A guide to practicing with Falco, but applies to all characters. Also includes some 20XX applications. Taken from stream on 5/7/19. Watch live at -- / ppmd
Excellent video. I love that you don't just show how to do tech skills, but general practice mentality and advice that's useful for any field. A lot of the things you said could apply to learning an instrument, for example.
"with Wavedash, you want to feel what's going on." PP, that, right there, is why I started playing RoA. You taught me about a much more slower paced play in a fast paced game when you wavedash dance in front of Armada. Everyone would've just dash danced to do that, but not you, you prefer to keep all of your neutral options opened, at all times, even if it's less efficient. And that kind of strategic passive aggresive style resonates with me, and it's reflected in something as simple as your wavedash.
PP idk if you realize this but you're not just a good instructor but you could be an amazing coach. You absolutely understand how to explain decently complex concepts ideas and actions in a concise and easy to understand manner. That's talent. You should coach :)
I really love how detailed this guide really is! It's very useful to practice on playstyle, defensive options, and spacing!! As a falco main, I took the time to watch this guide. Thank you for being an amazing teacher :D
You're an inspiration to a lot of us, and definitely to myself. You are the player who inspired me to take my neutral game more seriously and start really paying attention to space in my games. I play more Rivals of Aether than Melee, but the concepts translate pretty smoothly. I generally aspire to play with the level of clarity and awareness that you do. Keep it up, man, we all love you.
Awesome to see you back in the game PP! I got into the scene when in 2014 and was super sad to see you leave. So excited to see you think through a practice and drop some knowledge. Can't wait to see you get back to crush some gods.
Thanks for looking out for the little guys Mr. Dr. PP. I know it's gotta be tedious for high level players to post guides like this again and again, but I find them helpful, and they get me fired up about practicing Melee with my boys 8-)
Ppmd, in my opinion most likely the best super smash melee player who ever held a GameCube controller. You’re low key improving the meta with this knowledge my man
PPMD I love you. Just you streaming gives meaning to my existence, so freaking happy to see you back in any way and any amount. Forever the best melee player and personality
PPMD would make a GREATTTT teacher (like he shud be a high school teacher). natural charisma and always chooses his words carefully. this wasn't even a falco guide but a life guide to getting good at anytihng. also try adding a button input graphic
Dude I was literally just listening to that "Geoff - smash music" song about you which then caused me to search "how to play melee" as I want to learn and then I return to my sub box to see this? WOW.
For people watching this after 2020, the recordings section of this guide can be done more easily with Unclepunch.V3 instead of 20XX like Kevin does. Right now is available on patreon only but it'll be free for everyone in the near future :)
The biggest thing to mitigate his lasers is to stop buffering shield or spamming jump like you are probably doing every time you get hit. If you are in range of falco doing laser > dash > aerial, you can actually just let the laser hit you, pause for a second to wait for your stun to end, then do whatever you want. A little bit of hitstun followed by you being completely actionable is less of a risk than about the same amount of shield stun and you being stuck in shield with only wavedash/jump/shine to save you. If you dash away, the falcos aerial will miss and you can pivot grab/drill/nair/upsmash/whatever. Bad falcos constantly spam laser > dash > aerial because they are conditioned to it always working on people that cant deal with it. Practice doing this, it is 100% crucial to dealing with lasers in a way that doesn't make you commit to a jump or something. You can even do take laser > dash towards falco > nair/drill and hit him, so long as falco doesnt do an immediate aerial. Typically, what happens is good falcos will understand that you are dashing away, so he will start to do dash laser > laser or dash laser > dash laser, to follow you and let you give up the stage and put yourself in the corner. By taking the first laser, then doing dash in > nair, you will actually beat out the second laser if you are fast enough(there may be discrepancies with fox being at high %, falco shooting fadeback or fast lasers, or certain spacings, but typically this is pretty good), stopping falco from getting center stage for free. You can also dash in the direction of better spacing for acting out of the laser before the laser hits you. For example, you are about to get hit by a laser that is spaced in such a way that falco will get a guaranteed laser > grab, you can dash away before the laser hits you, then dash away out of stun. The first dash stops laser grab from being a thing at all, and the second dash gets you out of range of the nair that might be coming your way. Instead of the second dash away, you could do drill in place, or toward falco, upsmash maybe. Anything you want, your arguably at the advantage. You also need to understand what makes your full hop so good. A lot of fox's always do dash forward > full hop > early nair > then hold forward or fastfall in the same place every time, and then get whiffed punished half the time(or every time if the opponent is good). A big thing that people overlook which makes fox so good is the fact that you can do full hop, and then mix up fast fall timings, driftback, and late/early aerials to put out almost unreactable situations for people in the corner. Say you just full hopped over a falco laser that he shot from under battlefields side platform. You are spaced such that if he doesn't move your aerial will hit with normal drift and fast fall. This is a good position to be in, but it's not without risk. He could dash away, pivot grab > backthrow and now you are in a really bad spot(or on side plat if you are subscribed to kjh's excellent youtube channel). If you were to begin fading back your jump, then fall down, you will instead fall out of falcos grab range, and falco will have put himself deep in the corner(a terrible position, despite what a lot of falco/marth players think). You can then begin playing neutral from a better position in center instead of the true neutral state that you started at. This seems like a small win, but you took falco shooting a laser, forced a mixup with the full hop, and even with taking less risk and deciding on a less aggressive option, you still won stage out of it. You could have committed to the fast fall nair, and maybe you would have hit him, or maybe not. But it's up to falco to deal with this losing position, and for you to decide how much risk you want to take. The fadeback may have also beaten falco trying to dash under you, you could catch him with bair/drill/nair depending on % and where he ends up being when you cross paths. So you are covering multiple options, and winning stage control almost passively if falco decides not to engage. You can also mixup fast falling and not fast falling when you are above falco, and he cant cover both with up tilt since it is too fast to react to. He has to just predict which you are going to choose to do. You can wait and watch him up tilt, then fall and drill him. Or you can fast fall immediately, and drill to catch him off guard. Try mixing these up. It's not ideal because you are risking getting hit on a 50/50, but not mixing it up means that you are playing a 0/100 instead. This is important to consider about mixups, if you are only choosing scissors, you will always lose to rock. Another thing, when you are on platforms especially on BF, pokemon, and dreamland, falcos will usually place themselves in a good position to beat you doing sh > aerial off of the plat towards center, and then can just uptilt you for free if you do, or dash dance > whatever they want. From here, try instead doing sh > fadeback > fast fall. Aim for being out of their uptilt's range. You can often bait them into it and whiff punish. There are a ton of little interactions like these that you actually have more choices than you are probably aware of. Consider all of your options and their impact on the situation and see what you can set up. Things that are especially good are usually timing mixups which are hard to discern and spacing mixups which put you closer to center or out of their threat zones, since the former can win you stage and the latter can bait them into whiffing an attack. Also, mixups of which their safest choice puts them in an undesirable spot, you can force them to make mistakes very easily if you are smart about it. Be aware of your own lag, and the time it might take them to reach you. Also, fadeback sh > nair/drill is extremely good against people that like to dash dance whiff punish you. You can't react to it, it is not obvious whether fox is doing full commit or fadeback until its too late. This has big implications against marth for example, or characters who like to wavedash back. If marth dashes away enough to pivot grab the full drift forward nair/drill, he wont have time to dash all the way to you to get the grab on the fadeback. So to counter this and get his whiff punish, he HAS to space closer to you. This means that if he thinks your doing fadeback nair, he is now susceptible to being hit by the full nair. Players like zain recognize that this is a losing battle, and always space for the full nair anyway. This means that he is going to sometimes give up stage, but if fox does happen to do the full nair, then he will get the pivot grab that he wants. Try doing sh > fadeback nair against samus and watch her wavedash back dsmash like a dummy, then take your free drill shine upsmash to the bank and laugh at their pathetic mid tier character! Also, upsmash will outspace any of falcos options when he is facing away from you(uptilt/bair/whatever). When you want to dash > upsmash, put your index finger on Y and your thumb on the cstick. This is by far the best way to do JC upsmash in my opinion, as it is consistent and lets you dash freely up until the frame you want to jump, meaning you can easily do "pivot" > jc upsmash, without needing to input a difficult sequence on the left stick. Is falco facing the other direction while your in the corner? He's probably going to bair or uptilt, dash in and upsmash him. Be weary of him baiting you, though. And a couple less advanced/nuanced tips: 1. sdi all of falco's attacks when your being combo'd. Watch some high level fox falco and pay attention to how fox sdi's shine and dair to move himself away from falco enough to get out of the combo or to make them harder to perform. You can even mix up sdi on certain moves to make the follow up awkward for falco to get, if you can bait him into wavedashing the wrong way for example, or sdi'ing dair so that shine will send you the wrong way. 2. CONTROL CENTER STAGE. This is a big deal. If you have center stage, you are in an advantage. You have more options at your disposal than your opponent, and a character like falco is risking death if he gets aerial shined. Hold center. If they dont seem to want to fight their way out, they are trying to cheese you with bthrow shenanigans. Force different mixups at them or try to get them to over commit out of the corner, keeping in mind that they want to cross you up to win center. 3. The best tip I can give you for any matchup is to look at the choices you make in neutral, and consider what you could have done instead. Finding out what works against different characters is all a matter of looking at the interactions that play out during a match, assessing their risk/merit, and looking for other options you can choose and baits you can make out of them. tl;dr: this game is ****ing deeeeep
Just started playing and fell in love with falco playstyle still need a ton of more practice and a better monitor but this video will help a ton appreciate it and keep up the great work
Hey PP I was wondering if you'd consider making a video explaining why ppl make some of the common mistakes that they do (air dodging too close to when you jump making you short or full hop when wavedashing for example). I don't now if you could think of enough examples you'd want to go through to make a full video just thought it could be a cool sub goal or something. Either thanks for the sick guide, love your content, you're amazing.
Please, PLEASE make the Marth practice guide now. My region of Ottawa, Canada is dominated by Falco's. How am I supposed to catch up to them now? In all seriousness though very happy you are here with us again. Even though I main marth I still learn from your analysis and practice philosophy. Much love PP!
Oh my god PP you're the best. I'm gonna get so good with my Falco :D Sorry for being so late to the vid, I was practicing guitar. Hope you're doing well man, loving the vids. Also a quick question, why do I always have a harder time hitting shines with Falco, but with Fox its so easy? Is there a hitbox difference? Sorry if you said it in the vid and I missed it lol my memory is terrible
@@PPMD1 Oh ok! Thanks PP! Oh and sorry for all the questions, but is there any way I can help with the channel at all? I really wanna get invested in the channel and I want to see if there's anything I can do to help support the channel or grow it
Well someone earlier said they were sad there were no ads, and I have monetization enabled on this video. Do you know why this would be? Also, if you can help with thumbnails or know someone who could that could be interesting down the road. Finally, if you have any ideas for content that would be great too. Your desire to support is much appreciated =)
@@PPMD1 Yeah man I'll work on that. I'm no expert, but I think I have an answer for the ad issue. Ads will only display if one is available. Continue releasing quality content, and your subscribers (and ad clicks) will come. For thumbnails, I could try my hand in that. Not too great of an artist but I could give it a shot if it means helping the channel. And content ideas will be easy lol. Thanks for letting me help man, means a lot
The doc seemed in high spits.This vid is so much content and so long yet he never seemed to get tired despite it being a one take. Compared to the past few years, This is fantastic. This is a FULL, WELL MADE RU-vid guide, with the narrator highly knowledgeable in the topic at hand... Ladies and Gentlemen: ! ! ! H I S P O W E R I S R E T U R N I N G ! ! !
Question for you PPMD: what are your thoughts on alternative ergonomic controllers? I purchased a Smashbox this week due to having constant defective GameCube controllers and spending a enormous amount of money on them. Notches and other modifications are alternatives to fixing several issues with the controllers however those modifications generally don't last forever due to the natural wear and tear on the GameCube shells. I also experience hand pain from time to time from prolong play due to practicing strict and frame perfect inputs. Do you believe that more alternative ergonomic controllers are beneficial for the smash Community? Or do you believe they pose a potential problem that may lead to macros and potentially cheating?
They're good, but we need to make them fair relative to GCC so they're good alternatives but let us support official hardware/older players. The cheating can be an issue too, but I think we should say it's banned like we do with GCC macros and if it becomes an issue we will devise a way to test for it, before top 8s anyway.
Just started playing Melee in July. I think my biggest problem is when I face an opponent that just runs at me I get destroyed. I am trying to practice my survival DI and SDI, but I sitll get TOD comboed. I also don't feel like my movement is getting better even though I am practicing.
A good thing to add to the end there, is just take a breathe, and acknowledge you are taking a breathe. It really goes a long way when practicing for a long time.
You need to mess around with Uncle Punch on top of 20XX. Not all the same functionality, but it does make practicing and testing certain things much quicker.
@@PPMD1 Awesome. Aside from practicing simple things like shield drops after attacks, amsah techs, ledge techs and that kind of stuff. It has a mode that lets you pick the percent and the DI of the CPU, and automatically save-states it. Great if you are lazy and hate setting it up in 20xx.
