The best part about melee is how deep and subtle these things get when you start playing better players. Things that seem like hard commitments can be done so they are soft commits, over shoot and undershoot have ranges, certain hitboxes can beat shield, etc. Also, the concept of adapting / levels of pattern matching are so incredibly deep in this game because of all the different movement / positional options. Fantastic video btw, you distilled the nebulous idea of neutral down to some concrete things, without being too specific (which is really, really hard - so you deserve major kudos for that). The only other channel that I think captures these deep concepts that you talk about is Core A Gaming. Really enjoyable video, I plan to rewatch it many times to keep it in my head
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!
The fact that you just came out the gate with content like this blows my mind. I know you've been doing this for a minute but you make it seem like you've been doing this for a lot longer than you have. Keep it up homie, and congrats on the engagement :)
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 😊
Holy shit this is outstanding I watched Toph's reading of the Machaboo fundamentals article a few weeks ago and have been thinking about the RPS of point 2 since. Thank you for using the terms undershoot/overshoot, hearing those terms connected the Machaboo 3 structure directly to smash. Your details on building and deconstructing sequences are super helpful too. This was a big knowledge level up, thanks a ton! Gonna work to turn this into skill
Falcon and Marth are two of the only characters I can think of these particular concepts continually applying to since there's no projectiles. Maybe a "3 Ways to Make Neutral More Complex" would be good, exploring some of the limitations of this rule of thumb (there's more than 3 as well, so plenty of content!). Great for those learning the game though (which you mention at the beginning), as you're right to try and simplify the concept first, I always have a hard time explaining exactly what I mean when I say neutral though.
You can think of projectiles as just a really big sword in this example though. IE laser can be both a soft and a hard commitment depending on the range, and-
really, [reeeaaally] the best way to learn neutral is to watch matches in slow mo, I find subscribing to a model like this can fog your perceptions if you take it as seriously as may seem convenient
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.
This illustrated very clearly the (very important) conncepts i was realizing i havent been paying attention too enough. This helped me compartmentalize this a lot, and the way people talk about it seems way easier to follow now. Thanks a lot
great video, people always make neutral so complex but this really helped break it down. I'll try and think about this actively while playing from now on
video is pretty brilliant, because of its simplicity. introduce basic concepts then build upon it, show when and where to use it, then demonstrate with an example. love it. could you please link the song? its a banger
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.
Literally always sucked ass at neutral every since i have been playing smash games since 7, and started actually playing melee this january (extremely inconsistentently for like 4 years). This six minutes literally just completely chamged how i played the game. Thx ☺️
I keep coming back to this video. I only just noticed your point about just shielding if they overshoot with hitboxes only, i also learned this in game, a dash back -> pivot/dash in shield is like a really strong option and i kept losing to it because i only overshot with hitboxes
Great job distilling neutral down. I've been aware of the RPS cycle of hitbox grab shield but didn't consider whiff punish overshoot undershoot another one. Definitely gonna keep that in mind going forward. What's the music for the first 4 minutes?
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.
id lump CC in with shielding since it typically beats hitboxes but loses to grab. Left it out to keep it simpler for new players but probably should have mentioned it a little bit
Great explanation but don't believe your use of undershooting is accurate to how it is most commonly used, undershooting is most often the drift back or early use of an uncommital option in order to feint commitment and to get your opponent to try and punish with a commitment you can then punish in return as you were not in the spot they expected you to be, what you describe as undershooting in the video is normally referred to as "walling"
