Roy (SSBM)

Roy (, Roy) is a unlockable character in Super Smash Bros. Melee. He is a clone of, differentiated primarily by his sweetspots being located near the center of his blade rather than the tip. He is voiced by.

Roy currently ranks 21st on the Melee tier list, in the D tier. Roy's advantages include an above average approach due to having one of the best SHFFLs in the game, as well as a good grab game, and among the best reaches in the game thanks to his sword. However, Roy's flaws are significant, which include having poor flexibility in his combo game, attacks that are difficult to properly land, generally possessing significantly laggy attacks, having few moves that can KO reliably and only one of which (forward smash) that is an adequate finisher, and one of the worst recoveries in the game while being a light character that is heavily susceptible to combos; as a result, Roy has significant KOing problems while being easy to KO himself. These flaws overpower Roy's strengths, leading to numerous matchups hard countering him, especially against those who are higher ranked than him on the tier list.

How to unlock
To unlock Roy, the player must complete either Classic or Adventure Mode as Marth without using a continue, or play 900 VS. matches.

Roy is fought on the Temple stage, with the track "Fire Emblem" playing.

Attributes


Overall, Roy does not fall into any specific fighter archetype; while having a slew of powerful attacks, Roy himself is rather nimble, boasting a relatively fast dash and a long dash dance, combined with very high falling speed. However, Roy has a relatively below-average air speed, similar to. A combination of a fast falling speed and low traction gives Roy a somewhat long wavedash (sixth longest in the game).

Being a clone of a top-tiered character in Melee (The character in question being ), Roy inherits some positive properties emblematic of Marth's game plan. Due to his movement properties and long wavedash, Roy has excellent ground-based movement. His down tilt also serves as a respectable poke and combo starter, as it will send opponents straight up when hit, allowing for a follow-up. Combined with an effective grab game, with the second-largest non-disjointed grab range (behind only Marth), Roy can somewhat emulate one portion of Marth's effective neutral game play: threatening grabs and down tilt out of his dash dance. With his ability to chaingrab some fastfallers such as and  with his up throw, tech chase opponents and set up edgeguards with his down and forward throws, as well as perform a handful of other combo setups that stem from his grab, Roy can force his opponents to respect him in the neutral while creating tangible threats as well. Roy also has a very fast SHFFL due to his fast falling speed and low-startup aerials, allowing him to further protect his space as needed.

Roy also boasts high power in most of his ground-based attacks. Roy's forward smash, like Marth's, has quick startup and covers a large range; this is his primary KO move, and most of Roy's combos will end with a sweetspotted forward smash to send opponents off-stage. Its greater power up close can also punish overzealous opponents who carelessly step into Roy's threat zone, allowing for reversal situations. His other two smash attacks are more situational, but both his down and up smashes are strong when landed; the latter even has multi-hit properties and can spike when struck at the tip, although this is very situational. Roy's specials are also quite strong as well; Flare Blade is a decent edgeguarding tactic and has huge knockback nearing one-hit KO thresholds when fully charged, Double-Edge Dance can serve as a backup neutral poke with strong third and fourth hits, and Counter can be used as a devastating surprise option, turning the tables against single, strong hits when the opponent least expects it. Counter can also intercept linear recoveries, and because it scales based on move power, it will almost assuredly KO most recovering opponents if landed, unlike Marth's Counter, which often simply resets the situation.

However, Roy's primary flaw is the sweetspot placement of his moves. While it may seem that Roy has great reach on paper due to his disjointed hitbox offered by the Binding Blade, this is all merely an illusion in practice. Unlike Marth, who can safely attack opponents from a distance, Roy must still go into close proximity with the opponent to deliver strong damage and knockback, as the sweetspot on his sword is closer to the hilt rather than at the tip. While attacks can become incredibly powerful at this close of a range, this causes Roy to become very vulnerable, especially against characters with powerful close-range threats. This would not be as much of a problem if Roy's sourspots had utility in setting up KOs or extending combos, but many of them do not, greatly exacerbating this weakness. While Marth's weakest sourspots actually complement his game plan, using his weaker hitboxes to precisely set up for his stronger ones, Roy's sourspots do almost nothing to the opponent in terms of knockback or damage.

As a result of this very close sweetspot, Roy himself lacks a particularly reliable KO move. With the exception of his forward smash, his down smash, and the later hits of his Double Edge Dance, Roy has few options to quickly KO, and even these attacks need to connect in close ranges in order for them to have any reasonable KOing power. Further compounding Roy's problems with KOing are his aerials; even when sweetspotted, none of these aerials can reliably KO under 200%, they require good setups in order to properly connect, and none of them can easily inflict damage in the first place. Roy also lacks any quick KO options. While he may have two meteor smashes (the third hit of his upward Double-Edge Dance and his down air) and one spike (tippered up smash), all three are highly situational, requiring particularly lucky or skilled setups in order to properly connect. Coupled with poor offstage options as a result of high-lag aerials that are all of high risk off the edge and a poor recovery, Roy is almost completely dependent on attempting to rack up damage with brief combo strings, culminating in a reliance on hard reads and unforced errors by the opponent to garner KOs.

Roy also has limited combo ability, in stark contrast with Marth. Roy has slightly below-average air speed like Marth, but Roy's sweetspot once again hurts him. Roy cannot move fast enough in the air to hit with the hilt of his blade, causing primarily sourspotted attacks, resulting in low hitstun and hitlag attacks, impairing Roy's combo and aerial games, and even giving him a poor edgeguarding game, unlike Marth. Roy's moveset is only suitable for aggravating fastfallers, since he at least has chaingrabs and tech chases against them, and can juggle them on stages with few or no platforms such as Pokémon Stadium or. However, that is the extent of Roy's high-level punish game against the cast, and he has no reliable method of achieving any combos or KO setups on floaty characters such as or. Roy's combo potential is thus below-average at best, being both stage- and character-dependent unlike Marth, and has led to completely lopsided losing matchups against those aforementioned floaty characters, with almost no hope of winning in a competitive setting.

Roy himself, however, is easy to combo and edgeguard; like other fastfalling characters, his high falling speed harms him by making him extremely vulnerable to juggling. Even with fast falling speed, Roy's vertical survivability from the upper blast line is merely average due to a combination of his lighter weight than characters such as and much slower falling speed than characters like, despite him being slightly lighter than Roy. Like Marth, Roy also has a non-stellar recovery, though his faster falling speed and higher gravity only exacerbate it to make it far worse than Marth's and among the worst in the game; adding to this, his high falling speed makes him extremely vulnerable to edgeguarding, as well as being easy to gimp. While Roy's Blazer is slightly more effective than Marth's Dolphin Slash, due to its greater horizontal distance, multi-hit properties that can aggravate edgeguarders, and its ability to be controlled to an extent, it still has high ending lag, leaving him open to punishes as he lands. Additionally, while Roy can still use Double-Edge Dance to recover horizontally, it is not as effective as Marth's Dancing Blade due to his higher falling speed.

While Roy may appear like he has enough tools as a character to function, in reality, he struggles with nearly every aspect of Melee. His excellent movement is not only outclassed by Marth, but simply does not compensate for his many weaknesses in both the advantage and disadvantage states. Roy's moveset is full of low-impact hitboxes that struggle to push any sort of advantage against non-fastfalling opponents, while he is almost trivial to combo, edgeguard, and KO himself. While Roy's raw power up close can punish careless opponents, hoping that opponents make unforced errors is not a reliable strategy. As such, unlike Marth, Roy is a poor character at higher levels of play with sparse representation.

Version history
NTSC 1.01

Differences from
Roy is overall a considerably less effective character than Marth. All of his sweetspots are placed at the hilt or center of his blade, making it hard for him to space, and his down aerial's spike is a meteor smash hitbox that is difficult to hit with. Almost all of Roy's moves have hitboxes that come out slower, remain active for fewer frames, or stay out for the same period as Marth's, but with slower animation speed (leading to unfortunate hitbox timing on moves like his dash attack, the upper part of his neutral attack, three of his aerials and Blazer). Roy's sourspot does far less knockback and damage than Marth's, and his sweetspots do somewhere in between the knockback and damage of Marth's sour- and sweetspots, making his KO potential much worse than Marth's. Additionally, his wavedash and moonwalk are both shorter than Marth's, resulting in him being less mobile.

However, Roy does have some advantages. As he is slightly shorter than Marth, he is slightly harder to hit (although this makes his range shorter as a result); his up smash hits multiple times and can spike, making it more reliable than Marth's, and Flare Blade is much stronger than Shield Breaker, being a one-hit KO when fully charged. Additionally, unlike Dolphin Slash, Blazer has multi-hit properties and can OHKO most lightweight fighters, like Mewtwo and Jigglypuff.

Overall, Roy's advantages are not enough to alleviate his significant weaknesses, and it results in him having far less successful tournament results and a much smaller playerbase in comparison to Marth.

Ground attacks

 * Neutral attack:
 * Forward tilt:
 * Up tilt:
 * Down tilt:
 * Dash attack:
 * 
 * Forward smash:
 * Up smash:
 * Down smash:
 * Up tilt:
 * Down tilt:
 * Dash attack:
 * 
 * Forward smash:
 * Up smash:
 * Down smash:
 * Down tilt:
 * Dash attack:
 * 
 * Forward smash:
 * Up smash:
 * Down smash:
 * Dash attack:
 * 
 * Forward smash:
 * Up smash:
 * Down smash:
 * 
 * Forward smash:
 * Up smash:
 * Down smash:
 * Up smash:
 * Down smash:
 * Up smash:
 * Down smash:
 * Up smash:
 * Down smash:
 * Down smash:
 * Down smash:
 * Down smash:
 * Down smash:
 * Down smash:
 * Down smash:
 * Down smash:
 * Down smash:
 * Down smash:

Aerial attacks

 * Neutral aerial:
 * Forward aerial:
 * Back aerial:
 * Up aerial:
 * Down aerial:
 * Back aerial:
 * Up aerial:
 * Down aerial:
 * Back aerial:
 * Up aerial:
 * Down aerial:
 * Up aerial:
 * Down aerial:
 * Down aerial:
 * Down aerial:
 * Down aerial:
 * Down aerial:

Special moves

 * Flare Blade:
 * Double-Edge Dance:
 * Blazer:
 * Counter:
 * Double-Edge Dance:
 * Blazer:
 * Counter:
 * Double-Edge Dance:
 * Blazer:
 * Counter:
 * Blazer:
 * Counter:
 * Blazer:
 * Counter:
 * Counter:
 * Counter:
 * Counter:
 * Counter:
 * Counter:
 * Counter:
 * Counter:
 * Counter:
 * Counter:
 * Counter:
 * Counter:

Moveset
For a gallery of Roy's hitboxes, see here. All of Roy's attacks are at their strongest when they hit with the center of the Binding Blade; if an attack hits with both the sourspot and sweetspot hitboxes, then the sweetspot usually takes priority but sometimes sourspots do occur.

Stats
NTSC

PAL

Most historically significant players

 * See also: Category:Roy players (SSBM)


 * - Currently considered one of the best active Roy players in the world. Ranked 50th on the Mexican Power Rankings.
 * - Although better known for his in Brawl, he placed well in many French tournaments with Roy.
 * - A solid Roy player, although more known for his Roy in Project M.
 * - The strongest player in Japan in the early days; has a competent Roy secondary.
 * - Considered to be the best Roy player of all time with many results other Roy players still have yet to match. Placed 2nd at.
 * - Was considered to be the current best Roy player in the world after NEO's retirement, due to his popularity and widely acclaimed combo video Ashes to Ashes.
 * - Uses Roy under the moniker "DontTestMe"; mostly uses Roy in online tournaments to moderate success. Online, he has defeated, , and . His 7th place finish at marked Roy's most notable offline tournament placing since NEO's results in the Golden Age. Has wins over  and  offline.

Tier placement and history
On the current tier list, Roy ranks 21st, in the D tier. Roy has consistently ranked very low on most revisions of the tier list, with his highest being only 15th on two separate occasions. His severe weaknesses, such as his poor effective threat range, fast-falling physics coupled with very poor recovery, and nearly nonexistent combo game on floaty characters, have resulted in terrible matchups against many top- and high-tiered characters (particularly the non-fastfallers) that completely stop his mains from progressing far into tournaments. This holds him back far too much in competitive play to place consistently in high-level tournaments without the use of a secondary character.

Roy's moveset also does not boast the potential creativity of other characters, especially Marth, owing to his over-reliance on his very few good combo extenders and KO moves. This has resulted in much less nuance and optimization possible in Roy's metagame, making the Roy matchup very easy to learn and catch up with. Additionally, because he is very similar to Marth, a top-tiered character that any competitive player knows how to fight against, Roy players cannot rely on matchup inexperience to win sets, unlike mains of other uncommon characters. While, arguably the greatest Roy player of all time, managed to place top 8 consistently in the early Melee metagame, even he had to use Marth and Sheik secondaries to succeed at higher-stakes tournaments such as MLG. NEO, and many of Roy's best representatives, have either become inactive in the tournament scene or have dropped him for other characters (or other Smash games altogether), further hurting Roy's results in tournaments.

Roy's only notable results in the current Melee metagame have been through Marth players, such as and, sandbagging with him in lower-stakes tournaments or matches. Zain has seen a notable amount of success with Roy in online tournaments and at the regional level; notably, he placed 7th at, the character's best performance since NEO's placements in the Golden Age. However, the majority of Zain's best wins have been against fastfallers, outside of a handful of fringe sets where he barely scraped out wins against players, some of them not even ranked in the top 100. Thus, his tournament runs with Roy only reinforce what has been known about him for years already, both in terms of strengths and limitations, and it is clear that Zain's success with Roy is entirely due to his phenomenal abilities as a player rather than Roy offering any unique positive qualities as a character to fuel that success. Despite Zain's attempts to push the character, Roy's metagame still remains rather stagnant, with players' opinions of him only marginally improving overall.

The "Tier Wars" and comparison to Marth
's and Roy's differences became the center of controversy and discussion on GameFAQs' tier list debates, specifically in 2003 and 2004, when the competitive scene was still new. Marth players who generally supported the tier list claimed Marth had overall better attributes, in terms of speed, weight, and recovery capabilities. They also cited tournament results as proof of his superiority, with a multitude of professional Marth users such as placing extremely high in major tournaments, while Roy lacked any such representation to back up the anti-tiers' arguments. Roy players who generally opposed the tier list, however, claimed that Roy's different attributes, such as his larger sweetspot in the center of his blade and general "superiority" in power, were enough to allow him to be as efficient of a character as Marth was; they also argued that professionals needed to learn how to use Roy as a different character from Marth in an attempt to disprove the tournament results.

Owing to the fact that these debates took place before extensive testing of Melee's engine, the debates were plagued by numerous inaccuracies that have since been disproven with time. The point about Marth's extra weight, for instance, is now considered moot; his extra weight is decidedly negligible, and can even be interpreted as a disadvantage, considering his extra weight makes him susceptible to 's shine combos, while Roy's lighter weight makes him immune to such combos. More importantly, pro-tiers made a common assumption that Marth is faster than Roy. While Marth indeed has a faster dashing speed, this claim is questionable, considering that Roy's SHFFL is faster than Marth's due to his falling speed and lower short hop. Similarly, some points brought up about Roy's viability are also now considered inaccurate. For instance, Roy's "superiority" in power has been disproven, as many of Marth's attacks, tippered and non-tippered, deal more knockback and damage than Roy's respective centered and non-sweetspotted strikes. The sweetspot in the hilt of the blade is now considered a disadvantage and one of the main reasons for Roy's poor tier placement; while Marth can attack from afar and still deal respectable damage, Roy cannot do so, lest his attacks hit with extremely low knockback; Roy's sourspot on the entire length of the Binding Blade, besides the hilt, is also much weaker than Marth's sourspot on the hilt of the Falchion.

Overall, the primary reason for Roy's named inferiority is precisely the one that anti-tiers attempted to refute: Roy has too much trouble trying to KO his opponents. Marth has far more creative and flexible ways to string together moves, deal damage, KO, and edgeguard (especially due to his spike). Roy, however, lacks the same flexibility in his comboing and KOing games, and is instead heavily reliant on predictable and repetitive chain grab and down tilt setups, with almost all of his viable combos ending in a forward smash. Roy's edgeguarding game is also considerably worse than Marth's; while Roy's down tilt is more useful for combos, it is not at all useful for intercepting the majority of recoveries (unlike Marth's). Additionally, Roy has a notoriously poor offstage game due to his falling speed and terrible aerials, that are both incredibly weak even when sweetspotted and have a high amount of ending lag, which severely hinders his ability to effectively edge-guard offstage without self-destructing. The current metagame for Melee reflects these differences and conclusions: Marth ranks in the S tier at 2nd place and features numerous dedicated mains, while Roy ranks in the D tier at 21st, and has very few dedicated mains of his own.

In
Unusually, Roy does not appear in Classic Mode when unlocked, neither as an ally, nor as an opponent, making him the only fighter who never appears at all; the reason for this is unknown. Despite this, Roy does have an introduction image for the "Now Loading..." screen between matches in the game files.

In Adventure Mode
The Adventure Mode makes no concessions to Roy when he is unlocked. Like Marth, however, music associated with him can play in the Underground Maze stage.

In All-Star Mode
In All-Star Mode, Roy and his allies are fought on, as Roy was not designated an official home stage. Final Destination has the unusual property of playing the Fire Emblem music track when accessed this way.

In Event Matches
Roy appears in two Event Matches:


 * Event 46: Fire Emblem Pride: The player battles and must defeat a team of Marth and Roy in an untimed match on Temple, with all three characters receiving 3 stock.
 * Event 49: All-Star Match Deluxe: Roy is the fifth opponent fought in this series of staged battles. The selected character battles him on Temple with a stock of 2 while Roy has 1. With a timer of four minutes, the player must defeat him and the other five characters one-by-one with the overall time and damage:, , , and.

Trophies
In addition to the normal trophy about Roy as a character, there are two trophies about him as a fighter, unlocked by completing the Adventure and All-Star modes respectively with Roy on any difficulty:

Trivia

 * Close examination of textures for the Binding Blade shows the incorrectly spelt text "©HAL LABRATORY.INC" included in the file. It is not known why the signature is there.
 * Roy is the only character in Melee:
 * That is a clone of a newcomer, as well as the only clone of an unlockable character.
 * Whose icon on the character selection screen has a different background color on his name (the background color is almost pure black on his name while other characters have a red and black color mix for their background color for their names).
 * Who makes no appearance as a CPU whatsoever in.
 * Roy's files and debug menu listings do not reference him specifically: he is instead referred to internally as "EMBLEM", most prominently in the debug menu and his texture files refer to him with the codename "Fe", an abbreviation of "Fire Emblem".
 * This suggests that Roy was chosen as the Marth clone relatively late in development.
 * Roy does not feature a sheath during gameplay and his "Challenger Approaching" screen like Marth does; this is considered unusual, as Roy has a sheath in his victory poses, official art, character select portrait and all three of his trophies, as well as his unused Classic Mode introduction.
 * This also happens in Smash 4 and Ultimate, but the sheath appears when he uses his Final Smash.
 * Roy and are the only two characters in Melee that speak Japanese even in the international release.
 * Roy and Marth are the only playable characters in Melee that do not have a stage representing their universe, though hacked data shows that one was planned.
 * In Melee's All-Star Mode, Roy is fought on . In his two Event Match appearances and his unlock battle, he appears on Temple.
 * Roy and are the only fighters to use their KO cry for other uses. Roy's is used when fully charging Flare Blade and Young Link's is used during his Star KO animation.
 * Roy with his Flare Blade, with his Judge, and  with most of its electric attacks are the only characters in Melee to have attacks that directly inflict recoil damage.  can also harm himself if he copies either Roy or Pichu.
 * Along with Marth, Roy was originally going to be a character exclusive to the Japanese version of Super Smash Bros. Melee, but was kept in all versions on request of an employee at Nintendo of America. Their inclusion led to wider exposure to the Fire Emblem franchise, and it led to newer games being released outside of Japan.
 * All of Roy's sourspotted attacks make a punch/kick sound effect instead of a slashing sound effect.
 * Ironically, Roy's sword trails indicate that the sweetspot is at the tip of the sword.
 * Because Roy's intended debut game's release was delayed into March 2002, Roy is one of two characters who can claim a Smash game as their first appearance. The other one is, a composite of older Game & Watch characters with some original elements.
 * Roy's design in Melee is taken from the version of Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade shown at Nintendo Space World 2001. There are some differences, though, like the lack of sleeves and the lack of a jewel on Roy's armor.
 * Possibly as a result for his somewhat high learning curve and being a popular low-tier substitute for high-level smashers such as and, the term "skilled Roy" is a common gag inside the Melee community for being an unbeatable character, with the phrase "A skilled Roy can beat any . This is why I main Roy." being a good example of it.
 * Roy and Marth are the only characters that can perform the Whispy blink glitch.