Episode 2-3: The Comfort Zone

In this episode AV and Peon explore their personal comfort zones to learn about their origins, how to break out of that comfort zone, and how to apply these strategies as a person and player.

## Questions:

### **AV:**

> I didn’t know that shield dropping was out of the game, so that’s actually news to me. I think you can still. You can just let go of shield and drop items and drop through platforms normally. I think you don’t have to necessarily jump off of them. I think something that I see pretty commonly is people will press down through a platform and then just do an attack through it to cover the landing.
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### **Peon:**

> Yeah, but shield dropping was great because it bypassed the shield drop animation.
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### **AV:**

> Right, but did you shield drop in Smash 4?
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### **Peon:**

> Yes, but I’m upset that it’s out of the game, treeling, to be honest.
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> I think it was a perfectly good mechanic. It’s been in every iteration of Smash up to this point, why take it out? I have no idea. I don’t think it serves any purpose. I’m pretty bummed that it’s out of the game. I’ll be honest, it’s a minor gripe, but I wish it was there.
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> It also does limit your options on a platform, I agree. It takes one away.
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> Dr. Mario does seem pretty good, but is also unexplored. I know Zenyou, a player from SoCal, was saying that he doesn’t really see the hubbub about Dr. Mario. Rather he doesn’t see the potential, whereas I’ve heard a lot of other people say “you know this character actually has a lot”.
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> So, my current throughts, treeling, is that Dr. Mario is good and unexplored, which is scary to me.
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### **AV:**

> I feel like Dr. Mario’s combo game feels better than Mario’s, I don’t know, it feels weird. I actually vastly prefer playing Dr. Mario to Mario, which is very strange. I think you mentioned it in one of the previous episodes and then that made me think, okay, why don’t I go and play this character and I actually like him.
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### **Peon:**

> I think they are talking about picking up a character and not fighting against a character. So, a R.O.B. main would pick up either Fox or Wolf or a swordy. Thoughts?
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### **AV:**

> I think that learning a new character is learning an archetype. They’re characters that have their own archetype, like you were talking about. I mean, Inkling kind of has their own archetype, but I actually think Inkling does fall in a certain bucket of characters.
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> There are some really unique characters that are not like any other else. In my opinion, there are groups of characters that you need to learn if you play. If you play sword characters, other sword characters become more familiar to you.
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> Taking on a new type of character is not only learning one character, but you should view it as learning a group of characters. If you look at win conditions, do you have your win condition off a grab? Do you have your win condition off of a weak attack into a strong attack confirm? Is your win condition based off specials?
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> So, start grouping characters together and look at all of their options and the thing is that once you have picked up one character, look at how those aspects transfer over into your other characters.
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> That’s what I would say, I mean, obviously picking up a completely different paradigm of characters is difficult, but look for similarities is what I would say.
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### **Peon:**

> That’s a great question. I definitely would say that Fire Emblem.
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> The Fire Emblem representatives got me into Fire Emblem. I can’t say it was one representative in particular, but the combination of Roy, Marth, Robin, Ike, all those guys. You know, maybe you say, I’ve got to play some Fire Emblem games. So, I played Fire Emblem Awakening for the DS or 3DS and I liked it. It was fun.
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> Other than that, I can’t think of a character that explicitly made me go:
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> *“Yo, this character’s dope. I gotta see what their games are about.”*
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> Did you have that experience AV?
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### **AV:**

> I played mostly DK and Cloud. After playing Cloud, I think I felt it was obligatory to go play Final Fantasy 7, so I did play a bit of that. I think because I mostly play DK, at one point I came over to your place and you were like:
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> *“Okay, we’re playing Donkey Kong Country right now.”*
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> You made me do it and I was pretty good at it. I wasn’t that bad at Donkey Kong Country, so I might actually go and play through more of the Donkey Kong games.
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### **Peon:**

> Oh, please do for me. I will say this though, NintendoGamerChris, that I did end up playing Bayonetta 1 because I got it free on games with gold for Xbox. It came with my online subscription. So, I checked it out and was like:
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> “Bayo’s in Smash and I don’t know anything about her games. Let me give it a look.”
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> Honestly, after playing Bayonetta 1, I had such a greater appreciation for Bayonetta as a character, because Bayonetta’s games are so wild and crazy, and so over the top.
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> Bayonetta is such a badass in that game and she’s so funny. Even though Bayonetta was the most annoying character to fight against in Smash 4. I had to admit that I was a little bit more tolerant of her after I played her own game.
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### **AV:**

> I want to give a boring answer because it’s what I truly believe in that I have no idea who’s the current strongest player in Ultimate.
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### **Peon:**

> Alright, well I’ll answer. Tweek. Tweek’s my pick. I mean, Tweek did win the Sky Invitational, which you know, that and Don’t Park on the Grass were the only two major events. One wasn’t an invitational, but just watching Tweek play, this guy seems nuts.
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> Not only is he nuts, he plays multiple characters and is really good. I’ve seen his Cloud play, his Chrom play, I’ve seen his Donkey Kong play, and it just seems like he has such a great grasp of the mechanics so far.
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> He just has had some dominating performances already in brackets and, I gotta say, Tweek is going to be a problem. He’s my pick right now to be number one in the first PGR.
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### **AV:**

> Whereas I don’t have a specific pick, I will say that the player that I’m most interested in following is Konga. I think Konga has been doing some really cool things with DK and I’ll likely be looking out for any cool things that he’s up to.
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### **AV:**

> That’s a really interesting question. What do you think?
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### **Peon:**

> Yeah, I love that question. So, for me, a couple of options jump out.
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> One of them being Inkling. Perhaps that’s showing some personal biases. I’m playing Inkling and I kind of understand the potential of the character because I’ve played it so much. Inkling has some stuff that really makes her skill ceiling super high.
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> Her combo game is extremely flow charty but there’s a lot of guaranteed combos at specific percentages versus specific characters, which, once optimized, we’ll see crazy consistent damage output from Inkling. You already kind of do, but it’s only going to get more and more ridiculous.
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> Plus Booyah, the up throw up air. A true combo with Booyah is an extremely precise input, I mean, I’m talking a couple of frames precision, you know. It’s like the least true true combo I’ve ever seen in a Smash game. It’s ridiculously hard to input consistently against certain characters. So, once Inkling mains get that every time and every time we’re within the window, you get grabbed to death, that’s going to be crazy on a character that really doesn’t need that to be good.
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> I’ll say Ken, and Ryu of course, but Ken seems to have some crazy ridiculous combos, like the up air to shoryu, and just really technical, high difficulty, high reward combos. In six or seven months, I don’t want to find a Ken player.
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### **AV:**

> That was my natural response, was the Street Fighter characters.
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> I will say that there’s a few of the characters that I’d be looking for in terms of radical upward mobility. I would say one of them is Captain Falcon. I think Captain Falcon has a lot of interesting kill setups now. I don’t think any fast character with strong moves can be bad. I think that there’s a lot to be explored with them.
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> I think Snake is another character there’s a lot of opinions about whether Snake is good or. I think Snake is a very good character that is currently under explored because people just haven’t reabsorbed the archetype from Brawl. I think Snake is going to start to get a lot of traction later down in the game.
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> I think I’m going to give two more. Greninja and Sonic. Those are going to be my four. Captain Falcon, Snake, Greninja, and Sonic. I think Snake has received some play, but we haven’t seen too much play from the other three. I think the other three are going to be very good.
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### **AV:**

> So, I feel like we have touched on this earlier in terms of learning how to learn and improving your technical ability, but I don’t think we’ve specifically talked about learning characters. We might have, but I think, in general, just understanding frame data and understanding good options.
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> The first thing you look at is the neutral game. What are your options in neutral if, let’s say, you’re Cloud? What are your options that you can spam pretty safely? Like, you’re going to spam your back air and your forward airs, so those are going to be your neutral options, so then you have your options that you’re going to use in neutral.
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> Then you look at your punish game. Once you hit something in neutral and once you get your opponent disadvantages, or in a position where you can use another move, what move are you going to use. So, this is like a beautiful flowchart that you can follow in terms of getting used to a character’s movement, understanding what options are usable where, and just following that chart.
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> I think if you look at Zero’s recent video on learning neutral in Ultimate, I think that you’ll find a lot of useful information there.
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### **Peon:**

> I think that’s more complicated than I’d put it.
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> If I were to tell you this, I would say, learn how to start your combos, learn which moves of yours are good kill moves, and learn how to recover. Beyond that, check out your character’s Discord.
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> Let’s say you want to pick up Mewtwo, join the Mewtwo Discord. I’ve never been to the Mewtwo Discord, but I’m just going out on a limb and say they will have a million pieces of information for you to read, for every single situation, for every little thing. There’s going to be an entire community of people there that will tell you:
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> “Hey, yeah, you know this match up is like this. Why do you guys do this? What are your favorite stages?”
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> There’ll be a bunch of experts there that you can consult for free. That’s what I would do. I joined the Inkling Discord, Inkopolis it’s called, and they’ve been a godsend to me. That’s what I would recommend.
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