As I said, Pikachu's combos are overrated. From around 50% the most you get with decent DI is utilt-> uair-> uair for a massive ... 15%? And that's From 90% he does not even get that. At higher percents, Pikachu fights for every hit because of his small range, and gets very little reward.
His edgeguarding is overrated - the small range makes it a lot harder than you think, and if you can tech and have a better upB than Mario, good luck getting rid of them. Pika's air movement and range are simply not good enough to be great at intercepting offstage, and in a game where edgehogging does not exist and so many recoveries are so ridiculous,edgeguarding that involves neither spikes nor kill moves like Bouncing Fish or ZSS Bair is of questionable utility. And since Pikachu has so few (read: no) moves with decent knockback and a low angle, forcing the enemy to recover low (the only place where his gimp tools really shine) is impossible.
When it comes to kill moves ... Pikachu is a glass water pistol. He has 5 moves that kill at all at some point:
- Fsmash: slow and unsafe on block
- Usmash: Unsafe on block, tiny
- Dash Attack: Unsafe on block, kills only 130-140
- Thunder: yeah, good luck landing this one against people who can DI
- Uthrow: only at 170% or so (this makes the list because I kill with this often enough to really demonstrate the problem!)
None of them are big and fast, which makes punishing with them pretty hard. None of them are safe. you can't combo into them (except perhaps landing fair-> dash attack, but is not guaranteed depending on how you land, and did I mention how unsafe it is on block?). Every decent kill move has a very high commitment. None of Pika's aerials come close to qualifying as a "decent kill move". Platform camping is against pikachu not as meaningful as against Little Mac, but it comes close. Pikachu can not kill during juggles. He cannot kill when the opponent is on a platform. He can barely kill offstage.
UPB is actually really, really good. But you can not rely on this - it does not have good priority, and anyone with a good shnair or shbair can limit your approaches with it pretty effectively. As the meta develops, this will be less and less useful against top tiers. Diddy can shfair on reaction; sheik shnair; and there is as far as I know not really any way to bait these and punish them due to the high commitment. Good tool? Yes. But it does not really solve problems with Pikachu. Ah, you hit me at 150% with a QA. Now I'm in the air, and there you can't kill me unless you get a read on my landing, and have fun against people like Fox, Sheik, Diddy, ZSS, people with counters, Luigi, Jiggs ... I could go on like this. So have fun with (at most) your still 5 or 10% from uairs. At least I'm a little closer to killing you with uthrow!
Pikachu is not a bad character. He has tools. He can win. He can keep up. But that is not top tier. His kill moves are far too limited and he dies way too early. That is the nastiest part of all this - Pika being a lightweight would not be half as bad if he had decent kill power; but if the opponent survives until 150 or so, you die at 80. And despite his truly outstanding tools this just breaks some matchups in half.
Always nice to see a Pika player.
You're not wrong (with most of it, at least), but you're not quite right either. When I first got the game I started using Pikachu right away because I had used him in Brawl. I became disillusioned quickly because I thought that Thunder was worse, that d-smash was worse, that Quick Attack was worse, and in general that Pikachu's kit didn't have the KO power to keep up with others. I was doing 130% to my opponents and wasn't able to kill them while they were killing me at 80 or 90. It was horrible. I was convinced that Pikachu was average.
There were two reasons for this:
1 is that I was pretty average on the 3DS. Still using Brawl tactics, missing punishes and SD'ing due to the controls, and generally not working with the mechanics of the game. Maybe like a mid-level player overall.
2 is that I wasn't thinking in terms of all of Pikachu's tools and adapting to each matchup. I would try to up-smash Ness and get b-thrown for it and think, wow, Ness has disjoints and kills so early! Surely Ness beats Pikachu!
#1 was resolved near the Wii U release, but #2 wasn't. I had switched to other characters. But then I saw ESAM play in the Wii U invitational, and it struck me just how much he adapted between his two sets with FOW. The Ness MU in particular seemed to flip around inside my head, and I realized that Pikachu was capable of much more than I had envisioned. Going back to him this time, I tried using different KO methods against different characters. I figured out that KO'ing someone as Pikachu is kind of like a puzzle. You can't just use your smashes against Fox, for instance, and expect not to get jab -> jab -> up-smashed. You have to be patient, wait for a b-throw opportunity, and then nail his recovery, which you have about a 50-50 shot at predicting correctly (the up-b is easy to call, but he has two options for the side-b). A 50% chance to kill your opponent from a grab is not bad KO power. Most characters don't have that on Fox, because they don't have Pikachu's n-air and b-air (or high-powered up-smash).
Think of it this way: Pikachu has a better chance of killing Fox at 60 after Fox mistimes an illusion than Diddy does at 60. At 80-90, Pikachu's up-smash will kill while Diddy's f-smash won't (necessarily: depending on stage position). You can DI the d-throw -> up-air if Diddy goes for that punish instead.
For Ness... when Ness is about to use PK Thunder to recover in certain situations I actually jump right TO him and Thunder. Not near him. Not below him. Literally on top of him. It's an outside-of-the-box KO options that most characters don't really have. The only other character with as many options as Pikachu is Sheik, and she might actually have fewer overall.
There are other unique things, such as that Pikachu is one of the few characters who can expend his double jump on and off the stage without worrying, because his up-b lets him land or recover safely. This leads to better KO setups on certain characters, and better mixups/followups on others.
Also, lack of range is kind of a misconception, but the important point is you have to vary your playstyle.
Your post makes me feel like @
Shaya
feels when Lucina v Marth is brought up
