The first line of defense is to take advantage of the crisp mobility available, skirting the playing field around enemies to stay out of their attack reach. Teasing out attacks that don’t touch you at all grants opportunities to move closer without risk, perhaps even to whiff-punish for free damage. Eventually, though, whether against quick opposition or groups of enemies in free-for-all fights, you’ll be forced into a passive defending state. Understand the ins and outs and options so you can stymie opposing offense and get back to your game plan.
Shielding
Holding the Shield button causes the fighter to put up a bubble shield around them, color-coded to always match up with 1P, 2P, 3P, and 4P positions. Shields rise instantly—you can block attacks the very next frame after holding the Shield button. Tapping the Shield button—putting the shield up for the minimum amount of time—takes up no fewer than eight frames; blocking persists for a few frames after button release. This means you have to wait a bit to buffer any post-blocking attack. Shield grabs skip this block-lowering period, which is why they’re usually the fastest out-of-shield option (except for heavyweights or tether-grabbing fighters). If an incoming attack hits during that delayed blocking period, after having released the Shield button, a perfect shield occurs, basically a universal parry! For more details, see perfect shield.
Shields block damage from almost all attacks (though not grabs). Shields have a limited amount of durability, represented by their sizes, and simply holding up a shield depletes its area. If shield size is allowed to dwindle completely (either from holding it up too long or from blocking powerful attacks), the defender’s shield is shattered, dazing them and leaving them totally open. While dizzy, they’re unable to act or defend themselves; this period of true helplessness allows an opponent to punish with a heavy attack or combo.
Although an attack’s damage usually correlates with its shield damage, this isn’t always the case. Some attacks specifically do an inordinate amount of shield damage, such as Ganondorf’s up tilt, Ryu’s Collarbone Breaker (side tilt hold), and Marth’s Shield Breaker.
The shield’s bubble size determines what body parts are covered around the shielding fighter, as well as how much shield durability remains—a small shield indicates low shield health. When your shield shrinks and no longer covers certain parts of your hurtbox, you can be struck with attacks where you’re exposed. You can get around this by shield-shifting, tilting the control stick in the direction you think an attack is coming from, while holding down the Shield button. This is much more difficult than it sounds, and takes up valuable time (which you usually don’t have in a fast-paced match against skilled opponents). If you flick or tilt the stick too far, you can unintentionally get a roll or sidestep. To make sure this doesn’t happen, hold both Shield buttons (by default ZL and ZR), which allows you to freely and quickly shift the shield’s position around as you please without triggering evasive maneuvers.
Getting good at shield-shifting in a way that matters is less about having inhumanly fast reactions moment to moment, and much more about learning to recognize when you’re likely to have a bit of shield gone in a common scenario. For instance, when standing above a soft platform with opponents below, you might recognize they’re going to hop and try to hit you with up air attack through the floor, so you block and shift the shield downward just a little, to provide extra foot coverage.
See also shield-stun.
Rolling
Tapping left or right while holding the Shield button results in a dodge roll, a lateral evasive movement. It’s like a laggier dash with an instant and lengthy intangible period, allowing it to totally pass through any attack, but with some punishable lag at the end when intangibility wears off.
The outcome of a roll depends on which direction your fighter faces. Roll backward to stay facing the same direction. This makes backward rolls great as baiting feints. You can dash in, roll back, then perhaps capitalize if your foe whiffs something big into the space you vacated.
Roll forward, and your fighter ends up turning around. This is perfect for rolling right through opponents. You end up on the other side, still facing them. If you read their attack intentions correctly and roll through an attack of theirs, you should be poised to strike into their exposed backs!
Rolling toward opponents from far away ends with your fighter’s back to them. Rolling backward from this position gains more ground on foes but keeps you backturned. Which might be fine, if you have good moves that cover both sides and you’re ready to spring up with short-hopping back air. But to stay facing them, don’t roll forward unless you’re close enough to pass through.
Just as shielding can be overdone, so can rolling (and sidestepping). For one thing, while rolls are intangible at the beginning and middle, they leave you briefly vulnerable at the end. In this way rolling is identical to rising from a ledge-hanging position with a roll, or waking up from a knockdown by rolling to one side or another. If the opponent predicts the roll, they can wait for it (perhaps sticking out a quick, noncommittal move to encourage you to roll), hitting or grabbing you for free at the end. So, while rolls are great, they’re not overpowering or without downsides or counters.
What’s more, if you use dodge moves too often, each consecutive roll has slightly diminished speed and intangibility. By the time you use six dodge actions quickly one after another, there’s a noticeable difference in speed and usefulness. Back off of dodging actions for a while to allow dodge usefulness to “refresh” itself. This shouldn’t come up too often in gameplay; you might frequently do a couple rolls close together, or a sidestep and roll, but usually the situation changes in some way before you’d realistically dodge a half-dozen times.
Sidestepping
Hold the Shield button and tap down on the control stick for a sidestep, also called a spot dodge. Sidesteps are the most challenging of the dodging defensive options, since they’re immobile. Rolls and directional air dodges are mobile, and even a neutral air dodge keeps the momentum of the jump up to that point. Spot-dodging, in comparison, leads to cleaner potential opportunities right after but is harder to get away with.
Spot-dodging makes your fighter intangible for a brief period without going anywhere. It doesn’t last as long as a roll, and it has less end lag. Since it’s over faster and less vulnerable at the end, a sidestep allows quicker retaliation than a roll. However, a sidestep is also harder to time, since you don’t pass through attacks in progress and you don’t move out of the way of long-lasting multi-hit moves.
But with good timing, sidestepping is powerful. It lets you severely punish foes when you have a good read on their laggy single-hit swings. But like rolling, sidestepping can be risky, like badly whiffing a smash attack. If you spot-dodge when an enemy hasn’t committed to anything, you’re left wide open next to them at the end.
In a way, the new perfect shield mechanic is like an even tighter version of sidestepping, making an advanced defensive call that offers close-range reprisal when successful.
Air-Dodging (Neutral)
Tap the Shield button in midair without directional control stick input to air-dodge. The air-dodging fighter is briefly intangible, then has a bit of midair lag afterward. Depending on the fighter, it’s not too bad. If used near the ground just before landing, air-dodging doesn’t add too much extra landing lag. If you’re not attacking just before landing, it can potentially let you avoid incoming attacks and shots to air-dodge instead, making the period right before landing intangible.
When you’re recovering from offstage, if you have enough altitude to work with on a fighter with decent movement options, you can use an air dodge as a change-up at some point on your return trip. Aggressive edge-guarding foes will jump out after you, chasing you offstage; you can turn the tables on them using a well-timed air dodge to, for example, make their attempt at a KO-shot back air totally whiff, giving you a clear path back to the stage (or maybe to take a bold midair shot at them after dodge lag, depending on how far you’ve fallen).
Directional Air-Dodging
To get more oomph from an air dodge, point the control stick in a desired direction while tapping the Shield button in midair. There’s total control over the direction, any angle possible. Your fighter lunges in that direction, briefly becoming intangible. The combination of a kind of midair dashing motion and the intangibility means that directed air dodges can be used to evade clean through all kinds of incoming attacks. Like with sidesteps compared to rolls, directional air dodges are far more potent than neutral air dodges for passing through attacks unharmed, but much laggier afterward.
Landing lag after an angled air dodge near the ground is far more noticeable (and punishable). The air lag afterward means angled air dodges offstage typically lose much more altitude, making them riskier during recovery unless a directional air dodge toward a ledge is your last offstage action.
Aside from their intended use of dodging through things in midair, the flexibility of directional air dodges lets them be used as an aerial feint, an alternative to short-hopping and fast-falling repeatedly. Short-hop sort of close to enemies, then angle an air dodge back down to the ground. Don’t do this right up close; you don’t want to expose yourself during the landing lag. But done just beyond attack ranges, it’s another twitchy way to bait challengers into committing to their game plan first.