since you main Falco, there's no reason to go YL against non-floaties.

Young Link has a few killing options against floaties, the most popular of which is bomb --> dair. Practice that. Learn to time the dair so that it hits right after the bomb does so they can't SDI the explosion and escape but early enough so that the dair doesn't get negated by one of the bomb explosion's hitboxes. Usually the timing on this is very lenient. All you really need to do for it to be useful is to learn to time it so they aren't able to escape the setup.

Young Link sucks, so you need to learn to play tricky. Practice lots of tech skill, but only practice useful tech skill. Don't learn crazy, situational tech like ledge-cancelled z-air (which Axe uses a lot) until your movement is so good that you never mess it up. You don't have much room for error with Young Link since he gets punished very hard. When you have good movement, learn to move around in tricky ways. You don't want to spam tech skill; you want to make sure the opponent has trouble tracking you and knowing where you'll be. Young Link is fast, so this works very well. Just make sure you don't techskill yourself into a bad position.

Learn tricky projectile stuff. I love to throw bombs straight up because it threatens some space. I love to drop bombs on platforms so I can quickly grab them and use them. I love to ricochet projectiles off of the ground because the angle at which the boomerang bounces up covers a ton of space and often tricks the opponent. Make sure to mix things up and condition your opponent so they keep falling into your tricks.

Learn recovery mixups. YL is easy to edgeguard, so you really have to outsmart your opponent to get back onto stage. Aside from an okay up B, you also have a decent hookshot and a walljump. A favorite of mine is to hookshot the stage without using my double jump, wall jump off the stage, and double jump back on while protecting myself with b-air.

Watch other YL players. Axe is very good and pretty popular, but he doesn't really camp like other YL players do. Watch the likes of Armada, Laijin, and Rhan.

I feel like I forgot some stuff, but here's what I came up with off the top of my head.