SSBU/Ryu/Matchups

This page includes write ups and various other notes from Shotocord. This will include matchup notes geared towards Ken and Ryu. The names of who wrote the matchup write up will be listed.

Steve
{{MatchupSummaryBox https://twitter.com/nescartridges/status/1317965630230900737?s=20
 * Game=SSBU
 * character=Steve
 * favorability=
 * oneliner=
 * summary=

Ledge Jump {{clr|special|Focus}} beats the Gimr ledge trap.

Don't hit the pressure plate with {{clr|special|Shoryuken}} while recovering. Don't hit the TNT as well if using Ken {{clr|special|Heavy Shoryuken}}. The flames will make it explode.

From korkskrou:

After playing as Steve and practicing his moves and learning his frame data and stats for a while I figured out that most people are studying the Steve mu in a somewhat wrong way.

Steve's moves and mechanics make him play more or less the same exact way regardless of matchup, so learning how Steve himself works and how his moves are helps way more for understanding counterplay than just fighting him a lot or watching VODs.

Obviously the latter are mandatory for practicing the mu but Steve is arguably the biggest knowledge check in the game for his entire kit because he has tons of openings that you can't see yourself while just fighting him since his animations convey nothing.

The single most noticeable one is him mining, you should think of Steve mining almost the same way as inkling refilling his ink.

Don't even bother punishing it unless he's doing it right in your face because it's not really going to make him stronger to mine, it just lets him actually play the game Steve will get materials whether you like it or not, and getting overly antsy over it won't let you stop him from getting stronger as the game progresses, it only makes you more predictable and easier to beat in a dragged-out game.

The most important effects that Steve will get over the course of the game are gold and diamond, which he'll definitely get at least once in the match no matter what. Diamond is strong for obvious reasons but gold is arguably the more dangerous because it's going to have longer average effect over a full match as it makes his trash neutral a lot safer with the tiny improvement to his frame data, while diamond keeps his weaknesses exactly the same but only improves his punish game even more than it is by default, you can treat diamond the same way as waft basically, don't worry about it until later in the match since he'll save it for a fresh stock and he'll almost always have it a couple minutes in.

I said several times that his neutral is terrible and that should sound a bit off to most people who don't actually play Steve. His moves are fast and decently large while being safe and mobile(ish), and his punish game is busted, but you need to focus on his stats for the most part before Steve's counterplay properly clicks. A lot of people compare him to Kazuya because Kaz also has super strong advantage and mediocre-ish neutral, but Steve is even more extreme. His moves will nearly never hit you if you know his burst range and don't let him near you. Basically, the only things he can do in neutral against Shotos are mine to threaten you with buffs later and put up blocks to set up stage control. His approach game is damn near nonexistent outside of his exploitable minecart and he only fakes pressure with his tool buffs and material bar getting shinier.

Steve has a lot of minor and hard to notice openings that are very hard to know without playing Steve yourself or directly seeing someone exploit them. Yes UTilt on shield is basically always safe, but Steve approaching you with UTilt has a massive "poke low" target on him because UTilt is very small.

DTilt on shield is plus, but he needs to somehow get near you and catch you shielding for that to happen. Don't bother standing back and shielding within his burst range, as it's less dangerous to throw out your own move that will likely beat all his safe options. For Shotos that would be {{clr|tilt|LFTilt}}, {{clr|smash|DSmash}}, {{clr|special|RH}} for Ken and {{clr|special|Hado}} for Ryu to cut him short, and these options will only really lose to FTilt as a grounded approach (which is between -10 and -8 on shield and can be punished with {{clr|special|USpecial}}, {{clr|smash|USmash}}, or {{clr|grab|Grab}} OOS depending on his tools and its staleness), and his fairly slow grab that doesn't have all that much effective range because of Steve's pathetic ground speed. Steve can't approach safely period, he usually has to deal with your defensive options by making you approach by threatening with mining or slowly accumulating stage control with blocks and fake approaches

Steve placing blocks is another small opening that's hard to see and harder to know when you can punish him for it. Steve block place is 15 frames per block + 3 frames of jump squat, so for example if you see that he's placing a 2 block tower you have 33 frames to punish assuming you know your strongest option that can close that distance and assuming you know where he'll be standing after he places the blocks (usually standing on top of the 2nd one, but he can be either in front of it or behind it as early as frame 22 of the tower's start, you need to know/react to his habits to correctly punish this and all other block placements).

Another common thing is people getting punished for attacking his blocks or trying to stop him from building.

Blocks can look scary or inticing to attack, but really the only blocks you should bother going out of your way to break are ones blocking you away from center stage or ones that are setups for Steve to do future combos/confirms with. Any wall keeping Steve near ledge or otherwise placed randomly around while he was mixing up approaches is basically useless to him since he's so slow and clunky that he can't actually make use of the random leftover blocks while you potentially can use them against him be it with with superior range, mobility, or to maintain a lead by stalling with them yourself.

Steve typically puts up a barrier of a few blocks and blocks himself in near ledge to give himself time to mine or craft, and this is the time that he's the least vulnerable and least dangerous. The risk/reward of attacking him through a known safe wall setup is abysmal for Shotos because either you'll just stale your strong moves breaking the blocks and get nothing or you'll get severely punished by Steve during hitlag of hitting the blocks/endlag after breaking them. It's like approaching a Mii Gunner behind his mine while he charges a charge shot and trying to break the mine so you can hit him out of the charge. You'll just get punished for trying to interfere with a safe activity that doesn't actually do as much as it looks like it does while even if you succeed you won't get much out of it.

Dirt/wood block walls are common near ledge for Steve to mine behind because he'll usually not have many strong resources if he's needing to mine badly enough to give you the whole stage by choosing to go near ledge himself, and it's extremely dangerous to approach his block walls here because 1) you won't get much off of breaking them even if he messes up his punish, 2) you are within range of a bunch of approach setups after the bottom block breaks that use grounded elytra or minecart to hit you while he's safely setting up said approach by getting materials, and 3) you are near a safe Steve who is near ledge and are an easy target for huge damage off of setups that use the stage's length to extend his combos with FTilt.

So just let him mine while you keep stage control until he's satisfied with how many attempts he gets to minecart/set up block combos before his materials go dry again the concern that he'll just mine forever behind the blocks and keep getting stronger materials and tools isn't that big a deal since 1) he's going to get that anyway and 2) he can't mine forever near ledge behind one block setup because of how the orientation is on his actually safe block formations not allowing him to put the blocks back up in the same spot when they break again: the 3 wide base 1 block high walls are going to break from the inside out, bottom blocks first, meaning when they break in a few seconds he'll have to either push for stage control or retreat another few steps to get another safe wall up to mine more, both of which benefit you via either forcing him to approach you for a bit from a usually unfavorable position or by giving you even more stage control from retreating, so just prepare for what he'll do when he gets out of the blocks rather than trying to force him out yourself and getting punished hard.

Again, this is another situational awareness scenario that will happen at least a dozen times every match with a lot of incorrect choices for you to mess up on and knowing when and how you can push in on a Steve's block wall mining depends on the wall he built, type of block he built the wall with, its position on the stage, who has the lead, what your and Steve's %s are at, how long the blocks have until they go out, and what you've seen the Steve do in this situation before. It's raw Steve character knowledge rather than specific matchup knowledge since the same walls are safe on most characters and the same openings are always there for any character to exploit if the other guy knows them, so to really learn the Steve matchup you need to know Steve's setups, options, and major flaws inside out from the Steve's end rather than relying on your character's knowledge of what move is often good where, since Steve is so different from anyone else in stats, mechanics, and options that you'd be surprised what moves of his are actually unsafe from what positions and what aren't.

I'd go into more specific details on his most dangerous moves, setups, and options like minecart's specific gimmicks and counterplay to his combos or specific combos Shotos can do with blocks but those are already mostly covered Steves or Shotos who've fought a lot of Steves, but the most useful piece of advice I've found against Steve is to actually play as and study Steve yourself and figure out his weaknesses and how to exploit them, and I believe Steve is by far the hardest character in this game to get a proper grasp on without learning him directly.

Some specific interactions to always keep in mind if you don't feel like playing as Steve to learn the mu or reading the 4 page essay up there:
 * 1. When you die and respawn at 0% with Steve at kill% mining near the ledge behind a block wall, do not mess with that wall, your halo invincibility will wear off before the blocks do and steve will carry you across the stage with FTilt and get a free 40-70% inescapable combo, just chill and wait for him to refresh his resources enough to feel like attempting to approach, which you can then punish.
 * 2. Do not stand near the block wall when he's mining despite having plenty of resources, it's likely bait to approach with an instant USpecial or minecart setup once the bottom blocks break and it's hard if not impossible to reactively punish it when Steve does this trap correctly.

Then there's some less common and braindead Steve approach options that will knowledge check you to death
 * 1. Grounded USpecial slide under a block: just don't stand too close to Steve behind walls about to break, the hitbox on USpecial wears off about 40 frames in and you can punish him afterwards
 * 2 Steve approaching from on top of plat: he will DTilt you and it is plus on shield and links to a lot of stuff if it's not shielded, don't stand in front of him within DTilt range and if he whiffs DTilt, it's as laggy as most smash attacks, just beat his ass for it.
 * 2.5. Steve can do the same DTilt approach as mentioned before from plat-height blocks instead of an actual plat, and this is much safer because blocks can't be jumped through and will break from under him during DTilt's endlag making it safe on whiff: just get behind him from under the blocks.
 * 3. Very, very common approach option by Steve to cover the stage is to minecart then jump out while letting it slide under him, minecart stops grounded anti-airs and grabs out out of shield and can frame trap dodges while Steve covers you from jumping over it by threatening an aerial. Optimally you should run in and jump {{clr|aerial|FAir}} him before he gets to let out a strong aerial to cover the air, but if you're too far to do that just {{clr|smash|DSmash}} the minecart to break it and special cancel into something instead of risking an air-to-air.
 * 3.5. If you break the cart, a good Steve will usually try to avoid disadvantage by standing on a block above you then either retreat (which you should just let him do because he can threaten to safely DTilt you as mentioned in 2.5) or approach you by building blocks in the air. Here he can do a bunch of stuff depending on the blocks. Dirt is the most dangerous because they break very fast and let him punish your positioning instantly with anvil if you're under the block or DTilt if you're on either side of him. Here is where I'd say to learn the timing on Steve's block placement vulnerability and punish him while he's adding blocks, but just out from under Steve until he has to land if you don't know the timing to punish him mid-building.

Other than that, his aerial approaches suck because his jumps are trash (parry his big aerials and punish hard or anti-air his fast little aerials with {{clr|special|RH}} if Ken or {{clr|special|Hado}} if Ryu) and his grounded approaches are super linear to beat. Just shield and {{clr|special|USpecial}}/{{clr|smash|USmash}}/{{clr|grab|Grab}} FTilt on shield, poke low if he's walking towards you while using UTilt or looking up, and don't let him get within DTilt range or UTilt range of your shield or you're more or less dead.

Terry
From Bill Bill Bill:

for disadvantage: a good terry player will abuse the __ out of your disadvantage, ESPECIALLY if youre above the stage. i highly recommend for this reason to go on battlefield or horizontally small stages with platforms (but no platforms is fine, just more dangerous). if youre up and above and they have GO, get the hell out of there immediately (and go to ledge!), do NOT challenge them until your feet touch the ground. terry WILL buster wolf you with every chance they get. i think ken's shoryu beats aerial crack shoot. also, only challenge power dunk if its whiffed from the ground, and even then, it has very little lag. 80% of the time they use power dunk in the air, especially if its the light version, it will cancel all lag and you will get a hefty punish if you challenge it. also, as a terry player myself, try to avoid normal ledge getup and ledge roll at high percents. terry can use power geyser or raw burn knuckle and kill you for it.

From lean (Bean!'s alt account):

SDI up and in or up and out to ruin his combos, by no means easy but its definitely doable and is something you should be doing all the time (be sure to mix up sdi)
 * learn to parry TKPD, both light and heavy. this grants you automatic +3 frame advantage against heavy pd which is +-0 or -1 at best and it makes the usually +2/3(????) light tkpd +-0 which you can abuse.
 * mix up recovery offstage, terry has lots of kill options to use that just zoom him offstage with no accountability so recovering the same way is death. this is a must-do in almost every matchup in the game.
 * resetting terry is decently easy, he doesn't have f1 options like shotos or like ZSS so you're able to get more damage off resets by abusing his size since he's quite chunky.
 * play a low commitment neutral. stick to fireballs from 1/2 to 2/3 screen distance because this keeps you out of TKPD and CS range. after that you play regular footsies. PW is a free parry to let you close the distance and you can use it like a reverse rps to see what option the terry mashes. basically you want to use his neutral against him.
 * ledge trap carefully, especially when he has go!. if not you'll lose countless stocks to seemingly "braindead" wakeup supers that YOU just weren't ready for.


 * final notes and suggestions:
 * i suggest either shoto against terry, they both perform well and, as most people begrudgingly agree, ken does better
 * the overall rule of thumb against terry is just patience and slow gameplay. the true shoto way
 * most important tip is to not be a dumbass

Toon Link
From XzibitA:

In neutral, you want to start off by advancing slowly. He'll be using bomb and boomerang to cut off aerial approaches most likely, so you get free space to advance into, but don't commit to dashes. Once you're in sh ff fair range, you can use that (or nair) to punish bomb pulls or boomerang throws. Mix in empty hops over his projectiles to advance so he doesn't know what to cover. If he makes an aggressive move, spotdodge will avoid both dash attack and the unlikely dash grab.

Once you get an opening, Tink doesn't have many options. In shield, his UpB doesn't come out fast enough to deal with dtilt spam, so he'll have to jump or roll away. Just spam dtilt and chase the roll at lower %s because you get more damage. That way, you'll condition him to jump out, and when he does that at kill % you can immediately shoryu and kill him.

Tink's bad at landing in general, so make good use of pivot cancelling ftilt and hard uptilt to mess him up.

If Tink's on ledge with bomb in hand, he's probably going to drop off and throw it as he comes onto the stage. Shield it and UpB him. He may also ledge jump and throw it down; UpB. If he neutral getups, grab him. If he rolls, react and grab>bthrow to reset the situation. If he doesn't have a bomb, his options are largely the same (replace ledge dropoff bomb with ledge dropoff zair, which is even more unsafe), but it's safer to spam tilts to get bigger damage.

If you're on ledge against Tink, don't linger or you'll get ftilted. He's not great at covering multiple options at once, so just mix it up well. If his back is against you and he's shielding, he wants to grab your options and bthrow you for the kill, so just jump out.

Villager
From Adventuring Hero:

Play Ryu. Then use rising nair a lot. I haven't seen a villager come up with an adequate solution to rising nair. Rising nair completely nulls slingshot, a pivotal part of villager's neutral. Within the same short hop rising nair, you can null a slingshot and punish villager with the same nair because Ryu Rising Nair is active for 30 frames. The difference for landing lag between slingshot and ryu nair is around 9-10 frames, favoring Ryu. When you are able to null slingshot, Lloid becomes a non-issue as that projectile's capabilities come entirely from Villager's ability to anti air. Once you take that away with Ryu rising nair, it's a linear projectile with 52 frames of startup.

Wii Fit Trainer
From mo!:

How to deal with camping wii fit & header cancels: a short guide by becca

ball camping: wii fit likes to camp with header. a lot. here's how to deal with that.

Preparing: don't take wii fit to high plat stages like battlefield or yoshi's. you will not have a fun time. try ps2 or FD. if the wii fit bans those, you might wanna try kalos. it's not optimal but it's 3rd place.

Method A. if wii fit likes to stay in one place on one side of the stage after hitting the ball, try dashwalking up to them, shielding the ball. in the rare case that you're close enough to where you can safely catch their landing, react with a heavy up tilt or an up air. otherwise, you might wanna bait them out with a hado or a fakeout shoryu the closer you get so you can catch on to how they react, then punish them accordingly.

Method B. you can simply not approach and stay center stage, baiting them out with hado. at some point, wii fit will probably go for deep breathing and then approach you, playing aggro from that point until deep breathing runs out. while deep breathing is dangerous, you know what to do. punish bad approaches.

header cancel

what is header cancel?: wii fit has this thing where if you shield during side b startup, you won't hit the ball. instead the ball just bounces in front of you. you can do whatever you want with it after that. there's many different techs you can get out of the ball cancel. here's some of them and how i propose we react:

header cancel (the regular one): the immediate thing you will notice is that wii fit did not hit the ball with their head. after that, the ball will go at varying different speeds depending on what attack wii fit uses to hit it. in my opinion, the best thing to do would be to tatsu through the ball and then follow up with another punish.

a downside to header cancel for the wii fit is that it has a little bit of endlag. ken will usually be fast enough to punish that endlag. ryu is a gamble unless he distances himself.

header cancel shield: wii fit can cancel the ball and then shield directly after it, which can negate shield pokes if you aren't careful. this could be a prime opportunity to sour fair-> tsrk their shield if they end up doing this, though be wary since the ball goes over their head on the first bounce.

headwhiffing: this tech is really situational and you probably won't see most wii fits use it but i'll mention it anyway. if WFT gets heavily launched and then header cancels, they can dair the ball downward. it takes a long time for this one to startup so 9/10 you could probably catch it with up air or simply not react to it at all.

header getup: the most effective header cancel tool imo. drop from ledge -> idj header cancel. this lets them use the ball on the ledge almost immediately. if you see them drop from ledge, react with a nair. he ball usually will only hit at ground level so you should not get hit by the ball. note that wii fit likely will not be on stage at the same time as the ball so in the event that the nair doesn't hit them you can tilt them instead.

Wolf
To the top of the page

From IDA447:

For those who are interested, Down Smash is true punish OOS against Wolf dash attack - hits always but is frame tight If too late, cancel into RH for a true blockstring, doesn't matter If he crosses you up or not Up-B can miss tho if he crosses up and is too far

Don't fight him in the air, his stuff is too disjointed some people can be challenged in the air, our fair is not too bad, but Wolf Fair has better range

other than that Wolf has no good OoS options but is negative double digits on everything his Up Smash has good range but its slow

Young Link
https://twitter.com/ssb4_saboten/status/1188236320214138880?s=21

From SHORYUKEN:

Focus is bad. Punish whiffs with your fastest move because his grab, dair and grounded up b don’t have as much lag as you think. I wasn’t able to focus in time to beat up b > uair so it might just be a true combo at kill percent, should probably DI it diagonal up.

Low recovery from too far away will get you naired and you die.

Hadoken is pretty good at the right distance for canceling his projectiles or chipping on damage, which matters since he’s light.

Ryu is obviously better than Ken for having reliable combos, tatsu kills, a better projectile war and collarbone to punish excessive defense.

Drop down nair against his recovery before his up b can come out.

Response from Bill Bill Bill:

Focus is bad here, yes, but it can help a lot in juggling here since it can make upb miss by only hitting once, always tanks through uair and will avoid dragdown fair (last one is less consistent). Though, this only really applies of you are falling down and not in a combo. In those situations, you might as well airdodge.

Zelda
From mo!:

in general: zelda is a very patient MU for the shotos, all about keeping your distance. imo you should time your approaches and keep center stage. don't challenge zelda in the air unless you're in advantage. recommended stages: small battlefield, ps2

specials: din's fire is really not a problem at all. it's slow, can be focused through, and very easy to punish. dashwalk and you should be fine. nayru's love is annoying but not a huge issue if you know what you're doing. you can bait it out with a light hado and then punish her for it. also be careful when approaching her as she can mess you up with this. farore's wind is not a huge deal either. it can be difficult to deal with offstage if that's what you're going for, but if you can read teleports you can read farore's wind. despite that said, be careful challenging this move on shield. it's 6 frames. phantom is where this MU becomes a bit of an issue. phantom can eat focus 3 when fully charged (it has 6 stages) so its optimal to destroy it as soon as you see it. if not, spotdodge or FADC through it before it's fully constructed. zelda can also RAR dair to make the phantom appear in front of her.

standard stuff & aerials: zelda is a rather slow character on the ground, with a 15-frame dash startup and only a little faster dash than dr. mario. that doesn't mean she's not a threat. she has a rather long and disjointed pivot grab and dash grab (see tornado's hitbox image above) but it barely goes above her head, and has a 14-frame startup, meaning you could punish it with a sh jump-in if need be. her forward smash is also rather disjointed, so watch out for that. really, zelda can be rushed down quite easily on the ground unless she buffers a shorthop.

it's when zelda gets in the air where the MU becomes pretty problematic. zelda's aerials are very good, have huge hitboxes, and two of them have a sweetspot. combined with her up smash and up tilt, they are also potent juggling tools. DI and SDI as best as you can and make sure you get back on the ground. you can FADC but watch out for nair on the way down.

zelda is also very dangerous on shield. her oos options are very good and fast, and she can catch you off guard with a sh fair. don't try and break her shield and instead poke. which shoto? both shotos can deal with her in different ways. ken can rush her down on the ground and ryu can challenge her in neutral. either way, they can get the job done.

From Bill Bill Bill:

For ken: condition the hell out of zelda. Heavy tatsu works well at mid percents since its like -2 on hit at most? Maybe? Dont do it early percent, ever. They may instinctively neutral b and if you shield it, its a free punish. Obviously, dont spam it, cause their grab game is pretty good. Light tatsu isnt super good here because her floatiness makes it easy for her to tech if she gets into tumble. Mix up your recovery OFTEN. Dins fire is extremely strong (sweetspot). I think it may break early focus too, not sure. Her edge guarding isnt super great but she cant get punished for it. Do not ever tatsu immediately when recovering unless you read their dins fire somehow. Focus or recover low. Though i dont see many zeldas do this (fortunately), their dair is really good for spiking us, since the sourspot also spikes. Time your ledge options right if they use phantom, roll or even attack might work against it. DI out might mess with her upb and may make her miss the 2nd part of the move if she uses it oos. It kills really early too if you DI it wrong, so be careful

Zero Suit Samus
From Beek: https://twitter.com/DVN_Beek/status/1212508677418209283

From Nito:

Can roll under her Zair approach for big punishes.

But avoid tech rolling into her down smashes cuz you'll get big punished, typically tech rolling away is best because she'll only get a dash attack on you which wont kill you until like 150+ or something dumb.

You'll have to shield a bit in this match up because of her Flip Kick (you can punish in between but not start up of it with things like fair/back air or up air) and potentially out of shield punish if she lands on your shield aggressively with it.

If she starts running away don't chase her too hard. You have a projectile and so does she, the thing with hers is the end lag she has after using it is almost as bad as ours and is very telegraphed so you can punish it by jumping over and down airing her (However if you mistime it and hit her shield you need to special cancel so you don't get Up B'd punished so Tatsu away or try to poke her with Shoryu special cancel.

She doesn't have any kill throws until like 170 either so eating a grab is fine she doesn't have true combos out of them, however if she does grab a lot if you're able to dodge it you get big punishes on it every time. Super light, should be killing her around 70-80 all the time.

Make your punishes worth it and you'll kill her in 2 exchanges.

She can do the Shulk edgeguard on us if you don't time it, where she'll drop down and reverse up B facing away from stage so be aware of that and stall when you need to with Focus/Hado to avoid it, or just wait on your Shoryu to meet her halfway through her Up B and force a stage tech situation on her.