The Master's Critique — Midna

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Midna by Half_Silver28

So. . .I took forever to review this moveset. My apologies. I’ve been busy preparing all my MYM 5 stuff. I only have 7 movesets ready, ya know. . .So I guess ignoring doing this review turned out to be profitable. Anyway, at least I finally got around to it before doing the last of the polishing to my 7 movesets. . .And then Spadefox came in and offered me the chance to preview his epic Waluigi moveset. I couldn’t resist, man. What? Less excuses, more review? You got it.

Move Originality: The individual moves here don’t leap out at me as all that crazy too often, although I do LOVE the up special. The mechanics of that move are brilliant. If only Midna could enter the portals it wouldn’t be all that interesting, but you spice it up by allowing enemies to enter it. Lots of crazy potential for Midna to throw enemies to bad spots there, and you even manage to balance the move properly. The down special and bthrow are also pretty cool, although I wish the down special had less luck involved. The rest of the moves are far from being that crazy, but they do at least have unique hitboxes most of the time, besides some culprits such as that dair. I’m not too fond of the usmash and nair being so similar. . .The nair just doesn’t have the darkness effect. So what? You do make good use of Midna’s ponytail/huge hand coming out of her helmet throughout the moveset, although it seems a bit overused, as some of the moves involving such as the fsmash are ocassionally generic. You’ve got a lot of hit and miss moves in here with some being cool and some being very meh, so it balances somewhere in the middle.

Detail: You list all the essential details in list after the moves, and the main move descriptions describe the animations just fine. I never struggled picturing any of the moves here. I’m normally against not having the details you list afterwards in the main descriptions, but I feel it worked to this moveset’s advantage due to the descriptions of the main moves generally being so short. For this particular case I wouldn’t really change anything, but if you plan on increasing your detail in the future for more complicated moves I’d suggest working the details into the main descriptions, as otherwise the moves will become too lengthy with the extra added lines.

Playstyle: This was sort of an issue for me in the moveset. Firstly, you obviously have no playstyle section, and how the moveset seems generally thrown together doesn’t really make me feel like there was much of a playstyle intended. Midna doesn’t flow all that well in my opinion, as the moves don’t really fit together to form a character with a general theme all that much. Mostly just random stuff. I tried to pick up something off of here, but Midna isn’t really that good at. . .Anything. This takes us to our next category. . .

Balance: You say Midna is 6/10 on power, but she rarely gets all that powerful. She isn’t a weakling, per say, more around mid power level. . .But that is far from the biggest issue here. Midna is horribly, horribly slow. You do know it takes less then 2 seconds to charge a Warlock Punch, right? Midna is as slow as Ganondorf if not slower, but unlike Ganondorf doesn’t have the power to make up for it. Midna’s best hope is to just spam down B and hope for a top tier character, as she’s so horribly laggy she can’t do much of anything. She also can’t recover due to the lengthy 4 seconds before reappearing at the other portal, as this is WAY MORE then enough time for the foe to casually wait for Midna to reappear and fsmash her back out the moment she appears, potentially fully charging their fsmash if they time it right. Midna excels in no field and yet is still very laggy. Speed her up pronto. You’d probably be better off in just describing the attack speed with “average lag” and such rather then giving out specific amounts of time.
Relevance to Character: This is easily one of the biggest highlights of the moveset. The dair is more excusable when it’s using the Ordon Sword Midna had Link retrieve for her, and nearly all the moves are some ability/object Midna has had in her possession at some time. There’s hardly any creative influence moves here, and those creative influence moves that are present seem perfectly fitting. Add Midna’s notes into the mix and this moveset is brimming with personality. Midna’s notes are all written perfectly in character – PERFECTLY. It amazes me how well you got her character down in them when without those notes this moveset isn’t all that eye catching. Amazing job with them. How much Midna’s character shows through is easily the best thing this moveset has going for it. I wouldn’t change a thing relating to this.

Extras: Taunts and results screen poses are all good and unique and in character. I like how Midna’s dialogue is shown in subtitles, although the overuse of the “See you later!” line isn’t ideal. All the other animations and Kirby hat and what not are fine. The Snake Codec is among the more interesting I’ve seen and you did a good job of avoiding spoilers with the whispering. The stage is kinda meh, but you make good music choices. Your SSE Role is fail, but it’s excused due to your referencing of her role in Master Hand’s Royal Flush. Not too lengthy of a set of extras, but it does the job.

Organization: The actual organization is fairly standard, but it works fine. Good job. What makes this interesting, though, is Midna’s notes. This gives the moveset a much more unique feel and helps massively in reading through it and making it enjoyable. The fact you give the Midna’s Notes text a different color was also a good move in making them stick out. This definitely attracts people to read the moveset and is what first caught my eye about it.

Overall: This moveset without a doubt has a lot of problems. What made this moveset get noticed and place in the top 50 I feel is nearly exclusively Midna’s notes. I’ve never seen anything like that done so well in a moveset, but you pulled it off for an amazing pay off. Aside from that, the most obvious thing you could do to improve this moveset would be to replace the insane lag times given to the moves with descriptions of what you actually meant, as there’s no way you could of meant to make these attacks as laggy as they are. Replacing the more generic moves and giving Midna a playstyle would be far from easy, though. If you take nothing else away from this review, hopefully you’ve learned what kind of lag times to give your moves in the future. Still, making more of an effort to make the moves come together certainly wouldn’t hurt.