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Super Smash Bros.has many fighters across its five installments. With the latest one in the series,Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, many new fighters have joined the battle. Old fighters have also changed quite a bit from their previous iterations. However, very few characters have changed as much as Zelda, theprincess of Hyrule.
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Zelda is a character that has avariety of options. It can seem polarizing to work to get in on her, especially when that work ends up not paying off. Here’s how you can play against Zelda effectively and win out in most situations.
Zelda’s Strengths
One of Zelda’s greatest strengths is herstage control. If you’re at a distance, she can attack you with projectiles like her Side Special and Down Special (or Side-B and Down-B). Her Side-B can be controlled to go very far or very high before exploding, while her Down-B is a move that she can momentarily control the power and timing for. If opponents do happen to get in, she can get away with her Up-B, which is a teleportation move that has a hitbox around her when she disappears and reappears.
She also hastools for fighting opponents on the inside. Her quick FAir or BAir can apply lots of damage when the sweet spot hits. For her other aerials, DAir is easily one of the best spikes in the game due to its active frames and ability to spike regardless of whether you hit the sweet spot or sour spot (the former of which is very powerful), while Up Air is a great kill option with lots of vertical range above her. Zelda can also get opponents off of her with her Neutral-B, which gives her nine frames of invincibility and has a hitbox that can also reflect projectiles. Along with that is the previously mentioned Up-B, which can combo into itself as a kill option out-of-shield. All these tools, along with her stage control options, give Zeldaa range of effectiveness that’s surprisingly largefor a zoner.
Another strength of Zelda’s is her slipperiness. She hasa variety of tools that can mix up opponents, especially when she needs to recover. Her Neutral-B and Side-B can help her stall in the air, which will keep opponents guessing on when she’ll do her next option, whether it be recovering to the stage or landing on the ground. Her Up-B can also surprise unsuspecting enemies if they don’t play her game and stay away from her, allowing them to teleport directly to them and knock them away. Being a teleport move, it can also cancel off of ledges and platforms, leading to many more options that can surprise opponents, especially if they’re offstage and looking to recover.
Zelda’s Weaknesses
What is perhaps Zelda’s biggest weakness is herinconsistency. A lot of her moves are hard to get the same results out of each time. This is thanks to the precision that’s required to hit a lot of her stronger moves. Her FAir and BAir, while super strong, are hard to hit the sweet spot with all the time because it’s so small and quick when compared to her larger sour spot. Another culprit is how opponents can DI out of her moves easier as damage racks up on them, making her have to work harder for confirms that otherwise wouldn’t work at lower percents.
Her other weakness is herslow and laggy options. Even some of her fastest and strongest options, such as her FAir and BAir, have lots of end lag and landing lag, especially when the sweet spot misses. There’s also her Neutral-B which leaves her a sitting duck if the opponent can predict that she’ll use it. These are just a few examples of the many moves she has that are highly committal, and they can make her eat high damage if used improperly.
All of this is made worse by how slow she is. Fitting for a zoner of her caliber,her ground speed and air mobility isn’t very impressive. This means that it’s hard for her to catch faster opponents off of fundamentals alone, especially in juggling situations. This also makes it hard for her to get away from opponents should she find herself in said situation since she doesn’t have many options that aren’t, once again, highly committal.
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Strategy & Counterplay
Zelda’s main gameplan will be to bait you into making certain decisions, then punish accordingly. This often results in her forcing her opponents to jump in, feigning back, then using a Forward Smash where they’ll land to reset the situation. Part of mitigating this is tonever let her dictate the pace of the game. If she’s trying to bait you, learn to recognize what she’s doing and how she wants you to react. You can either follow up by not taking the bait, or doing so in a way that she can’t exploit.
Zelda plays exceptionally well against players when she knows what they’re going to do. The fix for this is the other part of alleviating her gameplan:utilize mix-up options. If Zelda doesn’t know for sure what you’re going to do, it will be a lot harder for her to hit you with her stronger moves. She doesn’t have the same luxury of making guesses that other characters do, because guessing wrong in order to achieve the desired outcome can put her at an awful disadvantage.
All of this culminates into the main thing you need to do against Zelda:get on the inside, and beat her at her own game. While she is great at baiting and punishing opponents, she doesn’t typically do well in that situation herself. The best thing for this is to stick to combos that she can’t break with her Neutral-B at lower percents once you close the distance, then punish her on her laggy frames with a powerful attack as her damage racks up.
It’s normally a bad idea to use a character against Zelda if they have any of these qualities:slow ground/air speed, large hurtboxes, predictable recovery, and untrue combos. It’s because of this thatIce Climbers, Little Mac, Incineroar, Kirby, and Jigglypuff shouldn’t be used against her. Characters withslow projectiles are often a bad ideaas well, since they get invalidated by her Neutral-B. Keep this in mind if you plan on using characters likeKing Dedede, Duck Hunt, Samus, Villager, or Banjo & Kazooie.
Characters that are better against her are those thathave answers to her projectiles. These can often be in the form of reflectors, multiple projectiles of their own, or some other move that deals with items.Rosalina & Luma, Wii Fit Trainer, R.O.B., Pit, and Mega Manare examples of this. What will give her the worst time is characters withhigher mobility optionsthat can make their way around her stage control tools. It’s a bonus if those characters can keep her in disadvantageous situations with solid combos and fast attacks. Think of characters similar toLucina, Joker, Zero Suit Samus, and — ironically enough — Sheik.
Characters that are half-and-half includeNess, Ridley, and Corrin. They all have advantages and strengths that make fighting Zelda easier. Ness has all the means to deal with her zoning pressure, including a reflector smash attack and an energy-absorbing move that heals him as a result. Ridley has great speed and multiple jumps to help him get in, and Corrin can effectively juggle her and punish her hard when she uses a bad option. However,their helpful tools are paired with some disadvantages, such as Ness’s trouble landing and recovering against her and Ridley’s large size. Corrin’s slow speed, lack of shield pressure, and projectile being useless against her, means they’ll have to play a more patient game to get in than most characters.
