Smash Ultimate may not require you to wave-dash, but if you've ever watched the pros and try to do what they do, you know it's not an easy game. And the game can be a whole lot harder depending on the character you pick. It's why we have a difficulty rating on our website. Oh, did you know about our website ProGuides.com? If you didn't know about it, you're either new to the channel or we need to talk to you about your listening and comprehension skills. ProGuides.com is a platform built to help you improve its smash and a ton of other competitive games. You can get one-on-one coaching with our InstaPro platform and find lessons from professionals for Smash, League, Fortnite, CSGO, and more at ProGuides.com. In any fighting game, the character you pick shapes the entire game. Different characters will require you to learn different skills. Some characters are so unique that they shape your fundamentals entirely. Some characters require you to master several skills to do well. These are the most difficult characters in the game and the ones we'll be talking about. Oh! Joy, you can... Please, please! Oh, no! For example, Ganondorf is super easy at low to mid-level play, but he's pretty hard at high-level play. You got the tech! He's still bad! He's still bad! He's still bad! So we're thinking about character difficulty in terms of mastery. How hard is this character to play pretty darn well, or at least up to tournament level? We'll consider how hard they are to pick up and press buttons with as well, just not as much as we'll consider mastery. Let's start with a spicy pick right off the bat with Rosalina and Luma. This galactic goddess has a lot more tech than you might think. When she's on screen, she seems pretty simple. Push Luma around to block some hits and cover parts of the stage and get enough raw hits until you can kill with up smash. In reality, Luma has a lot of late hit combos with neutral air that are both hard to execute and committed. And it's not hard to hit or kill Rosal either because she's tall and light. So if you want to play the galactic goddess well, you have to learn how to move so that Luma can back up your hits and protect you from danger. In every interaction, you don't just need to know where you and your opponent are, you need to know where Luma is too. You also need to know when you can save Luma and when you can. And just like the ice climbers, Rosal has tight windows where she can desync from Luma 2. Rosal does benefit from some pretty big, easy-to-hit moves, but a lot of these moves have underwhelming damage and knockback if you don't get Luma in on the mix. When Luma's gone, you then have to focus on surviving with an easy-to-hit, easy-to-kill character with laggy moves. This is why we don't see many Rosas and the ones we do see are PGR Calibur players with years of experience. Let's calm down a little with the character everyone will see coming. Shulk. Shulk is the go-to character when you're talking tough to Master. At a lower level, he's actually not that tough because his huge hitboxes can wall people out. But if you want to be high level with this guy, you got to master the Monato Arts. The Monato Arts are crazy tough too because they totally change Shulk's base stats and change what combos work and don't. They also change his play patterns, risks and rewards. Buster, for instance, makes Shulk do and takes so much damage that Shulk has to be careful enough to not get comboed but aggressive enough to get hits. Shulk comes with tons of unique timings and reactions, like turning Shulk on as a combo breaker, jump for recovery or speed for combos. Some aspects of Shulk's game can be linear and easier to understand. Built damage with speed and Buster, let's trap and kill early with Smash, stay alive of Shulk and jump, but it takes a lot of practice to actually execute those game plans well. Oh my, he called out the world so hard and that is a clean. Speaking of characters with a lot of unique mechanics, let's talk about Pac-Man. This whirling yellow ball of death doesn't just play differently than everyone else. He makes his opponents play differently too. But to get good at Pac-Man, you have to pick up a bunch of skills and patterns that aren't useful to many other characters. Pac-Man's crazy uniqueness makes him pretty tough to pick up from the jump. When you have to add in the fact that, to be good at him, you need to learn bonus fruit. Learning bonus fruit means learning the trajectories, knockback, and uses of 8 different items. Each fruit plays a lot differently and can be stored for later too, meaning you need to think ahead. Then there's the hydrant which has HP and specific launch angles that Pac-Man made need to learn so they don't get decked by their own hydrant. On top of all that, Pac-Man's combos themselves can be a touch tricky and very a lot by situation, especially if they involve bonus fruit. Now here's the rush down version of the character with complex item combos, Peach. These two have some of the most airtight, unforgiving combos in the game. You can do all right just landing raw hits, but you're not gonna unlock that bonkers damage unless you spend some serious time labbing out turn-up re-grab combos. Then there's Float, which is its own weird mechanic that takes some practice to learn and doesn't apply to any other character. It's pretty crucial too considering it lets Peach use aerials at ground level without having to jump. She's one of the toughest characters in terms of raw button presses and timings. To add to all that, Peach has always had a super weird mid-range design and smash. She's solidly rushed down an ultimate but she can kinda camp with turn-ups. So you have to know how to approach but also how to pull and throw turn-ups safely. It can be pretty confusing to play not quite in your opponent's face but not far away from them either. If you mess up your distances, then you can die very early and throw away the game for it. If there's a duo that has even more difficulty in raw execution, it's the Shodows, Ken and Ryu. This is a bit of a two-first since they are different characters but we'll lump them together since they have a lot of the same reasons for being difficult. Mainly, very precise command inputs. Ken and Ryu have a bunch of different command inputs that change their specials and doing them is kinda necessary to unlock their full potential. The same goes for Terry but Terry's inputs are a ton more forgiving. If you're too twitchy, it's pretty easy to mis-imput special moves when you're trying for a regular aerial. All these inputs are pretty unique for Smash 2 so if you're a pure Smash player, it could be tough to get used to. It's not just the inputs either, Ken and Ryu play a more grounded style and don't spam safe aerials or have big disjoints. You gotta get in there and brawl and take advantage of all the openings you get with your quick moves. To get those openings, it's not just executing combos but knowing a ton of combo windows too. Their auto turnaround mechanic also introduces a lot of new elements to their ledge and aerial game. They have to roar to access their backhears in most cases and they don't have a lot of drift in the air. To mitigate that, you have to learn to focus attack which is a 3 stage counter. Yeesh, that's a lot of shodown since you gotta learn to get good. And the last character on the list is Yoshi. This guy's so tough to play that we don't even need to get into it. See you all next time. Okay. The actual last character on our most difficult to play list are the Ice Climbers. The Ice Climbers don't have that tough of a neutral game since they've got some great raw tools like their side special. You can be okay with the Ice Climbers without needing to do anything too complex but if you want the mastery that makes you big D levels of good, you gotta learn the D sinks. And D sinks are pretty tough. First, you can only D sink after certain motions and options or if the Ice Climbers are separated so you need to understand all the times and ways you can start a D sink. Oh, and Ice Climber mains are still discovering D sink methods so uh... hope you like learning. Second, these D sinks are tough to execute. You have to execute a lot of inputs pretty quickly after each other to get complex D sink combos. Ultimate's buffer system will make some of these D sinks easier but not by any means easy. Oh no, I like this mask. He's gonna do it. Third, you gotta visually understand when the Ice Climbers are D sink. This can be tough because the difference between a successful and unsuccessful D sink is literally a frame in some cases. For example, if you input an aerial 3 frames before the main climber lands, you can put in a D sink option for the secondary climber. But if you input the aerial 4 frames before the main climber lands, then... NOT D SICK FOR YOU! Also, this only applies if you don't hit an opponent or their shield. If you did hit them, you get a wider window to D sink because the D sink rules change because of course they do. But hey, it's just the D sinks you gotta learn, right? Wrong. No. This character is... Ice. Hell. You've also gotta learn how the AI works. The climber AI is pretty finicky and there are tricks to getting it to move how you wanted to move without totally janking out and killing itself. This is really, really important because the solo climber is a solid lot here. These little sociopaths need each other to do well. That means you gotta learn how to protect your weird robot friend just so you can do all those fancy D-Sync combos you also learned. Climbers also have tons of weird little interactions you'll need to learn too, like how the rough special gets messed up on D-Sync. Or how the rough special will just kill the main climber if they're off stage and the secondary climber hits the opponent. And a bunch of their hip boxes are visually deceptive too. So yeah, Ice climber mains deserve your respect. Alright, that wraps up our most difficult list. You might have noticed we didn't order it. That's because we wanted to see what all of you think. How would you order this list? Who gets the number one most difficult to play award? Let us know in the comments. And you know what isn't difficult and will help you improve? Hitting that subscribe button and checking out proguides.com