Fighting Game Gold: Samus (Melee)

considering it's my favorite game of all time it only makes sense i'd do a fighting game gold video on super smash bros melee although i was genuinely hung up on what character to cover i thought about it a lot and i finally settled on who it's gonna be in this video we're going to be talking about samus in super smash bros melee you might think samus is a bit of a strange pick and i completely get it she's not as recognizable as any of the top characters in melee because she's just not as good she's a good character but she's not amazing or anything she's just mid tier i think the general consensus from most top players is that she's one of if not the last tournament viable character just below pikachu or yoshi just above luigi and i get that if you think that's weird but it's actually one of the main reasons i wanted to talk about it see when it comes to people who might not be that familiar with melee i feel like they at least understand why the worst characters in the game are the worst characters in the game and why the best characters in the game are the best characters in the game you see the best characters all the time and you hear about the worst characters all the time i don't think either of these things apply to the mid tiers of melee another reason i'd like to talk about samus in this game is that she's probably stronger in melee than she is in any other iteration of smash samus has historically not been a very powerful character she's considered low tier in smash 64 brawl and smash 4. now i did mention that people less familiar with melee might not understand what makes sam such a good character and that's completely fair but when i say that i'm mainly referring to people who don't play melee people who do play melee but are less experienced probably know all about samus and that's because she's pretty notorious for being a massive noob killer see samus is a very strong defensive character but i think what makes her good at high level is the fact that she still has good offensive potential so being able to mix up between an offensive and a defensive play style is huge for her however at lower level i feel like those defensive traits that she has are much harder to exploit for new players and because of that she feels kind of unbreakable i've been there we've all had to learn melee at some point and samus can be rough what i'm gonna do first of all is talk about some of samus's defensive options explain why they're so good and then talk about why they're so hard to deal with at lower levels and some things you can do to get around them [Music] one of the most notorious options that samus has is her crouch cancel samus is the heaviest of the viable characters in melee and this gives her a really good crouch cancel because crouch cancelling reduces the knockback you take by a third this is huge because it means at lower percent you can just eat an attack and retaliate immediately samus's great crouch cancel has good synergy with her down smash which has good range his frame six is decently strong and sends the opponent behind samus people eat millions of these at low level crouch canceling is a fantastic tool but you need to not get brainless with it or it just gets too predictable for a start it'll always lose to grabs it'll often lose to moves that medial smash or spike the opponent it loses to long-range disjoints that leave you too far away to get any kind of a punish and then you've got what is probably the single most famous example of a move that beats crouch cancelling which is peach's down smash yeah uh this is a really hard matchup for samus and this does not help i know a lot of what i showed off was character specific but for the record any character can be crouched cancelling it's just that some are better at it than others outside of just beating it you can also just bait it by jumping in acting like you're going to go for an attack and then double jumping so you can potentially punish their attack that they were gonna do out of a crouch cancel you have a lot of options but i understand why new players don't really see it on top of crouch cancelling another one of samus's most defining defensive attributes is her amazing recovery partly due to bomb jumping her up special is okay as a recovery move but where it really shines is out of shield this is another great defensive tool that she has it's invincible on frames one to five and hits on frame four and the range is a little bigger than you'd think it's worth keeping in mind though that if you do it in the air it's only invincible on frames one to three instead of one to five now it's a great outer shield option but it's not the best if it whiffs you're in big trouble it doesn't have the best range and it's not crazy rewarding on hit you can even get punished for it in low percents it's a great option but not the best i'd be out of shield in the game now everything i've mentioned so far is great for samus but i think a bit of an understated weakness about them is the fact that you need to get hit to take advantage of most of samus's best tools for example when you crouch cancel something yeah it's quite rewarding you know you get a down smash potentially but you're still eating the damage if the attack you crouch cancelled to take advantage of an amazing recovery you have to get launched off stage which on top of the fact that you've just gotten hit you're still in a disadvantaged state there's no way around it and you could argue that samus's weight is in the same boat these are still amazing features but i think this is important to recognize when it comes to why these tools are so difficult for new players to handle i kind of get it to be crouch canceling especially on characters who don't have dedicated answers for it you really need to be unpredictable with your approach which i completely understand is hard for new players you just kind of go in and you tend to do it the same way every time as for her recovery i also understand that samus's recovery is great but there's no denying that it takes a very long time but if a new player sees this happening they're probably just gonna let it happen and not try to edge guard samus i get it on the opposite side of the spectrum while newer players might not try and challenge samus while she's recovering when they really should they might try to challenge her in situations where they shouldn't samus is very heavy but she's also quite floaty which makes her awkward to combo if you try and combo samus and you do it wrong or you're just going for it in a situation you shouldn't you often eat a nair samus's nair is really strong and really fast so new players will probably get hit by it an awful lot i think you can kind of say the same thing about upbeat shield newer players aren't really going to bait this they're going to have much worse shield pressure or none at all they're going to fly you with unsafe moves and most importantly they're gonna miss l cancels so they'll probably eat a ton of these so that's enough about her survivability what about her neutral it's really good honestly she's got some phenomenal pokes forward tilt is one of her best it's frame six and has a phenomenal hitbox it's only around -17 or 18 on shield 2 which sounds quite bad but considering the range i think it's quite fair up tilt is a little slow hitting on frame 14 to 17 but the hitbox is fantastic and it's very powerful [Music] this can either pop up for a combo or launch outright where it's extremely strong on top of that it can be anywhere from -13 to -10 on block which is really nice out of her three tilts downtilt has the least range and is the most unsafe at -25 on shield however where down till really shines is as a combo starter because it pops the opponent right up down smash and forward smash are both unsafe but they're great moves in their own right they're both pretty strong have great hitboxes and are decently fast down smash is frame six and forward smash is frame 10. but to compensate it's much stronger a very common combo is down throw into forward smash [Applause] up smash on the other hand is not that great the would make my sleep schedule look consistent speaking of moves that aren't that great we gotta talk about samus grab it's pretty big but it's just so slow it comes out on frame 18 and it takes approximately a billion years to recover dashcrab recovers much faster but it doesn't have as much range this is why samus having a good up b out of shield is so important grab out a shield is really slow again you're still probably going to be landing a lot of grabs at lower levels because people are going to shield all the time against samus at lower level that and tether grabs just are a lot better at lower level than they are at high level people get grabbed by them a lot more often in general even outside of samus's amazing projectile game also just for the record unlike link and young link samus's tether grab can grab people out of the air i always found this really weird but it is the way it is i guess for some reason samsa's jab 2 has kind of been throughout the entire smash series and that's no different here it's pretty useless outside of some niche edge guarding applications but for the record jab one is actually really good it's decently safe has good range and you can crouch in between jabs to do them continuously it's pretty neat speaking of shield pressure and all that samus's aerials are all pretty great on shield neutral air can be up to plus one which is kind of crazy you can also make back air plus one on shield and you can make down air plus two but uh i'm really bad at it yeah that that that's the best i got but trust me it can be plus two samus's upper is pretty weird it doesn't have a ton of knockback and it's kind of easy to escape but it's decently safe on shield at least and it's good for poking at people above you it's not a terrible move now i did mention samus's neutral a bit ago but i only really talked about a normals i think it's about time we talked about this monster this is the best samus missiles have ever been it's insane samus's missiles are usually pretty laggy however if you use them in the air and you land during the move it auto cancels it's genuinely crazy this is insanely oppressive at lower levels of play it's it's unreal i'll never forget when i was trying to get one of my friends who really just played ultimate into melee and it was going pretty fine you know they found it pretty hard but you know they were getting into it and i they go on unranked for like half an hour and then suddenly they come back and they're just like how is samus not top one and they didn't i didn't hear a single detail of the match but i have a funny feeling it was mainly because of missiles when you start getting platforms involved samus's missile shenanigans can get completely insane i imagine if you saw this at low level you just you'd be terrified and i wouldn't even blame you platforms actually do a lot for samus even outside of missiles her air movement isn't that great she's a bit slow and stiff however her ground mobility is pretty great she's got a three frame jump squat which gives her a very fast wave dash and relatively low traction which gives her a very long wave dash it's not crazy long but it is pretty fast and a great mobility tool for a usually pretty slow character combine this with platforms and have movement become so much better also i don't know if it's like this in other games but missiles have really high knockback [Applause] they're genuinely pretty good kill moves especially if you can snipe the opponent with them off stage of course if you want a really strong projectile then you've always got charge shot does a ton of damage and on top of that it's relatively easy to combo into just given the nature of melee this is a genuinely fantastic move bombs are pretty good sometimes it can be hard to know what to do with them outside of bomb jumping but they blow up on contact so they're pretty great shield pressure so i've been talking a lot about why samus is strong and that's fine and all but i've yet to touch on why i actually like her as a character and even though i don't play her much anymore i really do i think she's incredibly fun but the biggest reason i love samus is because of just some of the weird obscure tech that she can do even though it's not always that practical it's really fun case in point that is the super wave dash and i love it to actually perform the super wave dash you hit back the frame before you hit the ground and forward the frame you land on the ground so frame 41 and frame 42 if you're crouching it's two frames faster because you hit the ground sooner so it's pretty slow but the whole thing is actionable this leads to a lot of really funny scenarios i it's pretty rare that i actually kill someone after doing this but oh it's so it's so fun dude now if the super wave dash is just a little bit too practical for you there's always it's completely useless big brother the super duper wave dash for comparison's sake here's a perfect super wave dash now to do a super duper wave dash you do the same thing except four frames later you hit down [Music] the frame after that you hit shield and the frame after that you hit grab [Music] it goes much further but it's insanely hard all of those inputs are frame perfect i just love stuff like this it's completely useless but the fact that it's here is so cool i'd argue the other most famous example of unique samus tech is the extender to activate it you just hit up down up on the d-pad and z from frames 8 to 39 of a regular grab it's really interesting it goes about three times as far but the downsides are that it doesn't grab people out of the air and you have to manually press a to activate the grab also if you hold l it holds in which is pretty nifty correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty sure this is the only use of down on the d-pad in the entire game at least in terms of an actual match up is obviously used to taunt but outside of that i'm pretty sure you never use any of the other three directions that's actually why i couldn't show this in uncle punch because they will activate things like saving states loading states and teleporting the opponent next to you now there's no denying that the extender is incredibly fun but unfortunately it's not all that practical mainly because you can't get rid of it without losing a stock the super wave dash and the extender are definitely the two most famous examples of unique samus tech and they're really cool i love messing around with them but she's got some other cool stuff going on too for example something i almost never see talked about is the fact that she can drop cancel her neutral air meaning she can drop to a platform do an air hit the opponent with it and land on the same platform yoshi can do this too but i'm pretty sure yoshi can do it all the time samus needs to hit the opponent if she wants to do this which is pretty neat if you can do this consistently it's amazing shield pressure since every neutral air you do this way is going to be plus one on shield another interesting unique piece of samus tech is her upper aerial interrupted ledge samus doesn't have the best ledge dash the highest amount of actionable intangibility she can get off it is four frames or i guess minus nine if you're like me and your at ledge dashes i'm absolutely terrible at this but i'm pretty sure you can get up to 11 frames of invincibility with this the most sams can get out of a wave dash off ledge is four and this increases that by up to seven so i'm pretty sure you can get that if you're not me there's a ton of other unique stuff that samus has that i actually can't even do like the daughter dash on the boost ball and the decker grab she's just such an interesting character even if you don't play it there's she's got stuff that you want to know about and learn about she's just so interesting and it's a massive part of why i love the character so much i don't play her much especially not anymore but samus is cool man now i'd hate for it to come off like i only like samus for all the goofy tech she has i really don't i think she's a super sick character in her own right i just love that she's a primarily defensive character who still has a ton of great offensive options i think that's super fun and honestly i think it's something a lot of more recent defensive characters in smash have kind of missed the mark on they'll tend to be overly defensive and have little to no offensive options personally for me at least the belmonts and ultimate came to mind i was super excited for them but they really did not do it for me although i must admit i think sephiroth does quite a nice job at filling that gap i've never really played sephiroth but he looks really cool i'll give him that so that's pretty much it for this video i know i've been gone for a little bit but it's mainly just because islands had a bit of a heat wave and that plus the fact that my fan was old and shitty was really up my computer however you might have noticed that i did a couple pokemon videos on my second channel if you want to check that out then feel free they were pretty fun to do i do have plans for pokemon content on the main channel but it's gonna be a little different from what i have on the second channel preferably a lot more edited so yeah check that out if you want the you wave now i'm over here myself are usually pretty laggy but what the no way did he was that that had to have been his idol animation that had to it was he saw it coming

Channel: Big Yellow

Views: 41,930

Rating: 4.9283919 out of 5

Keywords: Melee, SSBM, Samus, Mid, Balance

Id: gCQnrTl2Cos

Length: 19min 30sec (1170 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/KenshiroTheKid]

Big Yellow's content is really good, its cool to see mid tier discussion with melee.

[u/SkateboardCZ]

Happy he picked samus - a viable character who hasnt been talked about in a while - and not the same ol same ol marth v fox conversation thats been beaten to death

[u/MorniingDew]

Interesting that he picked samus

[u/Hatefull_creeper]

The only incorrect part is that he says that Melee Samus is considered her best version but Ultimate Samus is usually considered better or at least ranked higher nowadays.

[u/Natural_Design9481]

Is the thumbnail a reference to how Samus is just a worse Peach?