After some extended time with the game, Pokemon Trainer seems to me to be one of the versatile characters in the game, although there are times when he’s really hard to play. I’m going to take you in depth with PT and explain some of the tricksies that will give you an edge. I’ll look at each character separately, because realistically you’ll be playing as one character for a stock, and not switching back and forth.
Ivysaur
Ivysaur is in my opinion the most powerful of the three pokemon and usually the best one to start with. Ivysaur’s game is primarily centered around spacing. Ivysaur plays best at midrange, putting pressure on the opponent with razor leaf and fair. This means that Ivysaur has to do the legwork against characters with spamable projectiles like Falco and Pit, but against those characters with no projectiles, feel free to sit outside their attack range and spam them. Bair works really well when the opponent gets ontop of you. Jump and bair as you move away from them; they will be stunned by the attack or will be stuck shielding if they decide to do so, while you can get some space and get in a better position. Utilt, ftilt, and fsmash are great moves that have good priority and help with spacing. The best strategy for KOs with Ivy is to either land an uair at high damage or throw them off and punish as they try to recover. Ivysaur’s bullet seed is extremely powerful when used sparingly. It is hard to escape even with proper DI, so if every once in a while you use bullet seed instead of utilt, it can catch people offguard and do some amazing damage. Spam it, and you will be punished.
Charizard
Charizard is still somewhat of an enigma. He is much faster than he looks, but he is predictable and a huge target. Right now I think it is best to play him as a sort of hit and run character, staying at long range until the moment is perfect, and then approaching with a nair (fair is way too obvious and should be saved for KOing) and a dtilt, or staying at range and using ftilt. Char can juggle well, with a great utilt and uair, and his spike is very powerful. Rock Smash is also a strong move that provides some cover while you use it. Even if you miss with the main attack, the rock fragments do damage and will prevent the opponent from getting to you. Killing is very easy with Charizard, as his fair can kill at extremely low percents, and can act as a spike if used off the side. Dair is a great spike, and bair can kill if you chase with it off the edge.
Squirtle
Up until recently, I hated playing Squritle. He was just too weak and got punished very easily. That was until I read Tobias’s thread on shell shifting over at smashboards. Read the full thread for all the info, but basically Squirtle has a way to wavedash (albeit a little less useful) and it has opened up his game. Simply tap the opposite direction while running (not during a dash) and you will slide backwards in your shell while preserving your momentum. Watch Tobias’s video for the full rundown, including a superwavedash with upsmash. What this means is that Squirtle can dodge attacks very easily, and basically has the versatility of wavedashing from melee. You can dash forward and “wd” back, or dash the opposite direction, “wd” back and gain momentum and jump with bair extremely quickly. Use it as a mindgame, the possibilities are endless. What this means is that Squritle just got significantly better than before. Fair, Bair, Uair and Dair are all powerful aerials (rising dair is a great combo starter) and utilt and dtilt are good as well. Otherwise Squritle’s moveset is unspectacular, but his ability to wd makes him useful in a number of ways.
EDIT: MOOPLET HERE!
BAM, VIDEO! we just played this match today on wifi!
mooplet (lucas) vs. steel kangaroo (pokemon trainer)
Okay, so i drew Lucas based on a photo from the smash dojo, thought I’d put it up here in low-res.
I’m just having fun :P
The main part of the post is here:
Ike impressions + strategy. (Video coming later in the day)
The main strategy of playing Ike, and to an extent the entire game, is punishing rolls, dodges, and recovery– if someone starts to roll to the left, and you’re fast enough, you predict it and you smash left, obviously. But this brings me to talking about prediction. Ike’s game is based around the ability to KO after 4-5 attacks, provided an FSmash or a neutral B is the killing move.
Racking up damage
This is not hard with Ike, for the reason that most of his moves do between 15 and 25 damage, but there are different ways to approach the situation. In my personal experience, distance is not a problem for Ike because of long sweeping attacks like FAir and side+B.
(Note: Side+B on the surface seems like a rather useless or kind of lame thing to attack with, if you think of it as like phantasm or something, but it is one of the most useful attacks Ike has. Fully charged, which doesn’t take long, has a MASSIVE range and moves you almost all the way across most of the tournament-balanced stages. For recovery, it’s a good way to get back to the stage when you don’t have time to use his Up+B, or only need quick horizontal recovery.)
FAir, with a short hop, is relatively quick and covers a lot of airspace, but the best thing is that because of the new physics of Brawl, you can do a running forward short hop, FAir, then while you do it you DI backwards and it becomes a retreating aerial– great for spacing and backing off. You can also (if C-stick is still set to be normal attacks, I don’t find B-Sticking that useful for Ike) just do backward short hops with fair as a defensive move.
RAR’d BAir is possibly best used by Ike, because it is his fastest move and very useful for approaching. Then there’s his NAir, which if you don’t fast-fall hits all the way around him on a short hop, which can be useful for an extra hit… his Up-Tilt is incredibly slow but has a wide range of ‘catching’ people that lets you set up for a FAir again.
I must say i’m not a fan of his UAir, because although it can KO at low percentages, it is both slow, hits forward THEN backward, and is difficult to time right. Up-Smash is great for edgeguarding against some characters because it hits in a sweeping arc all above Ike, but a little bit in front of him as well and a LOT in back.
The spike
Because using his recovery as a spike is auto-suicide in most cases, Ike’s DAir is his only practical one. Good as a bobbling move while on the stage, or to avoid being hit with an upsmash or UAir when high above the stage, it spikes in the first bit where he slams the sword downwards. While hanging on the edge, a lot of characters can easily be killed with ledgehop+DAir, which leaves the hitbox for the spike right at the ledge where they would need to be to grab on. I find that larger characters like charizard and DK get hit from fairly far away with this.
Finishing with Ike
Not hard. FAir, BAir (especially), and Forward- / Up-smash will all KO around 80-90 damage on most characters. The main thing is landing it– my absolute favorite way to catch people is with his DAir first:
1. Spike from fairly close to the ground, if they are in the air. Usually no one’s reaction time allows them to techroll out of that.
2. Because you land around the same time they do if you were already on your way down from the air when you DAired, or you fastfalled, you can see them lying in ‘helpless mode’ on the ground.
3. Most people roll. Some might attack out of it, which means that if you’re standing right where they are you should do the old shield, wait, grab routine.
4. Predicting the roll, while standing right next to them, means that you can do a forward smash (no time to charge) in either direction and hopefully hit them. Up-smash works too.
It’s all about practice- this game is much less about technical skill than melee, and more about punishing mistakes in the form of poor recovery, trips, rolls, and missed attacks.
EDIT: VIDEO UP!!
Mooplet (Ike) vs. Steel Kangaroo (Olimar)
Nintendo Wii LAN Adapter // FIXES AND LAG REDUCTION
ITS A LONG READ.
Worth it though- i have a lot of problems i faced and solutions.
(Although this weekend is full of, and i mean completely full of, new advanced techniques and meta-game discoveries, I have to post this instead because I bought an adapter and set up my router)
Alright, here’s the scoop:
1. WiFi, being wireless, is laggy to about a .5 second minimum as far as i can tell. Closeness of the Wii to the router, signal strength, all of that is still limited by the pure fact that you’re not wired to the machine. For anyone who plays PC games, wireless connections can make it just laggy enough to be unplayable, or have lag spikes.
1a. NO ONE LIKES LAG SPIKES
2. The Wii LAN adapter changes your trusty old networking cable into USB 2.0, which goes into one of two ports in the back of the Wii. Bypassing wireless and making it an extremely fast connection to the internet increases speed for loading time, joining games, and playing. (sort of- ill get to that later)
3. From information on Smashboards, Nintendo’s site, and knowledge of how my routers and computers work, you can do several things to speed up the Wii’s wifi speed regardless of whether or not you have a LAN adapter or are using wireless.
4. THIS IS IMPORTANT TO KNOW: The reason that there is lagginess in RESPONSE TIME for input / output of hitting a button and the character responding is that Nintendo’s servers are delaying BOTH players to the lowest common denominator. That is, in order for the game to function as it is (with both players seeing the same thing at the same time, all the time) the game will slow down to the slowest player’s connection speed.
THEREFORE: as many people as possible should do what I’m about to talk about.
Note: I can drive to rigapeen’s house in like 3 minutes, he’s not very far away from me. He’s using the Wii’s built-in WiFi capabilities, but even so, when we play there is virtually no lag. The latency of the person who you are playing with can be measured on your Friend Code List, where there is a colored sphere. The more blue, the better the connection to them is. Blue = best, Green = okay, Orange -> Red = Bad -> worse.
I’ve played with people from the midwest, and theyre orange or green, whereas i got a few more blues and greens from northeasterners near NYC.
If everyone gets the LAN adapter though, and opens ports, we should all be one big blue (ha, ha) connection.
THE SOLUTION FOR WIFI BRAWL LAG:
2 things. 3 maybe.
1) this is the optional bit:
Because most people will not be playing with the LAN adapter, there is going to be a minimum amount of lag for matches with one player being wireless. Although i would recommend getting a LAN adapter for the possibilty of playing someone else who has one and a potentially zero-lag game, not everyone is going to want to go pay the 27 dollars (thats with tax) for it.
(side note- some gamestops have them, but Best Buy seems to have the most of them in stock, but it might be a 3rd party device. Mine was, it’s working fine though, i figure they can’t screw up hardware that badly)
2) A popular GameFAQS post was talking about “Port-Forwarding” for the Wii, in order to let the machine communicate through more points and therefore reduce lag. First, it’s not truly port-forwarding. Instead, it’s just a combination of two things: assigning the Wii a static IP, and opening ports for access to the wii.
2a) Assign the Wii a static IP on your router. This is vital for both wired and wireless setups. In your router settings (look up how to get to them for whatever router you have- i use linksys) there should be options to choose available IP addresses for use. My router assigns IP addresses to everything that tries to access it in my house- but I had to create static IP’s for my machines that i wanted to have full functionality for online access. Most P2P systems (DC++, BT programs, ETC) will need ports to be open for ‘active’ file exchange, and most games where players can host rooms (i had to do this to host games while playing DotA) need a static IP.
In some cases, as in mine, there was an issue as to which IP would be available for the Wii. My machines are using 192.168.1.101 -> …104, but then unknown to me, my new printer got assigned an IP, my router took one for itself, and my other network card needed one. (remember, they get handed out per request)
(view your IP info by running command prompt, type ipconfig. You might want to look up other info on this somewhere else, i dont have the room or time to explain everything about networking :P)
So the workaround for that is to change the assigned IP for the Wii to be about 10 higher than anything you know about, just in case.
(like 192.168.1.114 for mine)
Then you need to go into the Wii settings menu, bottom right corner on the home screen, and go to page 2 and internet options. Enter all the info you get from your router. This is where “Assign IP automatically” or whatever it says, should be changed to “No” and then you can choose settings. I dunno, find it. It’s there.
DNS settings will be found on your computer, and need to be put in for the wii.
Use the same # for primary and secondary if you dont have a unique secondary DNS.
3) (2b) Open the ports for your Wii to access.
Standard router how-to will explain how to do this:
TCP:
“Allow traffic to all destinations on ports: 28910, 29900, 29901, 29920″
Also, 80 and 443 should be open already. They’re needed.
UDP should be everything open.
Okay, good, so thats done.
Uh, this was sort of vague in some bits.
But anyway, start adding everyone and we’ll play, I’m on Wifi Wars
Olimar is really hard to fight. All of his attacks look the same if you don’t play him much, and most of his aeriels and tilts are weird pikmin extension attacks, which brings me to my next point: It’s all about the pikmin. A good electric or fire pikmin up-tilt or fair can KO really easily, but then theres much less damage to be had (maybe there will be some discovery about them) with, say, throwing blue or purple pikmin.
Steelroo: After spending some time with Olimar, I can tell that there is definitely a benefit to having a mix of yellow, red, and purple pikmin. These seem to be the 3 best pikmin- red and yellow do good damage with uair, fair, and most other pikmin attacks. Purple has really good knock back and can kill at lower % with smashes. Olimar’s Down+B works well for controlling/ordering the pikmin. Press it once and the pikmin line up according to color (all reds together, then all yellow, blue, white, and purple) Press it again to cycle through the next available color pikmin (eg, red goes to yellow). This allows you to switch to purple for the kill, or to more easily get rid of blue and white pikmin, which IMO are worse than the other three.
mooplet:I liked my… first KO. Chasing techrolls and get-up-rolls is definitely going to be big- spikes are hard to tech because they’re so fast and therefore easy to punish when rolling out of lying on the ground.
Me (Lucas) vs. Steelroo (Olimar) 2
Same deal… Roo was starting to get the hang of fighting against Lucas, and he said that he thought the best play style was “extremely aggressive on the part of Olimar- if you slow down or stop throwing pikmin then Lucas can overwhelm you very fast. RAR’s and F-smash on the part of Lucas are definitely overpowered and olimar can be easily killed while trying to recover as well”.
I think that sums it up, the end of the match shows how to stop a lucas recovery i guess, Olimar’s jump and floatiness is good for hitting a quick fair. Another second and he would have got caught in the Lucas PK thunder multi-hit blast, probably killing Olimar.
And… Rigapeen (Diddy) vs. Rivig (Pit)
Rivig is my kid brother, who might be joining us as a regular contributor or at least player. He plays a SLOW, SLOW pit game, arrows being spam-able and forward smash giving a lot of distance with which to use the arrows.
Rigapeen- This match is really long, like all Pit matches are. One thing I think I should have done was more bananas. I’ve played a lot since this match and now at the start of any match I put out 2 bananas. When against Pit, jump, banana, double jump, banana. Arrows rack up damage fast so don’t get hit.
Too much uairing and dairing. They’re not that good and both are very hard to hit people with. At 1:32 for example, that was an easy kill if I had Faired him out of the dash attack.
I need to practice punishing banana peel slips. At 1:58 that was an easy kill for a well practiced Diddy player. That’s probably the biggest evidence that Brawl hasn’t developed yet. People spend all their time looking for new techniques but nobody knows how everything works and what to do in what situations. 3:10 was also an easy kill. Also at 2:25 I think its possible to recover from that. I just have to play more matches to get a perfect feel of the mechanics.
You can stop watching after the 2nd Pit kill, nothing much interesting happens after that.
Steelroo’s comment: I don’t know how effective an extremely slow Pit game is against most characters. Pit has a lot of attacks that are very strong and powerful, and to relegate him to just an arrow spammer seems somewhat counter-intutive. I don’t think it is an awful strategy, and it certainly works against some characters, especially because Pit is able to fight well at close quarters, so once the other player dodges your arrows and gets in your grill, you can use a nair to damage them and then slap em with a fair or bair to kill them or knock them away.
Rigapeen - Yep, a slow Pit game is a bad one. I’ve been playing a lot on wifi and I am getting raped by good Pits. I feel like every aerial has priority over mine, and his side b is fucking annoying. Rivig didn’t use it at all (he will once he learns the game more), which was good. He stayed on the ground mostly, which is not good especially vs. Diddy because all you can do is Ftilt, side B and arrow. Diddy has good tilts and you are more prone to banana slips. Right now I have no clue how to beat a good Pit. My other mains are Snake and Dedede, who I haven’t had any sucecess with either.
Hey everyone, we got the first two videos up and running. More to come, and ill make a few notes underneath each one. Brawl strats, Etc.
If you see something like “quick note by steelroo” then that means he came and edited this to put his comments in.
Me (Lucas) vs. Steelroo (PT)
Uh, just fooling around i guess.
Have to say: Lucas, for me at least, seems to be one of the best characters.
The technique I have started to use the most in the past few days (this video was on tuesday) is doing a forward-moving BAir:
(quick explanation) If you run one direction, and after it’s too late to dash dance back, you hit the control stick the opposite direction and jump, then return the stick to the first direction, you are facing backwards while moving forwards at almost the same momentum that you had before the turn.
Example: Lucas is running to the right. Control stick slam to the left, hit jump asap, then slam control stick right immediately, then hit A.
Because you will be facing left, you will perform a Back-Air while moving to the right- really handy move for a few people (IKE! DEDEDE! LUCAS!)
Back to the match: Ivy got killed with Lucas’ sweet reflector, which i love to use as a killing blow (Ivy is particularly susceptible to this because of tether recovery only)
That was my last KO, and it looks nice… but the main attraction is realizing how powerful the spike of BAir (final big spark, end of the kick) is, which killed charizard early.
Also, Lucas has his twig FSmash thing that killed squirtle w/ very low damage.
So far I’m loving Lucas.
Me (Falco) vs. Steelroo (Wario)
I was learning how to use falco, and even though the match is marred by me suiciding with illusion, this shows off some of Wario’s mindgame ability.
(Steelroo wants to practice wario more, and although he wanted me to put up a Pit match… im lazy. Maybe tomorrow)
Because Wario is damn near unpredictable (every move has really choppy startup frames, and he moves around like G&W) and very strong, coupled with a few good aerials and WAFT, his godlike fart attack thing, (which is the final KO steelroo gets me with- very cool looking and worth expanding upon) he needs to be looked into.
Keep in mind that these are by no means final videos showcasing our talent, just good matches that I can easily comment on because I played in them and they have some good bits to talk about.
I got these two up (and I dont mean to sound apologetic, hehe) just to get them up, and more videos will be coming tomorrow, after rigapeen comes over to record at my place.
