Contrary to popular belief, anyone in the A tier and above is considered viable in Melee. It's just Fox has so many tools that he stands above the rest.
And I think the point of the article was how interesting it is when people find untapped potential in a character originally seen as low tier even though balance patches don't exist. Jigglypuff being the prime suspect of that case. Balance patches are cool and all but sometimes it's better to just let a game evolve on its own.
Did you guys know Bowser's u-tilt can't hit in front of him anymore?
Call me butter, because I am on a roll! 3ds friend code: 5258-0885-3903 Wii U: Bowser CharizardFrom what I hear, Fox is considered to have the absolute most potential of any character... but doesn't actually win tournaments all that often. In theory he can destroy everything mercilessly, but in practice, what separates Melee's Fox from Brawl's Metaknight is that the former actually has meaningful weaknesses. Unless the Fox player makes no mistakes, his weaknesses will be exploited, and that's something very many characters can do.
It doesn't make any sense to claim that "only" Fox is viable when one of the most powerful players in the world has a widely feared Young Link and a Pikachu player has been making waves, among others. Sure, those less common characters are less common because they don't have as much potential and a lot of their wins can be chalked up to their opponents not being used to the matchup, but that's how the game works. You're not pitting perfect computers against one another, but fallible humans. So as long as the best characters have sufficiently great weaknesses, they will still be beaten.
(Now of course, the question is how big a weakness is sufficient. Diddy has terrible vertical recovery, but apparently people aren't managing to make use of that. Probably because his horizontal recovery is quite good and there's barely any attacks that don't send you upwards.)
I'd say Diddy's biggest weakness is that if his recovery is interrupted he can't use it again. I've seen did Kong players, as well as my Diddy amiibo, recover from just above the blast line.
Call me butter, because I am on a roll! 3ds friend code: 5258-0885-3903 Wii U: Bowser CharizardEven Diddy's own Banana could be used against him. He's totally helpless if you have the guts to straight up attack him while he's recovering or smart enough to be able to hit him with a projectile like the Gordos.
Call me butter, because I am on a roll! 3ds friend code: 5258-0885-3903 Wii U: Bowser CharizardMy favorite pro-Smasher is aMSa, he plays Yoshi in Melee and even got to Top 8 with him and his Yoshi is just crazy. In Sm4sh he plays Greninja and was the one responsible for people to start paying more attention to the frog now.
Actually, it seems that Japanese players are way above everyone else when it comes to playing Greninja, the Japanese are finding all kinds of frame-perfect combos with him that can make an opponent go from 0% to 70% and other things like that.
And when every other offensive tactic in the game is automatically gimped by merely shielding...
"Tell them to shut up and have some faith in me." - dead flashback guyIt's also ridiculously hard to perform.
So I don't think it'll be seeing much use outside of very rare situations.
But yeah, don't underestimate the frog.
edited 17th Feb '15 9:37:36 AM by FullMoon
With enough skill, absolutely devastating. I should know, I main him.
Call me butter, because I am on a roll! 3ds friend code: 5258-0885-3903 Wii U: Bowser CharizardLike a lot of this game's heavyweights, Bowser suffers quite a bit from his more potent moves being either heavily telegraphed and/or leaving him wide open. Against faster characters/players, you'll likely just end up getting kicked around far more often than actually kicking people around.
Plus his recovery options are pretty subpar in a game where most of the cast have recoveries ranging from "great" to "god-tier".
edited 17th Feb '15 2:54:12 PM by Demonfly
"Tell them to shut up and have some faith in me." - dead flashback guyBowser's capable of landing incredibly powerful hits but won't be getting them off very often. On the other hand, he has several good mid-power moves available to himself that come out faster than you'd expect, usually at the price of range. An important tool in his belt is the Whirling Fortress- On the ground, it starts very fast and can land either a single big hit right on startup or a lot of little ones if you space and time it right.
I sure said that!

They're still considered high tier as far as I know, just not nearly as popular as Sheik and especially Diddy.