Nayru's Love as a 'Jump'
I'll be honest. When I first heard about Love Jump, I thought it was pretty neat, but gimmicky. I didn't think it would be reliable, and the fact that you lost your second jump scared me. I saw it as another one of those risky, but situational AT's, like ledge canceling with Farore's Wind. But since I'm stubborn and I like to try everything Zelda can do, I decided to play around with it. In the first couple of weeks, I was only able to Love Jump upwards. I didn't find it all that useful really - it just looked cool.
However, after awhile, I began to realize that certain moves and knockback put Zelda in awful places to recover, such as Meta Knight's down smash, which sends Zelda really far horizontally on the screen. Other such devastating knockbacks included anything that would send Zelda very low off stage, which made it easy for people to edgehog her, or worse, Zelda not having enough distance to recover back to the stage.
This is where Love Jump started to become useful for me. With enough practice, I was able to turn around many potential losses of stock. I stepped it up even further, and decided to learn more directions than just upwards with Love Jump, and found ways to apply it to gameplay. As Courier had stated, Love Jumping in different directions, such as diagonally, allows you to escape combos/set ups (I can elaborate on this more if you guys need me to), and as an alternate form of 'recovery'. The nice thing about this is that you can still use your Up B after the Love Jump.
Love Jump OoS is something still fairly new which I've been experimenting with. I'm not sure if you can use this against every attack on your shield, but these are a couple of situations where I've been able to perform this:
- Sonic's spin dash + follow-up
- Meta Knight's glide attack + follow-up
- Pit's glide attack + follow-up
There are some more that I can't remember at the moment, but you might have noticed a lot of these are out of follow-up moves. I don't know why it seems easier to use Love Jump OoS out of follow-ups instead of just regular attacks. Hm… yes, I'm still working on finding uses for Love Jump OoS, but other than it looking flashy, I have not found something game-changing about them yet. Perhaps if your reaction time is fast enough, you can follow up a Love Jump OoS with an aerial, if you predict where your opponent will land ahead of time. For example, if I Love Jump OoS a Sonic spin dash in which he follows up with an up b to down air, I can try something like, Love Jump OoS + Up air. There are many possibilities to follow up Love Jump in general. Be creative =)
Another nice thing about Love Jump is that it protects you from projectiles as you're performing the jump. You know what's fun? Love Jumping when Pit is shooting arrows everywhere, or when he has an arrow loop going. Love Jumping here makes his arrows go crazy. xD Or when Falco is shooting lasers at you. If he shot a laser at you while you were doing a normal jump, it could eat your jump and force you to Up B. In the case of a Love Jump, you can reflect those lasers right back at him, and still have the option to Up B if you need to.
Now after all that good stuff about Love Jump, here are a couple of drawbacks with it. As Fujin had stated, Nayru's Love lags toward the end, which can make you vulnerable to be punished by aerial attacks if your opponents baits your Love Jump. A perfect example of this is Zelda dittos. I would be very careful about Love Jumping in Zelda dittos, especially when you're close to the stage. If the other Zelda is smart, she will wait for that ending lag, and punish with an up air.
Another drawback about Love Jump is if you accidentally
don't Love Jump and use a simple Nayru's Love in the air. This can put you in a very difficult situation to recover. In addition to that, if you reverse momentum cancel with Nayru's Love in the wrong direction, it can kill you earlier than if you had DI'd. So be very careful with this.
Some helpful videos if you're new to Love Jump or if you want to try and practice it more:
Love Jumping Tutorial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8djTa_wHqtE&feature=player_embedded
Reverse Nayru's Momentum Canceling:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6V4HDXpFIo
Nayru's Love as a Reflector
As stated many times already, Nayru's Love has terrible ending lag. As a reliable reflector, it fails in this area. Slower moving projectiles are easier to handle, such as Pikachu's b move in comparison to faster ones like Falco's lasers and Pit's arrows. Samus's charge beam can also be reflected from a distance. but be careful when you're up close.
In match ups like fighting Diddy, you can use Nayru's Love to reflect his banana and interfere with his banana combos. Yet again, use Nayru's sparingly. Diddy doesn't have to throw a banana at you all the time. He can simply wait for your reflector, and punish the ending lag.
Nayru's Love as an Attack
Most of us know Nayru's Love can be used as an alternate 'Down Smash' when it comes to hitting our opponents from behind us, and wanting to keep the KO potential of Down Smash. There are many hits in this move, making it tricky to shield it, if your opponent is not used to it. Depending on what part of the shards that your opponent tries to shield, it can sometimes shield push your opponent so that you're not as likely to being punished. I would not rely on this though.
Once your opponent becomes comfortable with shielding Nayru's Love, you're going to be punished a lot. This goes in hand with using Nayru's Love as an approach tool. Mix it up and don't be predictable, otherwise this tactic will not help you very much.
