LowTierGod/Gaming
Despite Dale’s insistence that he’s a cut above the average player, or that he can at least keep up with the advanced players on a regular basis, the evidence shows he’s an average talent at best, and once he’s in a bad mood, he’s well below average.
Critique
Mains
The most obvious and widely apparent sign of Dale’s lack of skill is his choice of characters: Gill and Urien in SFIII and V, Rose in SFIV, with the lone exception being Miguel in Tekken 7. If you’re even remotely familiar with the games’ tier lists, you’d know these characters are far from “low-tier,” and several of them sit comfortably above most of the cast, which means Dale, despite how much he loves whining that he has to work twice as hard as his opponent to win, actually works less and still loses more often than not. When he’s not playing high-tier characters, his usual picks are Zoners, which are generally disliked in casual settings because most people play a fighting game for a traditional 1v1 melee match-up, and a Zoner can and will dictate the entire match if their opponent doesn’t know their weaknesses well enough to find an opening worth exploiting.
Despite this, it wouldn’t be fair to say Zoners are any less valid a way to win matches than any other archetype, since, as said, they can be beaten but only with decent game knowledge, and it’s blurry whether they require less skill than the rest. Still, Dale’s excitement at winning with Zoners comes off as overdoing it, given that his wins can be owed to his opponent’s lack of knowledge and far less to his own predictions or reflexes.
Gameplay
Dale’s playstyle can be boiled down to extreme defense. He’ll poke once, hop backwards, dash away, and then spend the rest of the match running rings around the stage just to avoid the opponent, only committing once he can land a heavy hit all at once or has chipped you down so far that an offensive push is a guaranteed win. The problem with this is that he has nothing to answer for once you pressure him, which shouldn’t be hard given the kind of characters he usually plays, but what keeps that from ever happening is his patience, or lack of it, since he gets frustrated and ends up worrying more about making excuses to save face in front of his audience than actually trying to win.
Another staple of fighting games that Dale refuses to commit to is punishing mistakes. At high level play, matches get tense because a single mistake can hand the other player a huge punish, which, depending on how much health either of them has left, could cost them the whole round or set, but Dale will either answer with a bread and butter combo when he could have gone for something far better, or he’ll toss out a poke, which lets his opponent retreat back to safety and refocus on whatever they were doing before, as if nothing had ever happened.