Why Does Everybody Play Fox?

Super Smash Brothers Melee: has twenty-six characters (twenty-five if you lump Sheik and Zelda together as one). They run the gamut in attributes and playstyles. You can play your game based on evasion and counter-hitting, on controlling space and shutting down options, on endless rushdown or endless runaway. The characters themselves range from glass cannons to nearly unkillable tanks. The tournament scene still has thousands of active players from all over the world, with different styles, attitudes, and approaches to the game.






The first and most obvious guess is because he’s the best character in the game. Fox is ranked number one on the tier list and has been for a long time. Should it surprise us that people who enter a competitive setting with the intent of winning pick the best character?

No. But the funny thing is, Fox doesn’t actually win as much as you’d think. Foxes have always achieved decent results, but the best players have, until recently, not been Fox players. Ken played Marth, then Mew2King played mostly Marth during his dominant period. Mango rose to prominence with Jigglypuff, but lost his title of undisputed best as he began using a mixture of Fox, Falco, and Captain Falcon. Then came Armada with the unprecedented combination of Peach and a pocket Young Link to deal with his toughest matchup, Jigglypuff. Only recently did Mango return to dominance while primarily playing Fox, and he still must contend with others who use Sheik, Jigglypuff, Falco, and Marth. A new contender for the top spot has arisen in the form of Leffen, a Swedish Fox main, but he hasn’t fully proven he can take things all the way yet.

Despite being the best character in the game, Fox is barely on the list of big winners. There have always been high-level Foxes, but they didn’t get to sit at the top. So either people think playing Fox will get them the W and they have very poor observation skills (possible), or it’s something else.

After all, there are a lot of strikes against you when playing Fox. He falls quickly, which makes him easy to combo. He’s one of the easier characters to KO at low percent. He requires a high level of technical precision to play consistently, and his mistakes tend to be extremely costly. On top of that, because he is so common, it’s very hard to find players that don’t have some degree of experience fighting him; the odds of having practice against every other character, however, is low for any given Fox player. So if you do play Fox, you’ll find yourself in a position where you make mistakes based on inexperience, mistakes that cost big time and get you sent to loser’s bracket early, where you probably bump into another Fox main. But people keep playing him.

What gives?

Part of it has to do with his speed, and the fact that going fast is fun. For some people it’s because they know how strong he can be while knowing how challenging it is to take him to the top. I used him as a tournament main and alternate for years, my reasoning being “if I can play Fox well, I will be able to play anybody” because of the dexterity required to play him. Many people share this attitude. Some relish the challenge.

Another reason is that he doesn’t actually have weak matchups. Glass cannon he might be, but a cannon nonetheless. Even if he’s not your primary character, as a backup he shores up any weakness your main might have, since his weakest matchups are fifty-fifty. For every disadvantage a different stage or matchup presents him, he receives some other advantage in compensation.

He also has some of the most reliable, bread-and-butter punishments in the game, and they can be practiced solo. This means that if somebody decides on a whim, “I think I’ll try playing Fox,” they can spend some time in training mode, hammer out a few basics, and have access to them once they start playing with live opponents. In a game where most combos are heavily dependant on the opponent’s positioning, percentage, and inputs, this is an undervalued but incredibly useful attribute.

The other thing to understand about Melee is that movement is at the heart of most of the game’s mixups. Fox has incredible versatility in the air with good air-control, sudden changes in speed by fast-falling, and his ground speed mixed with wavedashes lets him weave jukes and dodges with his direct aggression. Because so much of that speed is inherent to the character--and doesn’t necessarily rely on heavy training and optimization to unlock--picking Fox will give you access to the mental mix-up aspect of the game through his speed. This gives you access to the higher levels of both physical and mental components of the game.

But what really sells Fox is his versatility. He ranks well-above average in most categories, from speed to priority to power. His speed lets him rush down but it also lets him run away. He has a projectile that allows him to camp and spam, but it also can be used to force the other player to stop camping so you can fight in close quarters. He has solid options for poking and spacing and slowing things down, but also has the capacity to fight in your face. You don’t even need incredible finger speed to access his strongest tools, you just need precision and consistency. There are almost no skillsets in the game that can’t be accessed while playing him, so even though people don’t always end up winning as Fox, they feel like they get to play the game the way they want. Because he’s so strong, they see results doing it.

A huge element of the Smash Bros series is tweaking the game to play it however you want to, whether you want to organize things and eliminate all variables or create endless chaos. In a major sense, Fox embodies that because he lets you play precise and patient or wild and aggressive; he lets you camp and run while drawing the match out, or fish for low percent KOs to finish things quickly. At any point, you can switch from one to the other at the drop of a hat.



In short, Fox hits the sweet-spot of power, style customization, instant gratification, and reward for long-term dedication, along with the knowledge that if you keep getting better, you will win more and more. He represents much of what draws people into Melee, and that’s why you will almost never see a large tournament without a fleet of Starfox players.

Thanks for reading.