Dedede Strategy: Penguin in the Field

[Eggggggggggbert]

I've been into Dedede since release and it took me a while to take this game seriously just because I didn't feel like I had a reason to take this game seriously. Melee feels more competitive by nature, why bother. I'm starting to realize why I play this game, its for the characters. This game offers a lot more in terms of pure character diversity (besides the clones) and Dedede sits there being an irreplaceable beacon of glory.
What I'm trying to say is that I'm trying to taking Dedede seriously, it's my main focus. I don't just want to make an impact, I want to make one with Dedede. Personal \ story aside, I want to just want to talk about how I play him and hopefully generate some discussion.

Dedede has some incredible strengths, some freshmen to smash may even think he's overpowered just because he is so good at what little he does. He can easily render a majority of the cast unless with a little reading and a lack of foresight from the opposing player. He also has a number of drawbacks, which any person who plays him or with reasonable knowledge of the game can understand. Besides the initial looming fact that no speed usually means less viability in a competitive atmosphere, he possesses a keen issue with approaching. This really struck a note with me as approaching is such a broad term and it feels so weird in the spectrum of fighting games. Approaching in other games feels so much more integrated because there is not a whole lot of room for escape, you don't always have a lot of options but to approach and try to make things happen. Thinking about this brought me to a whole other question, "What is forcing Dedede to approach?".

A basic pillar of smash logic is based around the idea that center stage control is most crucial. The center serves as this magnetic point, it's impossible to get anywhere crossing it or above it and it just serves as a catalyst of interaction in general. I believe with Dedede's distance coverage, he can always comfortably stick here and be hard to move. Especially on relatively flat stages (FD and Smashville being the best). Triple plat form stages pose a slight problem as one of Dedede's weaker spots being high in front of him. Either way, this strategy works against a lot of characters and even against a decent amount of ranged characters and I'm getting pretty darn good results.

Dedede's best 3 coverage (ground) moves are f-tilt, d-tilt and gordo. Gordo is for long, f-tilt for medium and d-tilt for close quarters.
Gordo can be spammed into forcing the opponent to approach. If you throw it far enough, its hard for any character to properly punish because its easy to reflect back their reflection of the gordo. If they're a character who sucks at reflecting, they'll eat it a lot. If they have good tools, they will reflect it but you should be spaced far away enough to preemptively throw out a f-tilt or d-tilt that you can one against reflect it. You can even regrab and rechuck in a lot of cases. It sounds like janky **** but you can easily get the double reflect if you work on your timing.
Once they're forced to approach, you can cover ground incredibly well with f-tilt which has incredibly reach. D-tilt is a super good fast/close-coverage move that forces the enemy to give you space. Generally these two are your best spacing tools. I also don't always pick these options or even follow this completely, but it's just my general ruleset. I use grabs and various other tools but this is the bread and butter.
If you perform this walling technique well enough and provide enough stage dominance, its easy to rack up percent and get your enemy off the stage, turning it into an edge guarding situation. Edge guarding being one of Dedede's strengths, things become a lot easier this point forward. I'm not going to go into how I edge-guard because it's a very fluid thing and I don't do anything special.

If you've made it this far, I appreciate you taking the time to read all this.
I don't just wanted to get some voices on how I play Dedede but open up the floor to discussion about the mindset of people when they play Dedede. What do you do? How do you cover your own weaknesses or the character's weakness? What do you aim to achieve when you play? Feel free to share videos and clips of interesting tech or micro-strategies you use. I have ordered a capture card so I may come back and add some clips when that materializes.

TL:DR? I play a dumb campy dedede and i want to make discussion about your (and my) dedede stratagem.

 

[Soul Train]

I won't take the "Melee is more competitive" bait - instead I'll link you to the grand finals between Zero and Esam at Smash Con. You could write a Ph.D analyzing the incredible strategy, execution, mindgames, mixups, etc shown here. It's one of the best Smash 4 sets of all time, imo the best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY00ln50Yj8

But in short: everything above doesn't work at a high level. D3 has some of the worst frame data in the game, and any player with and shield button and half a brain will wreck that camping strategy. D3 simply has no utility moves. Our startup is too long, and where it's not too long the move is easily read and punished. We have to commit with every button we press - and that makes for a really, really bad camping character.

• Close range: Dtilt starts up in 6 frames. That's terrible. ZSS can actually jump in with a nair, cancel, and STILL jab us before Dtilt comes out. Sure our grab has good range, but not good enough to grab people at their normal Ftilt range, which is where they'll stay to punish us. We lose.
• Midrange: what you labeled as Ftilt here. Fact is, Ftilt is a great tool for D3, but any decent player will make it a point to just stay out of this one major threat zone. Most of the cast can sit either just inside or outside our Ftilt, and mount a completely safe offense at us, where a mistake means 40%+. And with one of the slowest characters in the game, we will have a much harder time spacing right. We lose.
• Long: lol. Gordos are not projectiles. If you're using them at long range to "wall", you're going to get punished. Especially against any Link/Pac/Megaman/etc.

It feels like you haven't bothered to look around the forum to see what we're working on, debating, analyzing, etc. Please do so. Example: the Gordo "janky ***" you mention is well known and documented. And it's still nowhere near game-changing for D3.

Honestly, it just sounds like you just haven't had the opportunity to play some higher-level opponents. Try Anther's Ladder, that's one place to go.

 

[Basseidon]

I won't take the "Melee is more competitive" bait - instead I'll link you to the grand finals between Zero and Esam at Smash Con. You could write a Ph.D analyzing the incredible strategy, execution, mindgames, mixups, etc shown here. It's one of the best Smash 4 sets of all time, imo the best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY00ln50Yj8

But in short: everything above doesn't work at a high level. D3 has some of the worst frame data in the game, and any player with and shield button and half a brain will wreck that camping strategy. D3 simply has no utility moves. Our startup is too long, and where it's not too long the move is easily read and punished. We have to commit with every button we press - and that makes for a really, really bad camping character.

• Close range: Dtilt starts up in 6 frames. That's terrible. ZSS can actually jump in with a nair, cancel, and STILL jab us before Dtilt comes out. Sure our grab has good range, but not good enough to grab people at their normal Ftilt range, which is where they'll stay to punish us. We lose.
• Midrange: what you labeled as Ftilt here. Fact is, Ftilt is a great tool for D3, but any decent player will make it a point to just stay out of this one major threat zone. Most of the cast can sit either just inside or outside our Ftilt, and mount a completely safe offense at us, where a mistake means 40%+. And with one of the slowest characters in the game, we will have a much harder time spacing right. We lose.
• Long: lol. Gordos are not projectiles. If you're using them at long range to "wall", you're going to get punished. Especially against any Link/Pac/Megaman/etc.

It feels like you haven't bothered to look around the forum to see what we're working on, debating, analyzing, etc. Please do so. Example: the Gordo "janky ***" you mention is well known and documented. And it's still nowhere near game-changing for D3.

Honestly, it just sounds like you just haven't had the opportunity to play some higher-level opponents. Try Anther's Ladder, that's one place to go.

You do realize not everyone is a high level player right? He just offered a well constructed guide on how he plays and can be helpful for those not as familiar with dedede. This board is for everyone.

Also note: I'm not saying the OP isn't a high level player either.

 

[Eggggggggggbert]

I won't take the "Melee is more competitive" bait - instead I'll link you to the grand finals between Zero and Esam at Smash Con. You could write a Ph.D analyzing the incredible strategy, execution, mindgames, mixups, etc shown here. It's one of the best Smash 4 sets of all time, imo the best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY00ln50Yj8

But in short: everything above doesn't work at a high level. D3 has some of the worst frame data in the game, and any player with and shield button and half a brain will wreck that camping strategy. D3 simply has no utility moves. Our startup is too long, and where it's not too long the move is easily read and punished. We have to commit with every button we press - and that makes for a really, really bad camping character.

• Close range: Dtilt starts up in 6 frames. That's terrible. ZSS can actually jump in with a nair, cancel, and STILL jab us before Dtilt comes out. Sure our grab has good range, but not good enough to grab people at their normal Ftilt range, which is where they'll stay to punish us. We lose.
• Midrange: what you labeled as Ftilt here. Fact is, Ftilt is a great tool for D3, but any decent player will make it a point to just stay out of this one major threat zone. Most of the cast can sit either just inside or outside our Ftilt, and mount a completely safe offense at us, where a mistake means 40%+. And with one of the slowest characters in the game, we will have a much harder time spacing right. We lose.
• Long: lol. Gordos are not projectiles. If you're using them at long range to "wall", you're going to get punished. Especially against any Link/Pac/Megaman/etc.

It feels like you haven't bothered to look around the forum to see what we're working on, debating, analyzing, etc. Please do so. Example: the Gordo "janky ***" you mention is well known and documented. And it's still nowhere near game-changing for D3.

Honestly, it just sounds like you just haven't had the opportunity to play some higher-level opponents. Try Anther's Ladder, that's one place to go.

This wasn't meant to be a post that causes any more offense. You sound pretty offended almost at me for just throwing my thoughts out there.
Melee is more competitive was poor phrasing, melee is a more exercised game at this point. More is known about its technical aspects and it is fair to say that it's just a faster game in general. It doesn't mean you can't put just as much thought into the game, I'm just saying at this point in time melee is a lot more technical.
I by no means was an insistence to make people play like myself and by no means was I being very technical about it myself. This is mostly because I'm at work and can't access pastebin but also because I wasn't trying to be that specific.
I also realize that this isn't going to work against high level players but as a majority of the people here are not going compete within those circumstances any time soon, I'm not sure how much you should consider competing with the greats. What I am posing is what I do this get good results in my locals as well as my thinking behind it. You can dispute that not many will ever get to play high level, as being good enough to make up for a character who objectively does not hold up is pretty challenging and very rarely happens.

Basically what I'm trying to say is relax, and instead of picking me apart, try to be more constructive. Take some time to talk about how you play, it sounds like you have a lot to say.

 

[JimmyTheCaterpillar]

In Soul's defense, think a lot of us are just a little tired that new threads are made like every day about the exact same stuff that everyone already covered a while ago, or when a new thread is made when a discussion thread similar to it already exists.

 

[Girthquake]

In Soul's defense, think a lot of us are just a little tired that new threads are made like every day about the exact same stuff that everyone already covered a while ago, or when a new thread is made when a discussion thread similar to it already exists.

Yeah but I love doing that. Other than the trash talk that follows CO18 every where he goes on this sub forum this place is kinda dead.

It's like hey! Let's talk about DeDeDe! Except 'almost' everything seems to have been said already.