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Choice Scarf
Basically, Pikachu was relatively successful in the Melee environment because of his incredible gimping ability combined with his own very good recovery, as well as a definite, straightforward way to secure onstage kills via his usmash. His playstyle in Melee is dictated mostly by his dependence on using his mobility in neutral to hit nairs and/or grabs.
As any Pikachu player will recognize, Fox does pretty much all the same stuff, but dramatically better. He can force gimps from further on stage with waveshines, shine spikes, and other shenangians. His neutral is much safer, due to tools like nair/drill -> shine on shield. His grab has better followups. He has much easier kills off the top (due to the additional tool of uair) and the sides (his ridiculous bair). Fox's combo game is better, and more reliable. The one thing at which Pikachu is really significantly better is getting extremely deep gimps offstage. Pika's fsmash is also disjointed and pretty cool, but not terribly practical in most situations, and not remotely comparable to the utility of Fox's moveset.
In addition to these, Fox has the invaluable ability to force opponents to approach him with lasers. As the attacker is always at a disadvantage, in this respect Fox almost by definition has the neutral game skewed in his favor. He's a character ostensibly designed for offense, with the tools to break in past any defense -- but who has the luxury of picking his battles rather than constantly needing to force openings.
So, in Melee, Pikachu isn't just a worse Fox. He's a
dramatically worse Fox.
In PM, the situation changes a bit. Pikachu is mostly the same, though he has a shiny new bair (which, to my limited understanding, quite resembles Fox's in frame data and utility) and the ability to QAC out of the first half of his up-B, which provides a couple highly limited/telegraphed movement options. He also gains the ability to RAR (or QAC) into his shiny new bair, and therefore it's a little bit easier to get opponents offstage. Fantastic! As an additional modest buff, he gets the ability to B-reverse his thunder and Jolt - which provide new options for edgeguarding and the neutral respectively. It's safe to say that Pikachu is, in PM, significantly better
in relation to Fox.
Unfortunately for Pikachu, the game has also changed. Though it's not nearly so prevalent as in 3.0, there are still many more characters in PM that can out-camp Pikachu by some means - be it mobility or projectile walls.
More significantly, the average recovery in PM is much, much better and more versatile than the average recovery in Melee, and thereby much more difficult to gimp.
This, itself, means two things.
First, Pikachu's good recovery is no longer nearly as strong in relation to the cast as it was in Melee -- it's also important to note that Pikachu's recovery takes
many orders of magnitude to use properly than any other recovery in the game. Without MANY hours of practice effort, Pikachu's recovery is in fact
worse than many other characters'! Axe has been quoted saying that he practices Pikachu's recovery
daily. For
hours. That's the kind of effort it takes for him to optimize this one aspect of his game that pretty much any other character can take for granted.
Second, it means that Pikachu's single most defining characteristic - his ability to gimp, is neither as unique nor nearly as effective as it was in Melee. Let's look at Captain Falcon, for example. Say he's offstage without his double jump, roughly on an even plane with the ledge such that he could land on stage with his upB if he did it soon enough. In Melee, he'd have 3 options: he can go high with his upB and try to land onstage, go high and grab edge, or go low and grab edge. In this situation, Pikachu can easily gimp him 100% of the time, no problem. In PM, not only is Falcon's upB much longer (so he has more drifting mixups with it, as well as the ability to make this choice from further away), but he has the additional option to Raptor Boost to challenge a possible edgeguard attempt. In this situation, Pikachu's gimping ability is much less certain, and he could even die to a Raptor spike if he makes the wrong edgeguarding option select.
That's just one example, but I think it's fairly typical for what I'm driving at. Pikachu's strengths are effectively watered down from Melee based on the new environment, and I just don't think the buffs he was given are enough to offset the weaknesses he's always had: weak range, outclassed projectile, etc. Even former Melee top/high tiers with whom Pikachu used to struggle have recieved similar sorts of buffs: Sheik/Fox/Peach can RAR just as well as Pikachu can.
I could be completely wrong, but that's my impression on the matter. I don't play Pikachu, but I love watching him. It saddens me to watch Axe feel that he has to play characters other than his one true love, even in PM. Basically what it comes down to is that a bunch of other characters do most of what Pikachu does, but better and/or with significantly less effort, including but hardly limited to Kirby, Toon Link, Fox, and possibly even Squirtle. There doesn't seem to be any real reason to play Pika, and that makes me a sad panda.
