SUPER SMASH BROS: 4 Character impression Link Id like to applaud Sakurai and his team. Link has been (with the exception of P:M) a consistently low tier character held back by sluggish attacks, weak recovery, and lack of proper defensive maneuvers to avoid pressure in bad matchups. In this game his recovery is better, his attacks are a fair deal faster, and his movement all around including: running, jumping, midair, and recovering have all seen mild to sizable improvements. His projectile game seems to have weakened. The arrows (while charge a bit faster) have pretty reduced knockback, smaller hitboxes, and next to 0 hitstun and deal little damage. The boomerang is fairly similar but the wind effect still sorta betrays him a lot. The bombs have a shorter fuse, but they can be dropped and Link is able to throw them further than ever before (like P:M almost) and his bomb-footstool shenanigans still work. The clawshot as an offensive tool is weaker and doesnt space as well, but is still a decent ranged poke. Spin attack on ground is a bit weaker, but starts and ends faster, and Up-B recovery goes slightly further and higher than before while its momentum is much better than Brawls and slightly less than Melee. Clawshot tether is close to 3x as long as ever before and Sm4shs new ledge mechanics greatly improve Links staying power and survivability. His Jabs dont cancel as quickly, but they confirm better and generally end sooner. His tilts seem the most improved, F-tilt is faster and stronger, D-tilt is more useful due to hitstun (I can true hit-confirm D-tilt-D-air spike from low %) and U-tilt juggles better due to having a uniform hitbox and Sm4shs greater hitstun. His smashes are also well improved. F-smash1 has two differnt hit boxes. One near the tip of the sword that acts like normal, but the rest of his swords hitbox hits lightly upwards to set up for F-smash2 that hits hard up&away. U-smash now confirms all 3 hits properly and is generally faster than before (think smash64) and hits decently hard. D-smash is fairly similar if not slightly faster, and the back swing launches slightly more horizontal than before. His aerials are a mixed bag. N-air hits the same as usual but has barely any landing lag. B-air is faster, weaker, combos better, but has more landing lag. F-airs hitbox is weird and doesnt hit low enough, but hit1 is stronger and hit2 is faster and the two confirm better. U-air is functionally the same despite the changed animation., though it works a bit better thanks to hitstun for light% comboing. D-airs starting hitbox spikes and the rest hit normally, which presents a trade-off. Its no longer as good of an upwards killer (which hurts Links decent kill ratio), but it works in short combos and kills downwards offstage very strongly (which gives Link a viable move for stuffing recoveries). His rolls are great Backroll in particular is outstanding. Spotdodge is mostly unchanged (it was decent in both Melee&Brawl). Airdodging seems to have been nerfed across the board for all characters, so while it is problematic for some of his evasion it helps tons with offense since people will be more likely to attack in situations where Links reach and great priority will serve him greatly (in Brawl especially, Link suffered badly to even hit opponents due to good airdodges and his poor frame advantage) which makes this a fairly positive trade. From the ledge, (%changing getups are gone) getup is decent, getup roll is good, getup jump is great, and getup attack is kinda bad. TL;DR This will probably be the best Link of any official Smash game (top tier in P:M). I would estimate longterm he will be a solid Mid-tier character with mostly fair matchups (from +1 to -1), very few strong matchups (a couple +2 and zero +3) a few bad matchups (some -1s that feel like -2 on paper) and one or two horribad matchups (-3) Grade: B- Skill: High Rank: Mid to Low-Mid
Posted on: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 02:35:56 +0000
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