Editor’s Note: The following is part three of a series of articles on various playable characters from the fourth installment of the popular video game “Super Smash Bros.,” available on the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. It is intended for competitive and semi-competitive players of the game.
Following a fairly depressing article last week about everyone’s favorite boy, this week I want to write about the character which I actually call my main in this game. I’m referring to Falco Lombardi, Smash 4’s lovable brash, cool, collected, sidekick pilot. Falco is one of Smash 4’s most interesting characters. Yet, Falco is also arguably the game’s most maddening character.
Simply put, Falco is not very good in this game. Falco, on paper, has the tools to be viable at a high level, but all of Falco’s good attributes are negated by a small selection of negatives that are gaping.
Let’s have a look at Falco!
What’s good about Falco:
Falco has a really good combo game. Some of Falco’s late percentage stuff is situational, but I can promise you that most characters, especially heavies, will be in for a world of hurt if Falco gets a grab on them, lands a dash attack, or a down tilt. Falco has a mean and unforgiving air game in particular.
Falco has the game’s best reflector. This really helps Falco compete with campy characters which would otherwise tear him apart without hesitation, such as Villager, King Dedede, Link and Duck Hunt. This reflector has other uses than just sending projectiles back too; when used at a specific distance, it can be used to trip foes, allowing Falco to potentially get the jump on them a lot easier.
Falco is downright oppressive against the game’s worst characters. This might not seem like much, but Falco holds a really big advantage against characters such as King Dedede and Bowser Jr. What this means is that Falco is very clearly better than the game’s worst characters, despite not being the absolute best in the game by any means.
Finally, Falco plays a really good pressure game and can generally be difficult for lower leveled players to take on. Falco can gather momentum really well with his good air game, and with other niche tools such as Falco’s down air, which spikes and Falco’s smash attacks. On stages like Battlefield, Falco can also shark (hitting players on the platforms while you’re underneath them) really well with a fast up tilt and good short hop aerials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIVcaaULckY&list=PL6_ZNxJPBxUL83DGxK44AKhe9IJtOGVjs&index=8
In the above video, I do a good job of showing what Falco can do. Now, Marinara, my opponent, is by no means low level at all. He’s a very formidable opponent. However, once I gain momentum in this game, I never really go back. I make a series of good predictions on Marinara’s movement options and a lot of his options in general, in the neutral and in the air. After I take the first stock with my down air, I go on a ravenous momentum spree, where I took one hit to get myself to 84 percent, and then proceeded to hit him for 113 unanswered percent of damage before getting hit. By the time he broke up my streak, the game was essentially out of reach for him. Falco has a good advantage state in general, especially against heavies.
Now, let’s have a look at what isn’t so great about Falco:
Falco is really, really slow. It’s not like Melee or Brawl, where Falco can fly around the stage slinging around lasers and creating a borderline oppressive zoning projectile wall. Nope, Falco is really slow. Characters that Falco should dominate in theory, such as Link, Duck Hunt or Corrin, are characters who actually hold advantage against him in the case of the former two, go even, or only barely are at disadvantage to him in the case of the latter. Falco’s approach game is really iffy because of this.
Falco’s blaster is nowhere near as effective as it used to be. This is where Falco’s mobility nerf hurts. Falco also got heavily nerfed with his blaster: double lasers, which have been a signature move of Falco’s up until Smash 4, no longer exist. This reduces the effectiveness of Falco’s blaster drastically; very few characters are actually threatened by Falco’s blaster due to how slow it is. It can’t force characters to approach, spare a select few, the way it used to be able to. You can really only use the blaster against extremely campy foes. Thankfully, you can at least use it liberally in these matchups.
Despite being considered to be slower, but being more powerful than Fox, Falco actually really struggles to close the stock on a foe, easily moreso than Fox. Falco doesn’t have any kill confirms, nor any kill throws, Falco pretty much has to pick up a read and hit the foe with a smash attack to close stock. This issue is slightly mitigated when you consider Falco can drop-shield-down smash (use his shield to block an enemy hit, drop the shield and use down smash before the foe can react) but this does nothing to help Falco against campy characters who won’t want to get up in his face.
Finally, the icing on the cake here is that Falco holds a very dubious duo of being a lightweight character with a fast fall speed. Kill confirms, such as Bowser’s Koopah and Donkey Kong’s Ding Dong, work ridiculously early against Falco because Falco does not get the protection of being a floaty faller like his fellow light weights mostly do. That also means the window to hit Falco with a kill confirm is usually going to be very, very wide, making Falco easy for most characters to close stock against.
That begs an interesting overall question: how viable is Falco?
Falco can perform at a regional and local level fairly adequately. There are Falco players out there, such as Atari and most notably Keitaro, who have done good things with Falco at that level. At the national level though, you can pretty much forget it. The environment there is much too hostile for Falco to be viable at. Falco is definitely outclassed by his comrade Fox at the national level: Fox can realistically accomplish anything Falco might want to do. Falco holds big disadvantage against many of the game’s prominent characters, such as Bayonetta and Cloud, that further ruins his potential at the national level. Overall, Falco can work, but really only as high as the regional level. After that, you’ll want to give Fox a try.
To end off on a happy note for a change, here’s a fun video of what happened when I jacked Falco’s stats to insane levels with a Smash 4 mod: