Dash dancing is... stupid? It's not even good in Minus compared to Melee, and in Melee dash dancing practically is the game for some matchups. Maybe it's because you play 4 (where dash dancing isn't even a thing) but I think you wildly underestimate how important a good dash dance is to playing Melee.
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PPMD is a ridiculously good player. He isn't mashing his stick back and forth, and he isn't just moving left and right in a mostly-actionable state like Boost allows for. Let's walk through what he did here once he hit the ground.
L cancel
Pivot
Short Wavedash back
Dash forward
Dash-pivot
Wavedash back
Wavedash back
STICKY WALK FORWARDS
Dash-pivot
Wavedash back
Forward smash
That's a ton of movement! He could shield at any point because he never entered run, despite moving around half the bottom platform. Even better, Marth's dash allows him to crouch very low.
imgur.com/aTlf7xW
Melee is all about the subtle movements, like how Marth's up tilt moves his hurtbubbles slightly forward, allowing him do things like this, where the lean forward prevents the Falcon grab.
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I play Melee, PM, and Smsah 4. In Melee and PM I play Link and I have top tier backups I almost never use. The ENTIRE point I was making is that having such movement options is fundamentally broken and too easily abusable against those with inferior movement options, to the point where they should entirely invalidate some or most characters [and thus kind of stupid... I know at least one player who was quite skilled and he quit Melee because dash dancing and the ledge mechanics were simply too abusive... he now plays traditional fighters and sees success in Melee thanks to his further improved footsies game, but he says that element is notably absent because dash dancing subsumes it all]. The way you highlighted PPMD's movement proves my point precisely - a character like Ganondorf in Minus has zero point zero ways to answer that without taking a massive commitment, and he should almost always die for doing so. And the reason Smash 4 is so much more balanced than Melee is that the things that top tiers abused the most [wavedashing, some shield pressure strings, chaingrabs, etc.] are not present [and Sheik is the best in Smash 4 because she still has the best ability to avoid landing traps, combo, and move within the system... but if you had all the movement options to that system, it's more than likely she or someone else becomes even more broken because they can abuse it so much better than the others].
PPMD is probably my favorite player [up alongside Axe and Plup], but I seriously believe that the way he plays Marth shows how much dash-dancing invalidates the need for interacting with opponent beyond simply spending the entire game dashing in and out. There is not a footsies game with block strings, crossups, pokes, or anything else that makes most fighers deeply intriguing, there's just him moving there waiting for a single opening to punish you as hard as possible, while all your options will be punished unless you outplayed him
hard. He has reduced the game to almost purely movement in a way that seems to invalidate how the game usually works, and while I find it impressive and interesting to watch, I don't think it is good game design to allow this to work vs the slow characters, or that we should have a move making the entire situation much more extreme [which is exactly what boost does to Ganondorf, Bowser, and more].
But to return to the topic at hand, let's compare that to Sonic. Unlike Marth, Sonic is strongest when he's on top of you. Unlike Marth's melee movement, Boost has a very big, very static hurtbubble. Sonic can't win a match unless he touches you, so you always know he'll approach at some point. So yeah, he's fast, but he's big, obvious, and predictable. The only thing that saves this is his ability to not commit, which is much weaker in 4.0b than in 3.Q.
Ability to not commit to things is fundamentally poor game design. That's why Fox's shine and lasers are so obscenely good - he can short hop and do 5% across the entire length of the stage, while having a frame 1, invincible move that is a guaranteed kill move into the second strongest vertical killing move in the entire game, as well as a frame 7 move with armor on frame 7 that ignores shields and leads into a guaranteed killing aerial horizontally or a very potent vertical kill move with only a few frames to counterplay it, if they space poorly,, while on whiff, you can slide in either direction spending a total of about 22 frames doing so, the duration of most SHFFs. That sort of low commitment that ALSO forces someone else to commit to beat it is bad... that's why Falco's reflector isn't nearly so problematic, because while it is not high commitment [but DEFINITELY a commitment unless your opponent is clueless how to punish], it is not something you at all have to react to, and it's not something that automatically forces you to respond or die to a zero-death combo [unless you're Bowser because reflector's hitboxes combo into themselves on him]. You can just sort of shield it or get hit and move on, but with Sonic's dash dance game [or Marth's] (or boost dancing), that is 100% not an option.
That's how high level Melee works. People lose to Armada all the time when they make a mistake, too. That's why you get situations like this.
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PPMD might be the best player in the world. Anyone getting zero-to-deathed looks like a terrible player compared to the person hitting them.
Wizzrobe is one of the best Falcon players out there, and
here he is whiffing a dash grab and getting pillared to death by Westballz. Leffen might be the best Fox nowadays, and
here's Armada following his SDI with four parasol hits, amongst many other things, killing him.
Having more options doesn't mean the game is broken or unbalanced, it means you have to be better at the game to deal with those options. No matter how tricky someone gets, someone will be able to outplay them if they read the situation properly.
Having an option that so thoroughly dominates the rest of the cast that you fundamentally uproot core gameplay is bad design. That's what Sonic's boost causes. There is no footsy game, and Sonic never has to commit to even a poke - he just presses side+b and jump carefully [and maybe even some regular dash dancing to really mess with them], then goes in when they whiff [or if they shield, then he can grab because yay that speed]. The problem is that Sonic's boost covers such a wide area that most characters simply can't swing, because if he's careful he's covering a different area most of the time, making it basically impossible to read when combined with its speed.
Also Armada wasn't getting zero-to-death'd most of the set, but chipped out by PPMD. And the fact is, you ALWAYS have to hard-read Sonic's boost to actually intercept it, which is downright awful design, given that nothing else functions that way [sure, you have to read Fox/Falco's phantasm, but those are linear, mostly fixed-distance, > 20 frames of startup, making them reactable and far less abusive].
"Be better to deal with those options"
Requiring you to consistently outplay your opponent so hard that they get hit out of the best evasive move in the game multiple times to win is just bad game design, as I've said before [roughly akin to Lucario's MAX counter - it's theoretically doable, if you're going to be THAT much better than them, but that's just a metric for a ridiculously game-breaking and over-powered-in-a-bad-way character]. I firmly believe if 3.Q became competitive on a serious level, the most broken character would be Sonic, because Boost is just too ridiculously good.
Unfortunately Minus doesn't have a debug mode, so I can't confirm this, but I'm pretty certain that Sonic is much taller than a dash dancing Marth. I don't know anything about Palutena. The main difference being that Sonic can't shield while boosting in the air, where I'm more likely to be boosting in the first place. (Boosting on the ground is asking for someone to throw a projectile at you in many matchups.) It's also a whole lot easier.
I actually just noticed that thread over in the Sonic forum. I'll redirect to there.
Sonic is harder to hit than Marth because he is moving significanty faster with the ability to move out of range [and back in] far faster than any other character in the entire game can - it's not about hitbox size at all, unless Boost does bizarre janky things to his hurtbox size ala quick attack [which I doubt]. My point was that if you had Marth and infinite-lightweight Palutena, you'd have a character that's absurdly difficult to hit, because of the huge swath of space they'd cover, and Sonic covers even more space [or optionally much less] at a much higher speed, leaving him even more able to punish the smallest of holes.
Stuff about FFAs said:
Oh please god no. Stuff like this is why Smash 4 Ganondorf and Bowser are bad [never mind poor Zelda and Samus]. Ganondorf needs tools like utilt to keep up [frankly I think his utilt is nigh useless in one-v-one outside of a somewhat silly tech chase situation], and nerfing it would just make Ganondorf unnecessarily bad in 1v1s.
If a side effect of trying to keep characters viable for 1v1s is that they become extremely strong in FFAs that involve no truces or whatever, it may be a sign that the character might benefit from a re-design, but nerfing the character is a horrible idea because they are automatically worse off in 1v1s, and none of the characters who would be targeted by these nerfs [save perhaps Lucario] are particularly strong there to begin with.
