Ive been a regular member of the Indiana ssbm pr since 2015. This channel is meant to celebrate what I enjoy about the melee scene. My series Play Better Melee is somewhat a guide for others, but mostly a way for me to explore what I need to work on myself.
This is not only one of the best explanations I’ve seen of neutral in Melee, but it’s one of the best-produced videos I’ve ever seen about melee. Good audio and narration skills are such a godsend on RU-vid. Looks like this channel isn’t active at the moment, but if you ever made more content I would be very happy to watch it!
I mean look none of us watching a video like this are good at the game so I don't think we're qualified enough to say that this "correctly" explains neutral or whatever else. However, I can say that this is probably the most practical explanation of neutral I've seen. So many attempts at these videos are way too nebulous to actually be actionable for someone with no point of comparison, so I commend you for making something we can work with for such an abstract concept.
An alternative to shield in the ‘shield vs attack vs grab’ is spot dodge. Then there’s also like dash dancing, tech roll, jump... dash away, idk like a bunch of other options besides shield for when you know an attack is coming. Like crouch cancel is another good one. Also counter for some characters. But yeah anyway, loved this video. Plz make more like it 😊
This is a lesson that probably took me over 10 years to learn, and it was in Ultimate that I learned. That game is very messy, and you can lose to players much worse than you by making really silly errors, so it's easy to find it tilting.
I remember playing you from years ago. It was a ball state tournament and I was about a year or half a year into playing melee. You stomped me (no pun intended) and ended up tied for 8th. I felt good after the time I dedicated to getting better feeling rewarded, but as the years went on I never really felt like I accomplished much. I practiced and practiced till my hands couldn't and still felt like I was going nowhere. After the years went on I deterred myself so much from playing cause I felt it was a waste of time and gave up melee entirely. I never understood what I was really missing and no one seemed willing to even help me try and figure it out. I spent hours studying tech and never realized what I was missing. After watching hours of more content, this time directed at my mental and getting more used to understanding myself on a personal level I decided to take it serious again. Started with SF5 then 6 came out and saw rapid improvement from learning to coach myself outside of game then to do it as much in the actual game and let myself go while playing and to just do my best and now I am back into melee and feel so much improvement all around without even touching the new tech skill that's around since I was gone from the scene. This video reminds me of all the Sajam/Core-A/etc. vids I watched before that helped me a lot and this was just what I needed to hear to keep myself motivated. Thank you Phrigid If you ever remembered the name EzE or Fiji, I was a sheik player from back in the day traveling to the FW locals here or there and entering in the bigger Indiana majors from 2016-2018. If you ever see this I hope to see you in more Indiana stuff in the future
Every bit of this video is extremly high quality but the words are what id like to thank you for. Mindset has always been my biggest struggle. Ive searched all over for advice on how to improve healthily but simply knowing about growth midset, trying to learn not to win, and even wanting to lose doesnt get me all of the way there. It helps but it superficial. The things that youve gone over here actually make a noticeable difference in my perception and enjoilyment of the game. I hope to review this video whenever i lose sight of why i play and that this practice will allow me to keep melee in my life for so much longer than the many competitive games ive dropped due to my poor mentality. Thank you for helping me on my journey. I am grateful.
Very wise. Lately I've been grinding with my mains, Sheik and Link, and going really hard in tournaments, with what I now recognize as my conscious mind taking over due to nerves. I've consistently gone 0-2, and have even been doing worse in unranked on Slippi. However, I recently switched from those mains to playing online as Marth, who I have 0 hours of practice in, with the tag Fsmash McGee. My online win rate has skyrocketed, funny enough!
Not sure I agree about the whiff punish, over shoot, under shoot rps. I feel like whiff punish was a form of winning neutral for a while back in the old days but around 2017 everyone started soft committing which gets beat by over shoot. You had it right with the first soft commit hard commit framework. Whiff punishing is too risky because players are so good now they’ll make it look like a punishable whiff when it’s not it’s a soft commit. So now it’s a mixup as to dash back or hard commit and over shoot beats dash back and whiff punish beats hard commit.
I've learned this recently. I play ultimate and I started doing well at my weeklies. As I want to consistently place top 5 at my weekly, i began thinking I had to have my conscious self be involved throughout the game as I was nervous to lose to "bad" players. My conscious self was thinking about very interaction and mistake for most of the sets and that's when i got 7th place. I started to balance out the conscious part and learned to trust the sub conscious. It's like magic that I can have an observation with my conscious mind and then i just let my sub conscious actually implement a solution even if my concsious mind didn't make up a solution, just identified the problem. I've noticed that I do stuff in bracket now that i wouldn't consciously do but that my sub conscious comes up with. It's amazing
i had no idea the inner game was a meme in melee loool the one for music is the one i read and was extremely helpful for all facets of skill expression.
4:51 omg I'm so happy!, I know EXACTLY what this means and feels like. It's really flattering? I don't think that's the right word for this but whatever, it feels great to have a skill advanced enough that I noticed and described to myself what it was that was going on in my brain, then years later get vindicated by a book haha! massive W good job me 🎉
"Please like and subscribe to help me sustain dopamine levels" LMAO And I feared the well of creativity had run dry on melee improvement content. You've got a new sub.
I'm teaching my wife how to play Smash, and this is such a good core concepts video! I'll be showing this to her when she's got a better idea of the concept of neutral.
