| During the game's release, Fox was considered a mid-tier character by the ''SSB4'' community. Players believed the reductions to his overall damage output, the weakening of his up smash, the heavily increased landing lag on his aerials, the loss of [[Blaster]] [[auto-cancelling]] and shine-spikes, and his increased frailty resulted in him being worse than his ''Brawl'' incarnation. However, they slowly reassessed their thoughts on the character, as the removal of [[chaingrabbing]] and [[edge-hogging]] and the heavy changes to [[hitstun]] cancelling would prove beneficial to Fox, as such mechanics plagued him in ''Brawl''. Opinions on Fox improved further as players discovered the first two hits of his jab could preform [[infinite]]s and easily combo into other moves, including his main finishers. As a result, a massive amount of Fox players rushed into the competitive scene and quickly gained results, with many spamming the infinite as their battle strategy. Ultimately, this "infinite" carried even casual players to victories over experts. While his jab received nerfs in patch 1.1.0 (which removed the infinite and reduced its combo utility, and caused his large playerbase reliant on the infinite to either drop Fox or preform noticeably worse), his results have continually improved, with smashers like {{Sm|MegaFox}}, {{Sm|Sodrek}} and {{Sm|Larry Lurr}} getting excellent tournament results, and the latter winning against {{Sm|ZeRo}} 3-0 in a dominating fashion at one point. He has also notably benefited from the nerfs to {{SSB4|Sheik}}, {{SSB4|Luigi}}, and {{SSB4|Bayonetta}}, who were among Fox's most challenging match-ups prior to their nerfs, though he still struggles against the latter two.
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