Two-Ell
Smash Master
NOTICE: Hello everyone, first off a note or two. Don't worry this guide is all in white text as you can see lol. I thought it might annoy some of you to read a wall of text colored cyan lol. Apologies if this seems like a tl;dr thread lol, but I promise you all it's very well worth the reading. Another thing is I'm sorry if my use of my Rosalina texture in the pictorial examples isn't to your liking lol. I wanted to have some of my personality to this guide here and I'm sure a lot of you guessed by now I love her character(I have it over default and blue peach for teams lol). For the input descriptions I was going to have a picture of an analog stick to describe inputs but I couldn't find any good exact top down pics. I'll do my best to describe the inputs. Now onward with the thread~
Introduction
To start, from the beginning Free Pulling is probably the most bittersweet technique since it's birth. It allows for constant mobility as well as arming Peach with her valuable projectile in one easy input. Where there's good there is also the bad. In order to perform free pulling one had to sacrifice ease* of DI and multi-directional Glide tossing. While there are few among us such as Meno that are willing to learn to compensate for the decrease of ability in those two areas. Most Peach mains did not see the technique as a worthy gain in place of those losses. So for a time Free Pulling sat in the hands of B-stick users and metagame focus turned elsewhere. Eventually Excel_Zero through his own experimentation along with a reminder of another user managed to develop for the boards two rough inputs for the technique without utilizing the B-stick. While it was found to work by various users. It was found significantly difficult to perform. So much that it was decided that instead of sacrifice this time around. Effort far outweighed the benefit.
Again for nearly a year the technique sat out of reach without the aid of a B-stick. Eventually recently in light of happenings and random chance attention was turned again to Free Pulling. The new consensus on the technique was that at the point in the Brawl metagame the technique still proved to be highly useful especially in match-ups such as one of Peach's worse: Metaknight. As KB put it:
Excel_Zero:
"The timing is hard."
The input was a rough idea of how it may work in thinking of how B-sticking worked, but the major problem here is timing. Just like any other AT this one has a special window of input. At this point you may have an idea of what I'm going to be teaching you later.
Method two I comment on with this theory of mine:
"My opinion for Excel's method two is that the way the game registers B-sticking is essentially gathering the C-stick down input and combining it with the 'Special' tag. When the the C-stick is under the 'Attack' tag I think maybe it can be out prioritized by a special button input if done in pretty much the exact moment."
In addition to increased input difficulty the problem of timing still remained here. At this point Rick's recent theory comes in.
Rickerdy-doo-da-day:
Dark Pch.
Gaining an understanding
The entire time we were attacking the problem from one side.There is another point though that I must bring up. Before we can ask how to do it. We must know why. In general there are three stages to learning: Memorization, Comprehension, and Application. The day we understood that a Down+B input can go through during Peach's turn around animation we were at the memorization stage. The problem though as you can see is we skipped comprehension for application. If your teacher taught you Pythagorean theorem(A^2+B^2=C^2 for those of you who slept during math x3), gave you some problems, and told you to use it to find the answer you would sit clueless on what to do with it. That's the same problem here. I'm going to explain why Free pulls work.
The Why:
Let's take the basics of what we know about Free Pulling. Peach turns around and with a B-stick an automatic Down+B input is done for us and Peach plucks a turnip during her turn around while sliding. Some how Peach maintains the momentum of her turn around while at the same time she is pulling a turnip. essentially the game blended both the Turnip Pull and the movement of the turn around animation into one because we canceled Peach's turn around animation with turnip pull. As for why it can be canceled in the first place you'll need to talk to Brawl's coders lol. From what I believe there's a possible order of access/priority to move-sets. Apparently the 'Down+B' command has priority over the 'Turn Around' command, but in usurping control 'Down+B' sorta gains traits from 'Turn Around'. Anyway Let's take this whole process and take a better look at the action. Here isRosalina'sPeach's turn around animations broken down:
Now so far we know that at some point during this whole thing we can flick our B-stick down for a turnip pull. We need to know what exactly our 'window' is in being able to do this. This means we need frame data. Thankfully upon looking through hotgarbage's stickied thread he managed to give us exactly what we needed:
Looking at that we have a nice fat window. That makes this technique insanely easy to do. All you need a B-stick and you're good to go with any practice at all. We just mentioned the problem though. We need a B-stick. Taking what we know so far all the way down to the basics. We need to hit Down+B during that huge window. That's the solution put simply though. let's look at the frame window information again. We need to turn around and hit Down B within a ten frame window. Some of you know that brawl runs at just about 60 frames per second. ten out of sixty frames means you need to make a turn around and a Down+b in 1/6 of a second. Being able to move your thumb AND the stick like that for probably frames 2-5 is physically impossible. Our nice fat window is shrunken down a good deal.That leaves us with six frames. That's 1/10 of a second. Here is what we now know:
What we have here is the endpoint of all our investigation. In math class our teachers gave us perfect example problems to use that Pythagorean theorem with so we could understand how it worked. with all this information we have here here. We need to try to make up our own application. Here is where we move on to the field test.
The How(finally T.T):
We're finally at the point where we get an idea of the real input. Some of you more enthusiastic guys(and gals~) may just take all this info and do try doing it out right. I feel it might be frustrating that way. As soon as we turn around we only have 1/6 of a second to go from pushing the stick one way to another, and then try moving forward. Don't let these numbers daunt you though. Our window is smaller, but it's still possible for us to react that quickly and enter that Down+B. We just need to train ourselves to react properly. Training means instead of taking on a huge load we learn go it small piece by piece until we can go big. /elementaryschoolteacher
Go into the training mode and turn the speed down to lets say 1/2. We could do 1/4, but I felt it was too slow and would get very frustrating to wait for Peach to finish her Bomber or Toad(which feel like they take forever >.>). At this speed we pretty much have more than double the time(since it's much slower we can access the earlier frames that were impossible at normal speed.) we need which is even larger than our B-stick window. At 1/2 speed try to get a good visual feel for Peach's turn around. Train your eyes to recognize the window points we need. If you need to, look at the way her hair/crown/feet/hands look during your window. Condition yourself for that visual cue so you can use it at higher speeds where they will fly by more quickly. Now considering the input we need to do and the speed we need to do it. We probably won't be able to just tap the stick left/right>Down+B> Forward. Tapping will take too much time. This technique needs tilting. Now, learn how far you need to tilt your stick in order to turn around. Reading that you'll probably feel like the technique is going to be complicated and let your discouragement begin to set in again. I am going to tell you now that performing this on the spot is perfectly reasonable with practice. Trust me in that when you follow the procedure I'm giving you here you won't have to wait long to see some results.
Once you get a feel for that point in your tilt she turns around now is the time need to try and fit a Down+B in there. Here goes our first attempt. Tilt your stick to start her turn around animation. As you see her going through it, from that same position your stick is at tilt it downward a bit(since we'll need to continue forward.) and hit B quickly while you're doing that. The reason I say tilt your stick downward a bit is because if you tilt it too far down Peach will remained locked in place as she usually is until she finish pulling the turnip. We need her to get the command to pull it, but we want to keep moving as well. As soon after you hit B fully tilt your stick diagonally in an attempt to continue forward. Some of you get it on the first try some probably may not. Keep doing it and I guarantee you will get it. (Looking at this input process can you kinda see why Dark's method was the closest?). Here I'll offer some personal observations as you try to move on to higher speed. Through out the entire process(which happens quickly) I never fully tilt my stick(fully tilt means push on the stick till it hits the end) till I reach the end of the input process. For me I push it just enough to have Peach turn around and I keep the stick there till I see my cue. I then bring the stick down again not fully, probably like around halfway so the game recognizes I'm pushing down, hit B and continue lightly to the diagonal at full tilt. Basically the entire thing is quickly, but lightly pushing Left/right> Down> Diagonal. Keep practicing this till you feel you're competent at it with your current speed. Then try taking it to the next difficulty(2/3 speed) until you've got it at normal. Now I don't want you all thinking that I'm here telling you to do all this and saying I'm getting fast and easy results myself. I'll be honest and let this do all the talking as far as how successful I currently* am with it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d81dCQ60D4E
As you guys will see I'm not perfect with it lol, but this was only after less than an hour of practice after learning how it worked through all of this. What we learned here is what I gradually found out for my self since studying it Monday night x3. Now that we've reached this point I'll ask you a question: Since you now know why exactly it works didn't performing it feel easier and make more sense?
Even when I miss inputs I can look at some thing like my video and know why it messed up rather than stabbing in the dark with an input just given to me. Anyway I wish you all success in learning this and implementing it into your play-styles. Again I know it's hard and honestly I really felt like giving up. Even almost to the end where I was trying to make a video(I ended up deleting it when I made my breakthrough lol.) I could barely do it and felt I should just forget trying at all. It was just after I tried sticking through that I suddenly found out what I needed. Oh and before I say I'm finished I've got a small treat.
As you get better with it..
Remember how I theorized that when 'Down+B' took control over 'Turn Around' it gained the traits needs for the slide? Well if you think about turn around what is it responsible for in the game? Continuing to move the character in a direction. if you push left/right then decide you want to go the other way then 'Turn Around' will do just that for you. When you combine this with 'Down+B' you can get results like this when you get good enough~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvJWSlouwwo
Complete!
Enjoy your demystified tech. I would've never been able to do all this if it were not for all the random ideas, thoughts, and sequence of events just looking all everyone's posts gave me. In a way all of you are responsible for this is some way that you'd probably call me crazy if I told you lol.
EDIT, A Final Note: I wanted to add this bit in due to a point Rickerdy made. I understand I did claim my method my would be easier, but his and mine classify differently under Excel's original foundations and are improvements on each. At this point now at least you the Peach main now have the choice of which way you want to approach learning this technique. Despite whichever way you decided to learn this you are now armed with the knowledge of mechanics of this technique. If you find Rickerdy's method easier/better that's fine and you can use all this information all the same in learning how to perform it.
EDIT2: A note from Rickerdy
Introduction
To start, from the beginning Free Pulling is probably the most bittersweet technique since it's birth. It allows for constant mobility as well as arming Peach with her valuable projectile in one easy input. Where there's good there is also the bad. In order to perform free pulling one had to sacrifice ease* of DI and multi-directional Glide tossing. While there are few among us such as Meno that are willing to learn to compensate for the decrease of ability in those two areas. Most Peach mains did not see the technique as a worthy gain in place of those losses. So for a time Free Pulling sat in the hands of B-stick users and metagame focus turned elsewhere. Eventually Excel_Zero through his own experimentation along with a reminder of another user managed to develop for the boards two rough inputs for the technique without utilizing the B-stick. While it was found to work by various users. It was found significantly difficult to perform. So much that it was decided that instead of sacrifice this time around. Effort far outweighed the benefit.
Again for nearly a year the technique sat out of reach without the aid of a B-stick. Eventually recently in light of happenings and random chance attention was turned again to Free Pulling. The new consensus on the technique was that at the point in the Brawl metagame the technique still proved to be highly useful especially in match-ups such as one of Peach's worse: Metaknight. As KB put it:
Users began giving the technique more attention and practice, but still remained the problem of effort involved in learning it. Excel's method proved too difficult even with reasonable practice. Eventually users began giving their own insights on how to perform it at least a fraction easier. It is at this point I will show you all each suggested method in this board's history and how and explain the drawbacks that still lead to inability of reaching high consistency.(I mean no offense in anyway to the users who developed these methods. We try to work with what we feel works and that's what helps reach better results.)
Excel_Zero:
Here is the birth of the idea of how to Free Pull without a B-stick. Method one was ended on the note that Excel was able to do it but it was too difficult to perform much less get it consistently. The same reaction came from users who posted in this thread. The key thing here is this:
"The timing is hard."
The input was a rough idea of how it may work in thinking of how B-sticking worked, but the major problem here is timing. Just like any other AT this one has a special window of input. At this point you may have an idea of what I'm going to be teaching you later.
Method two I comment on with this theory of mine:
"My opinion for Excel's method two is that the way the game registers B-sticking is essentially gathering the C-stick down input and combining it with the 'Special' tag. When the the C-stick is under the 'Attack' tag I think maybe it can be out prioritized by a special button input if done in pretty much the exact moment."
In addition to increased input difficulty the problem of timing still remained here. At this point Rick's recent theory comes in.
Rickerdy-doo-da-day:
Here progress is made with method two. Rick develops a method to attempts to alleviate the difficulty of performing it by making the input easier to perform. The downsides to this method though requires sacrifice of the L button. In his case the button was useless beforehand so it proved to be no problem. Concern was brought up by other users because they had their L for something else. Again though the problem of when the input it to be performed remained along with there being still being a considerable difficulty inputing the special and pushing the C-stick down at the exact moment. Just as there is progress with method two, one was also improved upon by Dark Pch.
Dark Pch.
Though the input is still a rough idea this is actually the most closest method among the three to the method I am about to explain to you all. Again though I'm sure by now you have begun to see a pattern here. Timing has never been addressed.
Gaining an understanding
The entire time we were attacking the problem from one side.There is another point though that I must bring up. Before we can ask how to do it. We must know why. In general there are three stages to learning: Memorization, Comprehension, and Application. The day we understood that a Down+B input can go through during Peach's turn around animation we were at the memorization stage. The problem though as you can see is we skipped comprehension for application. If your teacher taught you Pythagorean theorem(A^2+B^2=C^2 for those of you who slept during math x3), gave you some problems, and told you to use it to find the answer you would sit clueless on what to do with it. That's the same problem here. I'm going to explain why Free pulls work.
The Why:
Let's take the basics of what we know about Free Pulling. Peach turns around and with a B-stick an automatic Down+B input is done for us and Peach plucks a turnip during her turn around while sliding. Some how Peach maintains the momentum of her turn around while at the same time she is pulling a turnip. essentially the game blended both the Turnip Pull and the movement of the turn around animation into one because we canceled Peach's turn around animation with turnip pull. As for why it can be canceled in the first place you'll need to talk to Brawl's coders lol. From what I believe there's a possible order of access/priority to move-sets. Apparently the 'Down+B' command has priority over the 'Turn Around' command, but in usurping control 'Down+B' sorta gains traits from 'Turn Around'. Anyway Let's take this whole process and take a better look at the action. Here is
Now so far we know that at some point during this whole thing we can flick our B-stick down for a turnip pull. We need to know what exactly our 'window' is in being able to do this. This means we need frame data. Thankfully upon looking through hotgarbage's stickied thread he managed to give us exactly what we needed:
Unfortunately we do not have information on how long the animation itself is. No problem when we see 2-11 although we don't have the tools to find out how long the animation is we can try comparing the length of her turn around to something else. We know that Peach turns around relatively quickly. Something else fast in her move-set we can try is a jab. Comparing the two she finishes turning around slightly faster than she stands still after finishing her first jab. Jab 1 is 19 frames long. taking into consideration that the Free Pull window is frames 2-11 that's probably almost the entire animation we can pop in a B-stick input. Starting on 2 means we can smash on the stick at pretty much the exact moment we push the analog. Ending on Frame 11 means we can even wait till she's almost completely turned around for us to B-stick too. For those of you who like pictures when learning things this is what we've gathered so far:
Looking at that we have a nice fat window. That makes this technique insanely easy to do. All you need a B-stick and you're good to go with any practice at all. We just mentioned the problem though. We need a B-stick. Taking what we know so far all the way down to the basics. We need to hit Down+B during that huge window. That's the solution put simply though. let's look at the frame window information again. We need to turn around and hit Down B within a ten frame window. Some of you know that brawl runs at just about 60 frames per second. ten out of sixty frames means you need to make a turn around and a Down+b in 1/6 of a second. Being able to move your thumb AND the stick like that for probably frames 2-5 is physically impossible. Our nice fat window is shrunken down a good deal.That leaves us with six frames. That's 1/10 of a second. Here is what we now know:
What we have here is the endpoint of all our investigation. In math class our teachers gave us perfect example problems to use that Pythagorean theorem with so we could understand how it worked. with all this information we have here here. We need to try to make up our own application. Here is where we move on to the field test.
The How(finally T.T):
We're finally at the point where we get an idea of the real input. Some of you more enthusiastic guys(and gals~) may just take all this info and do try doing it out right. I feel it might be frustrating that way. As soon as we turn around we only have 1/6 of a second to go from pushing the stick one way to another, and then try moving forward. Don't let these numbers daunt you though. Our window is smaller, but it's still possible for us to react that quickly and enter that Down+B. We just need to train ourselves to react properly. Training means instead of taking on a huge load we learn go it small piece by piece until we can go big. /elementaryschoolteacher
Go into the training mode and turn the speed down to lets say 1/2. We could do 1/4, but I felt it was too slow and would get very frustrating to wait for Peach to finish her Bomber or Toad(which feel like they take forever >.>). At this speed we pretty much have more than double the time(since it's much slower we can access the earlier frames that were impossible at normal speed.) we need which is even larger than our B-stick window. At 1/2 speed try to get a good visual feel for Peach's turn around. Train your eyes to recognize the window points we need. If you need to, look at the way her hair/crown/feet/hands look during your window. Condition yourself for that visual cue so you can use it at higher speeds where they will fly by more quickly. Now considering the input we need to do and the speed we need to do it. We probably won't be able to just tap the stick left/right>Down+B> Forward. Tapping will take too much time. This technique needs tilting. Now, learn how far you need to tilt your stick in order to turn around. Reading that you'll probably feel like the technique is going to be complicated and let your discouragement begin to set in again. I am going to tell you now that performing this on the spot is perfectly reasonable with practice. Trust me in that when you follow the procedure I'm giving you here you won't have to wait long to see some results.
Once you get a feel for that point in your tilt she turns around now is the time need to try and fit a Down+B in there. Here goes our first attempt. Tilt your stick to start her turn around animation. As you see her going through it, from that same position your stick is at tilt it downward a bit(since we'll need to continue forward.) and hit B quickly while you're doing that. The reason I say tilt your stick downward a bit is because if you tilt it too far down Peach will remained locked in place as she usually is until she finish pulling the turnip. We need her to get the command to pull it, but we want to keep moving as well. As soon after you hit B fully tilt your stick diagonally in an attempt to continue forward. Some of you get it on the first try some probably may not. Keep doing it and I guarantee you will get it. (Looking at this input process can you kinda see why Dark's method was the closest?). Here I'll offer some personal observations as you try to move on to higher speed. Through out the entire process(which happens quickly) I never fully tilt my stick(fully tilt means push on the stick till it hits the end) till I reach the end of the input process. For me I push it just enough to have Peach turn around and I keep the stick there till I see my cue. I then bring the stick down again not fully, probably like around halfway so the game recognizes I'm pushing down, hit B and continue lightly to the diagonal at full tilt. Basically the entire thing is quickly, but lightly pushing Left/right> Down> Diagonal. Keep practicing this till you feel you're competent at it with your current speed. Then try taking it to the next difficulty(2/3 speed) until you've got it at normal. Now I don't want you all thinking that I'm here telling you to do all this and saying I'm getting fast and easy results myself. I'll be honest and let this do all the talking as far as how successful I currently* am with it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d81dCQ60D4E
As you guys will see I'm not perfect with it lol, but this was only after less than an hour of practice after learning how it worked through all of this. What we learned here is what I gradually found out for my self since studying it Monday night x3. Now that we've reached this point I'll ask you a question: Since you now know why exactly it works didn't performing it feel easier and make more sense?
Even when I miss inputs I can look at some thing like my video and know why it messed up rather than stabbing in the dark with an input just given to me. Anyway I wish you all success in learning this and implementing it into your play-styles. Again I know it's hard and honestly I really felt like giving up. Even almost to the end where I was trying to make a video(I ended up deleting it when I made my breakthrough lol.) I could barely do it and felt I should just forget trying at all. It was just after I tried sticking through that I suddenly found out what I needed. Oh and before I say I'm finished I've got a small treat.
As you get better with it..
Remember how I theorized that when 'Down+B' took control over 'Turn Around' it gained the traits needs for the slide? Well if you think about turn around what is it responsible for in the game? Continuing to move the character in a direction. if you push left/right then decide you want to go the other way then 'Turn Around' will do just that for you. When you combine this with 'Down+B' you can get results like this when you get good enough~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvJWSlouwwo
Complete!
Enjoy your demystified tech. I would've never been able to do all this if it were not for all the random ideas, thoughts, and sequence of events just looking all everyone's posts gave me. In a way all of you are responsible for this is some way that you'd probably call me crazy if I told you lol.
EDIT, A Final Note: I wanted to add this bit in due to a point Rickerdy made. I understand I did claim my method my would be easier, but his and mine classify differently under Excel's original foundations and are improvements on each. At this point now at least you the Peach main now have the choice of which way you want to approach learning this technique. Despite whichever way you decided to learn this you are now armed with the knowledge of mechanics of this technique. If you find Rickerdy's method easier/better that's fine and you can use all this information all the same in learning how to perform it.
EDIT2: A note from Rickerdy
Or maybe I'm missing something?
