Young Link -VS- Link

[SirJesterful]

Hey folks, I've been playing melee for about 6 months now and have been fairly loyal to Young Link as my main. Partly inspired by Magicscrumpy's "600 hours" when I was playing around with different characters I absolutely fell in love with Young Link, and his play style.

I've been perusing different discussions and videos discussing the benefits of playing Young Link or Link over the other. I really don't mind which one I would play over the other, I love both of them, but I want to stick to either of them. The general reasons I came across for the main benefits of them is as follows,

Young Link: Speed, maneuverability, more simple.

Link: Kill power, deals (a lot??) more damage, can actually recover.


So with those and all outside information in mind, which is "better"

Thanks so much for helping me out here everyone.

 

[SazoonTheBoon]

I personally think that young link is better just because his bomb dair is easier to hit against floaties and can rack up damage more safely against floaties, but he still sucks vs non floaty high tiers

 

[Avoin]

Woops, missed the actual topic and confused it for the matchup.

Honestly, it's either or. YL deals with floaties well, but link does not have awful match ups with floaties either, believe it's starting to look like a 50-50 to arguably winning match up for link vs peach actually. And he seems to do good against marth, which is either 50-50 or slightly marth's favor.

More link mains are around to study, and to advance your game (SAUS, J666, Germ). very few YL mains exist and YL as a counterpick is a dying breed. so not too much to go off of.

But that shouldn't really effect who one would choose to main. it came down to enjoyment for me, and i chose link to main, though i do pull out the young link every now and then in certain match ups.

YL is fast and that helps a lot given he's heavily projectile based and needs to get in and out quick at times, but what YL has in speed, link has in power and kill potential, plus a better recovery in the hookshot.

Good choice in character though, link mains of either young or adult are few and far between. Very fun to play and it's always cool to have people marvel at your skill level with a considered *sub-par* character. you'll definitely have the crowd behind you a lot haha. Can't wait to start going to more tournys in my area.

 

[Plunder]

I'll point out 4 major things off the top of my head -

- Link is MUCH heavier, so he suffers less hitstun and can nair/uair out of pressure and combos much easier, YL is pretty damn easy to combo (same as Marth and almost the same as Sheik, so combos are easy to transfer no matter the MU ignorance)

- Link has more range, which is extremely important. He's slower and less mobile but he can actually space unlike YL. Everything YL tries aside from projectiles is unsafe pretty much.

- Some move differences - Link's Nair is S-tier since it's active longer than the animation, YL's F-tilt and D-smash are much better (the former is 5 frames faster), Link's Throws are much better, YL's Upsmash is more usable for it's coverage compared to his body size. YL's projectiles are all around better and deal more damage (this make no sense but hey it's a game). YL can do more from the ledge such as pull bombs, shoot arrows, better wave dash, etc

- YL's taunt is at least 3 times better than Link's