Meta Knight in Super Smash Bros. Brawl is one of the most dominant characters the series has ever seen. He remains the only character in Smash tournament history to be banned by a majority of the community, which happened briefly in 2011.
Believe it or not, there were measures in place when he was still legal to use to further curb some of his strengths. One of these was putting in a ledgegrab limit to reduce the usage of planking. The other is a stalling technique known as the Infinite Dimensional Cape.
What Is The Infinite Dimensional Cape?
The IDC is a technique that exploits Meta Knight’s down special move, the Dimensional Cape. The dimensional cape normally causes Meta Knight to disappear briefly, where he is invulnerable, and then reappear somewhere else, where he can either perform an attack or do nothing at all.
The IDC is a glitch that allows a player to extend the invincible portion of the move much longer than intended (theoretically, if the player could maintain the glitch, they could cause Meta Knight to disappear for the entire length of a match.)
While it’s incredibly difficult to maintain the exploit for that length of time, the ability to essentially stall the game and avoid the opponent with no risk of taking damage made it an appealing technique to learn for defensive players. Additionally, being able to disappear and reappear wherever you wanted made it a prime approaching tool for offensive players, since they could essentially get in and attack opponents with no risk.
The sheer advantage it gave Meta Knight in terms of massive rewards with next to no risk led to it being an easy choice to ban for the competitive community.
How Do You Do The Infinite Dimensional Cape?
The infinite dimensional cape is performed by performing the down special, and continuing to hold down on the control stick, while simultaneously using the up smash attack over and over (this is usually done by mashing the C-stick upwards on a GameCube controller, or the right analog stick on a Classic controller.)
Triggering the glitch and maintaining the up smash attack rhythm is quite difficult to do for an extended period of time, but the benefit of getting it down is that you could get a lead on a player, and then use the glitch to effectively disappear for the rest of the match. Even if you dropped the glitch, you could simply use the dimensional cape again and try to pull it off once more.
While learning to use the infinite dimensional cape can help you get a full grasp on how broken it was as a concept (and the glitch is one of the more technical tricks in Super Smash Bros. Brawl) it will almost never be available to use in a match, since all tournaments will have banned it and it’s highly unlikely even the most sadistic player would allow its use in friendlies. Although it would be fascinating to watch a 4-player Meta Knight battle do the trick simultaneously…
