Why Your Main Sucks #1: Falco
By Griffin
This’ll be an ongoing series where I do my best to properly express why every character in this game sucks. Not suck as in “is bad”, mind you, but suck as in “everyone hates you”. It’s the difference between a baby trying and failing to eat candy and a guy who steals that candy. Oh, and for the 3 readers of this blog who are also big on frat life- yes, this series is inspired by TFM’s- “Why Your Frat Sucks” series, because no matter how much time I spend on Melee-related shit or other nerdy ventures, I’m still a wannabe fratstar at heart.
Why Falco though? I understand the bird seems like a weird place to start but I do have a few reasons.
1- You have to start somewhere and I literally hate every character in this game so why not.
2- I just got off KJH’s Twitter.
3- Some guy told me to on Facebook.
Anyhow, fuck Falco. Here’s why.
Low Level
One of my biggest problems with Falco is he’s designed in a way that at the lower level of play he’s so goddamned easy that any documentary-jerking, top-player mimicking Falco main can spend a weekend practicing lasers and shine combos and then immediately show up to their dead-ass local and get top 3 just because of how amazing this character is against shitty players. As a consequence of that you’ll get guaranteed occurrences of annoying Melee player archetype #11- “New Player Who Thinks They’re Good”, simply due to the fact that they live in Buttfuck Nowhere, Alabama, play Falco, and learned how to shine, laser, and dair. At least with other broken characters you don’t get such a high incidence of pasty-faced emaciated teens thinking they’re in a position to tell people what they’re doing wrong because they can “lock down Marth on FD with laser pressure” at their locals or some shit, (shoutouts to Colorado Smash).
But low-level scrubby Falcos aren’t the only issue, that’s just the Triforce of Scrubs of the larger “Falco Sucks” Triforce, there’s still 2 more parts to cover.
High Level
The next bone of mine to pick with Falco is at the opposite end of the spectrum- high-level Falco mains. With no other character in the game is there as much unwarranted bitching, moaning, and crying from good players about their main as there is with Falco. Now, I understand that there are other characters that get bitched about more by their representatives, but I said unwarranted bitching, and that’s a big distinction to be made. It’s the difference between a rich child complaining about how the Lexus his parents bought him was navy blue instead of royal blue and a homeless person complaining that they haven’t eaten in 4 days- they’re both annoying but you at least kind of feel sorry the latter. (Please donate to your local homeless shelter.)
So when a Ganondorf main complains to me about dying everytime they leave the stage I don’t feel bad because fuck Ganon, but I at least empathize to a certain extent. But then you have Falco mains who are leaving their character because they can’t shine into auto-kills anymore and it just makes me want to punch them in their stupid Falco main faces. They say Falco can’t keep up with the meta and it’s like, well no shit he can’t. He probably can’t keep up cause the biggest development Falco has recieved over the past 2 years from you guys is Westballz’s epileptic fit shield pressure. Every other high-tier has had their play optimized in some way, shape, or form lately, be it Sheik’s reaction techchases, Fox’s doing the Armada shine, 20GX techchasing with Falcon, whatever, but Falcos keep doing more of the same and get frustrated when it doesn’t work.
In a nutshell
Man, I’m not asking for the world here… just being able to consistently hit lasers against recovering opponents would be enough. I know it’s hard but for fucks sake, Armada could shoot turnips out of his ass and still manage to gimp virtually every recovery in the game, so you can’t tell me you’re not capable of hitting at least 50% of your off-stage lasers when they matter.
This fucking character is probably the 2nd best in the game, has 4 of the best moves in the game, no matchups he outright loses, and yet 90% of the people who main him at a high-level want to go Fox for teams and against every floaty and/or spend more time practicing their secondaries than they do practicing the bird and then blame it on the character when they don’t succeed. There are some Falco mains I know of who say they’re transitioning from the character because the way they wanna play doesn’t work with him in 2015 and that’s fine, but when people blame their lack of success on the intrinsic qualities of Falco as a character, oooooh man that pisses me off. Update your laser game for 2015 and onward, use the top platform, quit dropping edgeguards, and quit bitching you ungrateful skid marks.
There you had the Triforce of Whiny Pros, but there’s still one more Triforce to go before we’re done here and you wanna know why it exists? You… Probably.
Community
Falco holding his gun sideways and doing everything with an air of indifference made people for the longest time say that if Falco were a person he’d be some cool gangster type but who was still really cool and smart and shit instead of a scumbag, kinda like if Omar Epps’ character from House was a gangbanger, but if the human incarnation of Falco carried over the self-defeating insecurity that his mains had for him he’d end up being more like the fat girls who eat their feelings from Mean Girls.
Even if he didn’t inherit the insecurity he’d still end up looking like the least intimidating G ever though, probably somewhere between Little Bill decked out like a Blood and Earl Sweatshirt dressed in drag after a Xanax binge… But I digress. The idyllic image the community has for what Falco is supposed to be is the final reason he sucks. You (again, probably) perpetuate this notion that Falco is supposed to be some swaglord who does nothing but shoot his dumbass gun sideways, go blip-blip, and spin on people’s heads in an aggressive and flashy way and in the process you (as in the general community) have set the Falco community back an extra 2 years just because the only time you wanna give Falco any love is when someone posts a gfycat of Westballz repeatedly slamming his dick onto his controller to do multi-shines until he breaks some poor schlub’s shield and then punishes the shield break by side b’ing off stage, or something like that.
You reward flashiness over substance and in the process make Falco players poorly prioritize what they should work on and learn. I get it though, it’s natural to prefer flashy play over optimal “boring” play but for fucks sake, just be nice to the Falcos who decide to play it safe… cheer on Westballz whenever he decides to remember that camping the top platform against Peach is an ok idea, tell Zanguzen he looks very pretty this evening, I don’t care what you do just so long as you create an atmosphere to where Falcos can improve on shit that’s actually important.
Now you may be thinking “Wow, that’s a pretty strong reaction to us liking cool things” and you’re right, but you’re also being a reductionist dickhead, because it’s not just about liking cool things, it’s the fact that you liking cool Falco things so much creates this shitty cycle that allows the Falco Sucks Triforce to exist. You only care about octuple shines and unnecessarily complex pillar combos, which creates new Falco mains who forego ever learning fundamentals but have stupidly good tech skill and are insufferable because of it, then those players get better and find out they can’t get by on doing nothing but Falco stuff anymore and start to bitch about their character not being good enough which makes everyone hate them and their character, and then to top it off the community doesn’t want them to actually improve because they think it’ll be boring, which just keeps the cycle going on longer.
It’s all your fault. You’ve got the 3 Falco Sucks Triforces- the Triforce of Scrubs, the Triforce of Whiny Pros, and the Triforce of Shitty Community Expectations, and they all feed back into each other in a loop akin to the Water Cycle, but instead of creating rain it creates auto-cancelled lasers and bird shit.
That’s why Falco sucks.
🙂