Editing King K. Rool (SSBU)

King K. Rool's extreme weight, very large hurtbox, and above-average falling speed make him seriously vulnerable to combos, and while his Belly Super Armor can help alleviate this, it's not completely foolproof: if K. Rool takes 36.02% of total damage to his armor over a short period of time, he will suffer a pseudo-[[shield break]] and be rendered immobile until his belly armor recovers. It also replenishes only 0.3% per second, making abuse quite difficult. Its limited HP punishes abuse of this mechanic if used frequently. Although it is hard to break in most matchups, it is certainly possible especially against other heavyweights with strong attacks, such as Bowser and {{SSBU|Ganondorf}}.

Though a lot of King K. Rool's moves have decent start-up, especially for a super heavyweight, an equal amount of them suffer from very high ending lag, which means that King K. Rool gets easily punished if he fails to connect his attacks. Despite the wide array of tools he has at his disposal, he lacks many moves that can simply be thrown out quickly, as many of his attacks are punishable or force him to use up his belly armor. This ironically makes his [[approach]] ineffective despite the sheer amount of different, fast attacks he has; few of his attacks can maintain pressure without being exploited, and the lag can make moves like forward tilt a neutral reset at best. King K. Rool is also vulnerable to being pressured and rushed down due to a poor out-of-shield game; his up smash cannot be used out of shield in most matchups, as the headbutt (which comes out on frame 6) only hits directly above him, while the later plank hitboxes are weak and slow to come out and he is wide open if it's shielded.

King K. Rool's neutral aerial, his fastest and most reliable out of shield option, has poor range, especially behind him, only covering his belly, and is unsafe on hit at low percents. As a result, K. Rool is particularly vulnerable to characters that can cross-up his shield easily, since he effectively has no option to punish this kind of approach and has to resort to retreating or jumping away. Finally, even his amazing grab game has some flaws, mainly due to the low knockback scaling of his throws: forward throw is unable to KO at realistic percentages, up throw requires platforms to KO effectively and is too laggy to have true followups, back throw loses a lot of its KO power if used center-stage due to its low knockback growth, and down throw's extensive mixups and KO confirms more often than not require reads to be effective. It is also affected by the [[bounce glitch]], which adds even more inconsistency to the move.

Additionally, King K. Rool's air game can overall be seen as mediocre. Although his aerials are generally very potent moves and have interesting attributes, including two meteor smashes and armor on some of them, all of these moves (apart from his neutral aerial) suffer from one fatal flaw—very high ending lag in the air—making many of them somewhat situational, and forcing K. Rool to land with the moves to minimize the ending lag in the air. His down aerial's meteor smash hitbox only lasts for two frames and the move itself has high ending lag, making the potential punishes off of it very situational. His up aerial has extreme ending lag (the highest of any aerial in the game), preventing King K. Rool from acting even after a jump (though platforms can alleviate this), making it somewhat risky to use high up in the air. While his back aerial is very strong and has a lingering hitbox, it has very high start-up lag, which makes it easy to stuff out especially with its lack of armor or intangibility, and it additionally has a very weak sourspot that doesn't KO at reasonable percents, making it somewhat inconsistent.