Roy (SSBM): Difference between revisions

As a result of this very close sweetspot, Roy himself lacks a particularly reliable KO move. With the exception of his forward smash, his down smash, and the later hits of his Double Edge Dance, Roy has few options to quickly KO, and even these attacks need to connect in close ranges in order for them to have any reasonable KOing power. Further compounding Roy's problems with KOing are his aerials; even when sweetspotted, none of these aerials can reliably KO under 200%, they require good setups in order to properly connect, and none of them can easily inflict damage in the first place. While he may have two meteor smashes (the third hit of his upward Double-Edge Dance and his down air) and one spike (tippered up smash), all three are highly situational, requiring particularly lucky or skilled setups in order to properly connect. When combined with poor offstage options from having high-lag aerials that are risky offstage and a poor recovery, Roy is almost completely dependent racking up damage with brief combo strings, culminating in a reliance on hard reads and unforced errors by the opponent to garner KOs.

Because of his poor sweetspot hatboxes, Roy also has limited combo ability, in stark contrast with Marth. Roy has slightly below-average air speed like Marth, though Roy cannot move fast enough in the air to compensate hitting with the hilt of his blade, frequently causing sourspotted attacks, resulting in low hitstun and hitlag attacks, impairing Roy's combo and aerial games, and even giving him a poor edgeguarding game, unlike Marth. Roy's moveset is only suitable for aggravating fastfallers, since he at least has chaingrabs and tech chases against them, and can juggle them on stages with few or no platforms such as [[Pokémon Stadium]] or {{SSBM|Final Destination}}. However, that is the extent of Roy's high-level punish game against the cast, and he has no reliable method of achieving any combos or KO setups on [[floaty]] characters such as {{SSBM|Jigglypuff}} or {{SSBM|Peach}}. Roy's combo potential is thus below-average at best, being both stage- and character-dependent unlike Marth, and has led to completely losing matchups against the aforementioned floaty characters.

Roy himself is easy to combo and edgeguard; like other fastfalling characters, his high falling speed harms him by making him extremely vulnerable to juggling. Even with fast falling speed, Roy's vertical survivability from the upper blast line is merely average due to a combination of his lighter weight than characters such as {{SSBM|Captain Falcon}} and much slower falling speed than characters like {{SSBM|Falco}}. Like Marth, Roy also has a non-stellar recovery, though his faster falling speed and higher gravity only exacerbate it to make it far worse than Marth's and among the worst in the game; adding to this, his high falling speed makes him extremely vulnerable to edgeguarding, as well as being easy to [[gimp]]. While Roy's [[Blazer]] is slightly more effective than Marth's [[Dolphin Slash]], due to its greater horizontal distance, multi-hit properties that can aggravate edgeguarders, and its ability to be controlled to an extent, it still has high ending lag, leaving him open to punishes as he lands. Additionally, while Roy can still use Double-Edge Dance to recover horizontally, it is not as effective as Marth's Dancing Blade due to his higher falling speed.

While Roy may appear like he has enough tools as a character to function, in reality, he struggles with nearly every aspect of ''Melee''. His excellent movement is not only outclassed by Marth, but simply does not compensate for his many weaknesses in both the advantage and disadvantage states. Roy's moveset is full of low-impact hitboxes that struggle to push any sort of advantage against non-fastfalling opponents, while he himself is almost trivial to combo, edgeguard, and KO himself. While Roy's raw power up close can punish careless opponents, hoping that opponents make unforced errors is not a reliable strategy. As such, unlike Marth, Roy is a poor character at higher levels of play with sparse representation.