Lucina (SSB4)


 * Lucina Wakes Her Blade?!

Lucina (, Lucina) is a playable character in Super Smash Bros. 4. She was revealed during a livestream on July 14th, 2014 on the official Super Smash Bros. website, during which was announced and her fellow  fighter  was also revealed.

Laura Bailey and Yū Kobayashi reprise their roles as Lucina in the English and Japanese versions.

Lucina is ranked 14th out of 54 on the tier list, placing her in the B tier. Lucina's grants her relatively long disjointed range, yet differs from her ancestor's  by lacking a tipper. As a result, Lucina's moveset is less polarized than Marth's and, in turn, possesses several benefits.

Compared to Marth, Lucina's KO potential is noticeably more consistent at high percentages; on a related note, she also has guaranteed horizontal KO set-ups unique to her. In addition, her moves inflict higher shieldstun at close range, which makes her slightly more difficult to punish out of shield compared to Marth's sourspotted moves. Lastly, Lucina is slightly better at defending against close-ranged pressure, most notably against rushdown-oriented characters like Captain Falcon.

Like, Lucina's overall mobility is above-average and the majority of her moveset has minimal start-up lag. When these traits are coupled with the Parallel Falchion's disjointed range, she possesses a reliable neutral game. Lucina also has useful combo starters (neutral attack's first hit; neutral aerial's first hit; and Dancing Blade) and respectably strong KOing options (forward/up smashes and back aerial).

However, Lucina also shares Marth's flaws. Her attacks have short hitbox durations, some of which also have noticeable ending lag, which can make her susceptible to punishment if she does not space efficiently. Lucina also has a poor grab game: each of her throws have meager damage outputs, while her only throws that do have utility (up throw for KOing and down throw for starting combos) are only effective at very high percentages and low percentages, respectively.

Lucina also has difficulty dealing with aerial pressure: Dolphin Slash's linearity leaves her vulnerable to edgeguarding and gimping, while her lack of reliable anti-pressure options leaves her vulnerable to combos and juggling.

The Parallel Falchion's lack of a tipper hitbox is also a double-edged sword for Lucina. While her moveset is safer overall compared to Marth's thanks to her attacks having consistent knockback, low hitlag modifiers, and slightly higher shieldstun at close range, Lucina's attacks are more punishable than Marth's if they are not spaced sufficiently because of Marth benefiting from his tipper's higher shieldstun.

Despite their consistent power, Lucina's strongest KOing options are also weaker than Marth's tippered attacks, preventing her from gaining an advantage by scoring early KOs. Lastly, her higher overall knockback removes several noteworthy sourspotted combos that Marth possesses at high percentages, while her unique KO set-ups are riskier than his.

As a result of these differences, Lucina has ultimately been viewed by many professionals as inferior to Marth. This has been reflected by their respective tier placements throughout SSB4's lifespan. Although Lucina has not achieved the breakout of impressive results that Marth has, several professionals, such as, , and , believe that the gap between her and Marth is not as significant as it seems, if it exists at all. This has been most notably demonstrated by ZeRo adopting her as a secondary for a period of time in 2017, as he had continued winning regional and national tournaments up until his retirement.

After completing one of the two methods, Lucina must then be defeated on Arena Ferox.
 * Play 40 VS Matches.
 * Complete as  without using any continues.

After completing one of the two methods, Lucina then must be defeated on Coliseum.
 * Play 30 VS Matches.
 * Clear on Intensity 5.5 or higher.

Attributes
Lucina is a clone of Marth: her moveset and animations are primarily based off of his, while their attributes are identical. As such, Lucina is tied with Marth as the lightest middleweight in the game, yet she boasts great overall mobility like he does: she has the fastest walking speed in the game; above-average dashing speed and air acceleration; average air and falling speeds; and low gravity. Lucina is also slightly shorter than Marth, which makes both her hurtbox and range marginally shorter than his.

The primary difference between Lucina and Marth is their swords: Lucina's Parallel Falchion has a consistent damage output throughout its blade, whereas Marth's Falchion is more powerful when hitting with its blade's tip, but is significantly weaker throughout the rest of its blade. By extension, the power of all Lucina's attacks is approximate to the weighted average of Marth's sweetspotted and sourspotted attacks, if not very slightly higher.

These traits collectively grant Lucina a few advantages that help her set apart from Marth; in particular, her neutral game is overall safer because of the higher shieldstun on average her moves can inflict, which makes her moves safe on shield when spaced correctly. A prime example of this is her forward aerial, which is arguably her most useful spacing option, especially when utilizing the middle or tip of her Parallel Falchion.

Another advantage that Lucina possesses is her consistent KO potential: unlike Marth, precise spacing is not required for all her moves to deal dependable knockback, whereas Marth's sourspotted attacks deal mediocre damage and knockback even at high percentages. Noteworthy examples include her up smash, down aerial and Dancing Blade, which are all more powerful than Marth's equivalents in any given case. Although Lucina does not have as many intricate sourspot combos or set-ups that Marth can utilize to set up his tippers, she gains more consistent damage off her own combos than Marth due to her lack of such sourspots.

Lucina also has her own KO set-ups different from those of Marth via the first hit of neutral attack, while sharing some of them with him, and those she shares being arguably easier to perform because of the Parallel Falchion's consistent hitboxes; the most prominent example is the KO combo consisting of her neutral attack's first hit into forward smash, which is overall more effective when compared to Marth's, thanks to her balanced hitstun and knockback.

There are also many strengths Lucina shares with Marth. Like him, many of her moves possess good range, fast start-up, and cover wide arcs, allowing her to pressure the opponent without leaving herself open to punishment. Lucina's special moveset also possesses immense utility, and in two cases, more than that of Marth. Shield Breaker can break shields thanks to its high shield damage, even when uncharged, and it is useful for punishing rolls. It also grants some horizontal movement, which is amplified when fully charged. Dancing Blade can be used to punish sidesteps and boasts combo, mix-up, KO and even recovery potentials. In comparison to Marth's version, it does not link as well because of each hit's higher knockback, but it has much better KO potential.

Dolphin Slash has quick start-up; provides intangibility during its start-up; and is relatively strong upon coming out. These attributes make it Lucina's primary method of recovery, as its speed can make it difficult to intercept, especially from out of shield. In addition, its power makes it capable of breaking combos and even stage spike reckless edgeguard attempts. Lastly, Counter is a counterattack with a 1.2× damage multiplier that can KO an opponent who uses a sufficiently strong attack.

The last strength Lucina shares with Marth is her strong edgeguarding potential: her forward and back aerial's fast start-up and good range make them go-to edgeguarding options. Down aerial is relatively quick, and can strongly meteor smash opponents if it hits at the center of the arc. Forward smash's range makes it a good choice against opponents aiming their recoveries directly towards the edge, such as and, and down tilt's range and speed make it good at exploiting an opponent's 2 frame-long vulnerability when grabbing the edge. Both have the ability to hit below the edge as well.

Nonetheless, Lucina also possesses notable disadvantages compared to Marth. The lack of a tipper is both a strength and weakness: while the lack of a tipper does make her combos and rushdowns more consistently damaging than Marth's, if Lucina does not successfully use one of her reliable KOing options, she must rely on scoring KOs with options that are vastly inferior compared to Marth's tippered attacks. On a related note, she cannot secure early KOs with hard reads, or gain as much positional advantage off precise spacing against approaches or shields. This makes Lucina slightly less threatening in the neutral game; attacking opponents do not have to space their approaches relative to the Parallel Falchion's blade the same way they would with Marth's Falchion, and defending opponents do not need to adjust their spacing to avoid being hit by a tipper.

As such, in order for Lucina's attacks to be safe on shield, she must still utilize her Parallel Fachion's range in order to space her moves at the middle portion or the tip of its blade. Opponents also do not have to worry about being KO'd early from a powerful and timely tippered attack, which in turn makes Lucina somewhat inferior at pressuring opponents in comparison to Marth.

Lucina also shares some of the weaknesses Marth does: despite having below-average weight and average falling speed, she is susceptible to combos, and her slightly above-average height makes her a rather easy target. Lucina also has minimal defense against juggling, as her aerials are ineffective at relieving pressure. Though her attacks have quick start-up, many of them come with high ending and landing lag, and lack lingering hitboxes, making her attacks unsafe to use on shield up close despite their greater power. Lucina's moveset also lacks a projectile, making her struggle against projectile-oriented characters.

While Lucina can pressure characters and force them to hold shield and block her attacks, she often struggles against shields, as improperly spaced aerials leave her susceptible to punishment, and Shield Breaker is highly punishable if predicted. This is further compounded by Lucina's poor grab game: although her pummel is fairly quick, each of her throws have low damage outputs, while only two of them (up and down throws) have utility. However, even these throws are ineffective: up throw only KOs at very high percentages, whereas down throw fails to combo past medium percentages.

Lastly, Lucina is vulnerable to edgeguarding. Dolphin Slash is her only reliable recovery option, and despite being hard for edgeguarders to outcome thanks to its speed and power, it has a linear path with fixed distance, making it predictable regardless. Due to its below-average horizontal distance, she is also vulnerable to semi-spikes. She does have options to mix it up, though: Shield Breaker can aid her horizontal recovery when fully charged, while Dancing Blade stalls her after a midair jump. Even so, she is also heavily reliant on her double jump for mixing up her recovery, and she is in significant danger of being gimped if off-stage without it.

Overall, Lucina is a "lower-risk, lower-reward" version of Marth. She trades heavy power and range for more consistent spacing and damage racking abilities, as well as more consistent KO potential. Like and, she has a low learning curve thanks to her straightforward playstyle, since she benefits from spacing at close range while also having several fast and reliably strong KOing options. Despite this, and due to Marth's more rewarding KO and spacing potentials, she must play more defensively in order to utilize her moveset to the fullest, namely her moves' consistently high knockback, though without getting the extra reward Marth obtains by doing so.

While Lucina does possess some advantages that allow her to fare better in certain matchups compared to Marth, such as and, she still lacks the main advantages that Marth's tipper provides. Despite her flaws, Lucina's actual level of viability is debatable: although her playerbase is fairly small, she receives strong results from the players who do use her, with the most notable examples being 's numerous tournament victories upon adopting her as a secondary in 2017.

Differences from
Lucina's differences from Marth mostly boil down to her lack of sweetspots. Lucina's attacks will deal the same damage regardless of where on her sword the attack lands (excluding Down Aerial). This change made players view Lucina as an "easy mode" of Marth, with players not having to worry about spacing to maximize damage output. Lucina is slightly shorter than Marth, which makes her slightly harder to hit, but would also slightly shorten her range. Her up tilt has a timing sweetspot opposed to a tipper sweetspot.

Lucina overall performs similarly to Marth, but her lack of tipper sweetspots makes her play noticeably differently. Her differences essentially boil down to a more consistent version of Marth that isn't capable of getting early KOs compared to Marth's tipper sweetspots.

Update history
Initially a poorly regarded character like her ancestor, Lucina has been buffed significantly thanks to game updates. Updates 1.0.6, 1.0.8, 1.1.0 and 1.1.3 collectively improved her overall damage output, decreased the ending lag of several combo-oriented moves, and increased the knockback of many of her standard attacks.

However, the biggest buffs Lucina received were indirect. Originally, the low shieldstun used in SSB4 made her neutral game quite unsafe, and the fact that her moves (aside from neutral attack) lack hitlag modifiers resulted in them being less safe on shield than Marth's sourspotted attacks. The changes to shield mechanics brought about by updates 1.1.0 and 1.1.1 remedied this by making her moves safer on shield, especially when compared to Marth and 's sourspotted moves. Shield Breaker was nerfed as a trade-off, however, as its shield damage was decreased.

Lastly, update 1.1.4 increased all of the damage outputs for all of Lucina's aerials, which not only improved her aerial combo and juggle potentials, but further closed the gap between her overall damage output and Marth's. Her grounded attacks and aerial attacks' hitboxes were also increased to the point where, like Marth, her range now overreaches certain characters' ranges, such as 's. When coupled with her multitude of buffs, Lucina is much better than she was during SSB4's initial release.

 1.0.4

 1.0.6

 1.0.8

Technical changelist 1.0.8

 1.1.0

Technical changelist 1.1.0

 1.1.1

 1.1.3

 1.1.4

Moveset
For a gallery of Lucina's hitboxes, see here.
 * Lucina's overall damage output is close to the weighted average of each of the hitboxes of 's attacks.

Tier placement and history
Upon SSB4's release, Lucina was quickly compared to due to her inheriting many of the flaws he had received in his transition from Brawl. Although her Parallel Falchion boasts consistent power, this strength has been viewed as less effective in comparison to Falchion's tipper, resulting in Lucina being widely regarded as worse than Marth, as well being poorly regarded early on. As time went on, however, game updates gradually improved Lucina, with the vast majority of her buffs being shared with Marth. These changes helped her mitigate some of the problems she initially had, although they were not sufficient enough in comparison to Marth's, who began developing a much more dedicated playerbase than her. As such, Lucina achieved much poorer results in comparison, which saw her ranked 47th on the first 4BR tier list, placing her in the bottom-tier and six places below Marth.

However, Lucina continued to improve over time, and gained some other significant buffs in update 1.1.4, with some of them once again being shared with Marth. These improvements allowed Lucina's offense to flow more consistently than before, giving her a niche over Marth in certain matchups. Although these buffs were still not enough to enable her to achieve significant results, even from her best players like, they still improved her perception within the community. As a result, Lucina ranked 36th on the second tier list, resulting with her being reassessed as a mid-tier character, and gaining the fourth largest rise between the first and second tier lists. Even so, players such as and  considered Lucina's position on the tier list as too low, due to most of her strengths being shared with Marth. To reflect the drastic improvements brought about by game updates, as well as her stronger, if rare, results, Lucina was then ranked 18th on the third tier list; by extension, this was the largest rise between the second and third tier lists.

Although Lucina was still considered to be inferior to Marth overall, some smashers claimed her placing to be somewhat low, especially considering the briefly improved results brought by ZeRo during the spring and summer of 2017 after picking her up as a secondary, as well as better results brought by other players like Kogarasuma and. Thanks to these results, she has rised to 14th on the fourth and final tier list. She is the only bottom-tier character to ever become a high-tier one and is one of the characters who have improved the most overall.

Lucina also began to earn more results as Mr E got 5th at EVO 2018 while defeating, , , and to qualify for top 8 before losing to  and  and continued to do very well with her such as getting 17th at Super Smash Con 2018, 25th at Shine 2018, 4th at Canada Cup 2018 and 17th at both GameTyrant Expo 2018 and DreamHack Atlanta 2018. These results which were previously unspoken of for Lucina have not only been more impressive than a fair amount of the characters above her, but also Marth. Due to this and with some people noting that Marth has not achieved that much success with out a secondary on top of him being significantly less consistent at killing as a character, some have said that Lucina is a superior character to Marth. This however, is highly debatable.

Most historically significant players
Any number following the Smasher name indicates placement on the PGR 100, which recognizes the official top 100 players in Super Smash Bros. 4 of all time.

See also: Category:Lucina players (SSB4)


 * - Considered one of the best Lucina players in the United States. Placed 4th at, 7th at , 9th at , 13th at , and 25th at . Formerly ranked 10th on the New England Power Rankings.
 * (#37) - The best Lucina player in the world for most of the game's lifespan. Placed 5th at both and, 9th at , 13th at , and 17th at  with wins over players such as , , and.
 * (#1) - Formerly used Lucina as a secondary alongside and was considered the best Lucina player in the world in the first half of 2017. Won, , , and.

Solo Events

 * In the Name of the Hero-King: As, the player must defeat Lucina in a Stamina Battle.
 * New Challengers 1: Lucina is among the opponents fought in this event, alongside, , , , , and

Co-op Events

 * Mirror Magic: Lucina and must defeat, a giant metal dark Lucina, and a giant metal dark Ike.
 * The Ultimate Battle: Two players select a character and must defeat the entire roster.

Trivia

 * Although Lucina was originally planned as an alternate costume for, she was transitioned into being an entirely separate character later in development once her attacks were given differing traits. Masahiro Sakurai elaborated on this by explaining that "whenever there is even a small difference in abilities, that character gets an actual roster slot." She was one of three intended alternate costumes to be made separate in this way, with the other two being the returning and her fellow newcomer.
 * Lucina makes a few references to her home game:
 * Her pose in official art of her for Super Smash Bros. 4 is identical to her pose in official art of her disguised as Marth. Lucina also strikes this pose for her Counter (though she instantly shifts to 's Counter stance for an extremely brief moment if her Counter is triggered), her up taunt and a victory pose.
 * Her father, Chrom, also strikes this pose in his official art, albeit mirrored.
 * The battle stance she assumes when her reveal trailer's tagline appears is identical to the stance she and Chrom assume simultaneously during their duel in the Arena Ferox tournament.
 * Her in-game model in bears the Brand of Naga in her left eye.
 * The mask she used while disguised as Marth is used for her on-screen appearance and down taunt.
 * Both of her lines emitted after successfully using Counter are the same lines used when she performs a Dual Strike.
 * Lucina is the first clone in the entire series whose special moves, including custom variations, all share the same names with the character she is a clone of, and also the first clone to share every single move with the character they are derived from.
 * Additionally, she is the only full clone in Smash 4 not to share a voice actor with the original character. Dark Pit and are both voiced by the same actor, but share different voice clips, while Dr. Mario reuses 's voice clips.
 * Robin and Lucina are the only playable Fire Emblem characters in Smash 4 to originate from the same game in their home series.
 * Lucina is the only unlockable character in both versions of SSB4 who was officially revealed prior to the release of SSB4 and the only unlockable character to appear in the opening movie for Super Smash Bros. for Wii U.
 * Lucina is also one of three unlockable characters prior to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate to be revealed as a playable character prior to the release of the game, with the other two being and  in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Of these, Lucina is the only one not to be a third party character
 * Lucina is the only one of the three clone characters to not share their counterpart's screen KO animation.
 * Lucina, and  are the only characters that players are not forced to play as in any single player Event Matches.
 * Lucina is the only Fire Emblem character whose Counter does not involve her holding her sword in a reverse grip during either her stance or counterattack. However, as stated earlier, she will instantly shift to Marth's stance for an extremely brief moment when her Counter is triggered.
 * In the Japanese version of the game, Lucina has an alternate blast KO voice clip, while she grunts in the international releases. The line itself is "" (Must I fall here...?), a reference to her death quote in Fire Emblem Awakening.