Skill matters way more than character choice. But that doesn't mean that some characters aren't inherently better than others.
So saying something like "the better character is just based on your skill with that character" is kinda flawed to begin with. If you were going to think about how good the CHARACTERS were relative to each other, you'd want to get rid of the variablein this case, player skill. So if you had two players of EXACTLY EQUAL SKILL, who knew everything about every character and had them play every match up in the game over and over again, recording results, you'd end up with certain characters with more victories than others, just because that's how the game is imbalanced.
There are character counters, so like DK is below average when compared to the entire cast. But in certain matchups, like against Fox, he actually does really well if the DK player can chaingrab and zero-to-death Fox. DK has that potential. But Fox still does better against most of the other characters than DK does.
And there are people that are prodigious with otherwise "bad" characters. Bum plays DK and has beaten some of the top pros with their top characters. Luigi KA-Master uses Luigi and got 9th, I think at one of the largest Melee tournaments ever. But that's player skill. As a generality, the character still doesn't have as much going for him as the "higher tier" characters.
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Roy is really good. There's a Roy player in Houston named Sethlon who is absolutely amazing, and he taught me a lot of things about Roy. Roy has combos that work really well. He just a lot of trouble getting kills off efficiently. A good Marth player can combo anything into a kill just by leading into an f-smash or getting them off the stage and raping with edgeguards.
Roy can put together combos based around d-tilt and f-air, but they don't lead anywhere. You get damage up, but in order to kill, you're looking for very specific f-smash setups, or just lucky moments where you manage to get people off the stage. And Roy has a lot of trouble comboing characters that are floatier, because he falls fast and doesn't jump as well, so he can't chase and juggle them like Marth can. If they get too far, they'll recover and escape/hit Roy before he gets a chance to follow up.
Those are Roy's biggest two problems, I think. He lacks knockback and stun on combo moves so it's hard to carry people and combo into kills. And he's limited on what characters he can combo, whereas he is a fast faller and can get combo'd pretty easily by most of the cast, so he tends to have matchups that are slightly tipped against him.
And on the flipside, Marth is just kinda... universally amazing.
« Last edited by TobiasXelKythe on Dec 28th 2007 »LUIGI'S GAME IS STEPPING UP [ www.freewebs.com/tobiasxk/LuigiFAQ.txt ]