Captain Falcon is one of the most “over-hyped” characters from the general audience perspective, but when we start to think about why Falcon is so hyped compared to other characters, can you really put a finger on a single reason? Falcon’s hype can be broken down into a couple different factors, the technical aspect and the playable aspect of the character. We’ll be going over each of these two factors and in the process hopefully bring your Falcon up a level or two.

We also got some pointers from the infamous Captain Falcon player Joey "Lucky" Aldama, who admittedly is a bit rusty on the current Falcon meta, but still agreed to help out the best he could!

Lucky: “The story is pretty silly, but it mostly goes back to my early days of playing Melee. I must have been around 12 years old when I first started playing Melee with friends. On a random summer night I had a couple friends stay over to game all night when it happened. Half-awake in the middle of the night I started referring to my Captain Falcon as ‘The Batman’ and attacked anything that I could on screen. I honestly have no idea what I was thinking, but it made all of us laugh at the time. In the end for the nostalgia of it I will always call my Falcon ‘The Batman.’”

Falcon’s Technicality

Falcon requires an unbelievable amount of technical control as the character is much more delicate than he may seem. One of the biggest reasons Falcon can be hype is that the audience knows how difficult certain aspects of Falcon’s play is. Understanding how to speed up your Falcon and take advantage of his incredible speed should be your “subconscious goal” when practicing. It’s more important to understand the purpose of/why you need to learn something than to just try and move as fast as you can with tech-skill.

Your speed will increase with time, both from solo practice and playing others, but you should use your speed to enhance your movement. A lot of lower-mid level players get too focused on increasing their speed, without thinking about why their speed is good. You want to use Falcon’s speed to increase his movement options, opening up more opportunities for mix-ups and combos, but to not take away from your overall gameplay or decisions.

Here are a couple main points to focus on with increasing your speed with Falcon, assuming you’ve learned all the basic advanced techniques

Pivots

Pivot aerialing will give you more options with how you hold space with your moves. Being able to do a pivot out of your dash into a neutral-air is a good strategy for catching opponents chasing you. Pivots can also help you manipulate Falcon and his moves in a way to use different/new moves in scenarios you might not normally think of. A tip for learning how to perform pivots is to take advantage of your controller’s snapback. Most Gamecube controllers have some form of snapback, meaning that when your control stick is let go after being held in a direction it will do it’s best to snapback to the original position. However most controllers have an issue with snapback so that the stick actually goes past the original position and then back to the original position. This is what causes your character to turn around seamlessly.

If you have a controller that tends to have a lot of snapback, learn to work with it so you become comfortable performing pivots by dashing and letting go of your stick. If your controller has a lot of snapback, you’ll be able to see pivots occurring more often than a controller with low snapback. If you have a controller with low snapback/you want to try another method, you can move the stick similar to how snapback would move your controller. You want to bring the stick barely past the original position, then let go in order to let the stick return to the original position.

This should result in a pivot, but these are just two ways of pivoting, so however you learn to pivot is good enough for you. Once you get pivots down, try using moves in tech-chase scenarios that might lead to some easier follow-ups (pivot-back-air to cover tech-in-place, or Falcon’s down-air).

Notorious Falcon player S2J utilizing pivots and shield-stopping to continue his combo. From another excellent Falcon guide by Victra.

Smash-turns.

Smash-turns are a similar form of movement to pivots, in the sense that they turn your character around in a very quick manner. Smash-turns are a way of making your character turn around faster than they would normally, in simple terms. What you want to take advantage of with smash-turns is their usage for tech-chases, when you’re looking for tech-chase grabs or you need to move backwards out of crouch (in the case of your opponent rolling in/towards you) using smash-turns will help you move where you want.

Smash-turns are done by “hitting” the control stick in the direction faster/harder than normal in order to turn around on the first possible frames. This isn’t necessarily an aggressive motion, but a fast motion for turning around as soon as possible. One of the main uses for this tech is doing it out of an aerial or jump. You can practice or test this tech by doing a full momentum jump across the stage into smash-turning and jumping/doing something. You should see Falcon turn around immediately after landing with very few frames of anything in between.

Practicing this type of movement will help you when you need to turn around after doing an aerial and landing, there are all kinds of combos where you might hit your opponent in a reversed direction on accident, but could still follow up if you smash-turn in order to turn yourself around as fast as possible to continue your combo. If you’re interested in learning a bit more about smash-turns and their mechanics you can check out this MIOM article.

Drop-zones

Drop-zones are a simple aspect of Melee once you think about them, and they make sense. A drop-zone occurs when you down-throw a character by either the ledge of the stage or a platform, allowing you to do a unique follow-up that wouldn’t normally happen. What is happening is that your down-throw which would normally cause a knockdown on stage due to the throw’s hitstun is now just being applied to the character normally, allowing you to follow-up with a move by just running off the stage. The trick here is you need to be aware of a couple things when doing drop-zones, your opponent’s percent and how they DI the throw.

At most percents you should be able to react to how your opponent DI’s the throw and act accordingly. If you down throw a character by the ledge and you notice that they are either close to the stage or going almost straight up, that means they are holding in towards the stage and you can knee, back-air, or down-air accordingly. However, it is easy enough for your opponent to DI away, meaning that their character will move more horizontally away from the stage, but most characters and percents can be caught with a drop-zone up-air.

This can become a pretty good mix-up for catching your opponents off guard, especially if they think that their DI away is good enough to not get hit then an up-air can definitely secure a K.O. if they’re holding away long enough.

Falcon’s Playability

Defensive Play

For lack of a better word, Falcon’s playability can be extremely difficult for players to master. His overall gameplans are simple but executing any of his simple gameplans can be really difficult, as picking your spots can be hard with Falcon. One of the biggest things that Lucky said about the difference between low-level players and high-level players is that:

Lucky: “Top level Falcon players worry much more about defense and realize just how badly the character can be punished or edge guarded, while also being able to convert even the smallest of openings into huge damage. Lower level Falcons usually pay attention to the punish game of their Falcon hero idols and don't really notice the way they play neutral.”

Falcon’s flashy combos tend to take the attention away from the spots that players start them from, which is equally as important as the actual combo. Being aware of the stage positioning, the move choice that starts the combo with a follow-up, and how the player was able to get the hit are the key factors when looking at starting combos. One of the things that mid and low level players tend to not be aware of is that Falcon starts a lot of his combos from defensive positions, as in Falcon takes advantage and reacts to opponent’s options and punishes accordingly. High-level Falcon play actually involves a lot of low-commitment options that lead into higher-commitment punishes. Here’s what Lucky had to say:

Lucky: “Falcon's defense is amazing. Learning to throw out attacks defensively is key with this character. A lot of top Falcons tend to attack just outside of their opponent's range so that the second they move forward, they move into an attack. Then learning how to anticipate when your opponent does move into these defensive attacks, therefore you can have an easier time reacting and converting these stray hits into big damage.”

You essentially want to focus on doing moves in front of your opponent and, if they get hit, be prepared to follow-up on your move. One of Falcon’s moves which is probably the best move to utilize this strategy is his neutral-air.

Lucky: “It's a 10/10 attack that you can use by retreating or use in place to wall things out. You can dash back at different lengths with pivots to control space with it extremely well and it has amazing reach when you use it offensively moving forward. Defensively is still the best way to use it, but it doesn't hurt to have the mix up of using it offensively.”

Falcon’s neutral-air takes up a large amount of space, it’s fast, and it leads into grabs and other aerials. When using it you want to be prepared to react to whether your neutral-air hits or not. If it hits, you should have your follow-ups be practiced to the point that your hands will move before you can think by primarily grabbing or using another move at high percents. You also want to take into account where you are on the stage and whether another move (back-air, up-air) might be better for where you are vs. where your opponent is. Neutral-air works pretty much anywhere but is best from center stage, whereas back-air is a better choice when your opponent is really shoved in the corner, as back-air will probably lead to a guaranteed K.O. if it hits. This strategy is extremely useful in any/most match-ups, with varying pros and cons. It’s best used when you can outrange your opponent but still usable in most situations.

Lucky: “That strategy in neutral I mentioned can be very hard to deal with. They constantly attack at a range where it feels like if you try to approach them, you run into an attack before you can get one of your own attacks out. It's truly a frustrating thing to deal with when you don't essentially play to counter that style, which by doing exactly what they do, but better.”

Getting Stuck in Shield

A huge weakness of Falcon’s is getting stuck in shield. Getting your momentum halted and being forced to get stuck in shield is one of his biggest counters. Your goal when getting stuck is to focus on a couple things: looking for holes in your opponent’s pressure as well as how to get out of pressure safely. Here are a couple different examples Lucky provides us with:

Lucky: “Wave-dashing out of shield is an amazing tool for any character in the game but Falcon's aerial attacks have very specific scenarios where they can all be absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, with Melee having so many offensive options, it can be hard to really understand when and why you should use aerial attacks out of shield. I highly recommend watching S2J or any of the other top three Falcons and try really hard to pay attention to when they are in shield. Pay attention to what move hits their shield and which move they use to counter out of shield. If you can learn specific timings or scenarios, you can really up your shield game with Falcon.

I'll use Fox and Falco as a reference since they have some of the best shield pressure in the game. Nair-shine or Dair-shine strings tend to be very popular and a well timed Dair by Falcon out of shield can blow these strings up. It doesn't really matter if the opponent is in front of you or behind you either. Although Nair or Dair into a spacie up-tilt can change the timing on this and almost make Dair out of shield unusable. That's where the mix up comes into play, though since if you shield an up-tilt you can pretty much get out of the pressure for free by wavedashing out after. There are way too many options to go over but this is a pretty simple and common scenario.”

So these are a couple different things that you can use to help you deal with pressure. It is also worth noting that rolling unpredictably can be a good way to escape pressure, as long as you’re not doing it too often or at similar timings. It’s better to use wave-dashes out of shield when you can, but buffering rolls is still a good option especially when your opponent is committing to doing lots of shield pressure.

Punish Game

Most players that aspire to play Falcon tend to focus a lot of time on how to combo characters or do niche/rare tech and can get a bit lost with practicing their bread and butter combos as well as learning their percents. When playing against any top tier character in Melee, percents tend to mean more than most lower level players might think. Crouch-cancelling is one of the biggest pieces of anti-Falcon tech out there, so you will want to learn what at percents you can and can’t get correct follow-ups. This brings us to looking at the move choices that high-level Falcon players make, specifically Wizzrobe. Wizzrobe’s heavy-grab based gameplay shows his awareness for crouch-cancelling, grab being Falcon’s best option for countering crouch-cancels. Lucky also wanted to highlight that:

Lucky: “Wizzrobe really showcased what Falcon can do on a flowchart level for the character's punish game, which was so damn good that even S2J and other top Falcons seem to be mixing in that style of punish game. So if any new players are trying to pick the character up, you can definitely learn a lot by looking at Wizzrobe's punish game.

A simple way for beginners to look at tech chasing with Falcon is to break it down into two parts. First at lower percentage you go for grabs when tech chasing since it's easier to react to. Attacking tends to be better mid to high percentages. If I were to say how I feel about it personally though it would be that tech chasing with attacks will always be cooler than with grabs. It just depends on if you care more about winning or about looking cool.”

S2J getting a long combo featuring a couple tech-chasing grabs.

Wizzrobe’s playstyle is based around doing guaranteed options, or at least options that will give him the highest amount of success with least amount of risk. This means he will tend to focus on getting grabs which will lead to guaranteed damage and follow-ups. However, if you do want to focus on going for “cooler” combos, they are just a bit harder to hit. If you practice your reaction timing as well as becoming comfortable with the speed of your moves, you can find a lot of success tech-chasing most characters with pretty much any move.

Generally you can flowchart which moves are better based on percent, stage position, and knowing your opponent’s DI, but each of Falcon’s aerials have a general priority to which move you want to use. Most Falcons will want to tech-chase (in order of general value) with knee, stomp, neutral-air, and then his back-air. Using Falcon’s stomp is the hardest aerial to react with and also holds the highest risk due to how long it takes to come out as well as the possible landing lag, but it has a high value if the move hits. Usually you can react to character tech-rolling away from you by using the momentum from your dash to carry you into using stomp, but otherwise you should use stomp as your read-based or defensive aerial.

Concluding Points

I asked Lucky about what his thoughts were about Falcon in 2018, especially with the rise of S2J, Wizzrobe, and N0ne over 2017. Lucky told me that:

Lucky: “I think Falcon is becoming a much more viable character at the moment especially with three specialists in the top 20. At the end of the day although he is an amazing character, he gets hit very very hard. It might feel like a bit of an uphill struggle when you see your friends taking less damage than you or getting combo'd less if they are playing Peach or Puff. Just remember he is definitely a top tier character and definitely worth the effort to learn.

Falcon seems to cover most of the match-ups very well in 2018. Wizzrobe, S2J and None are all proving the character can go head to head with any of the top tiers atm. If anything, maybe Puff could be a difficult match-up for Falcon and probably the only match-up I could see the character needing a counter pick for. Although everyone is different and if you find yourself struggling with a match-up, it isn't a bad idea to learn another character for that match-up. Just know that as long as another Falcon is out there doing it, you can, too, if you work hard to learn what to do.”

Overall the main theme today was to focus on your defensive game. Figuring out how to react to your opponent’s decisions will help you become more comfortable in stressful situations and using your muscle memory. When your reactions with follow-ups in Melee become second nature then you can spend more brain power on adapting to your opponent’s decisions.