Pichu (SSBM): Difference between revisions

Pichu is currently ranked 22nd in the D tier. Pichu has solid overall movement, complemented with some very quick attacks and an excellent neutral air. It also possesses a surprising amount of power for its weight class, with good [[chaingrab]]bing ability and a handful of strong finishers, some even more powerful than those of its counterpart, Pikachu. However, all of Pichu's strengths are severely outweighed by its weaknesses. It has abysmal range and very poor endurance due to its light weight, and is unusually prone to chaingrabs itself despite its small size, due to the unusually high amounts of hitstun it sustains as a result of being the game's lightest character. It also takes [[recoil damage]] from its electric-based moves, including its own recovery move [[Agility]], further hampering its defensive game. As a result, Pichu suffers from abysmal matchups- with nearly the entire cast taking advantage of its fragility and poor range. Historically, Pichu was considered to have the worst matchup spread in the game, with no universally agreed upon winning matchups. However, its perception has mildly improved over time due to developments in the metagame.

Pichu performs significantly worse than Pikachu, being largely outclassed in most areas by its counterpart. The raw power increase on a few of its finishers is not enough to outweigh the utility loss across its entire moveset, but also the added [[recoil damage]] on several of its moves that automatically make such moves riskier than Pikachu's. Perhaps the single most negatively impactful change is Pichu's lack of a semi-spike hitbox on its up aerial, which makes it vastly inferior to Pikachu in terms of [[edgeguard]]ing. Pichu's loss of such an integral edgeguarding tool harms its viability significantly, as edgeguarding is considered one of Pikachu's biggest strengths, and one of the main reasons that it can stand up to the top ''Melee'' characters at the highest levels of play.

While still considered to be an awful character and unused outside of [[sandbagging]], players began to recognize Pichu's strengths, namely its agility and decent set of normals. Several professionals, such as {{Sm|Mew2King}} and {{Sm|Armada}}, believe that while Pichu is still unviable, they believe that other characters, like {{SSBM|Kirby}}, {{SSBM|Zelda}}, and {{SSBM|Bowser}}, are even worse than it, [http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2014/may/02/kirby-and-zelda-are-two-worst-characters-melee-pichu-highly-underrated-mew2king-discusses-his-super-smash-bros-tier-list-pt-1/ ranking it 19th] and [https://youtu.be/17n7Tcjrifg?t=264 22nd], respectively. Pikachu's rise in the competitive scene also helped Pichu's ascent out of the bottom tier, with players noting that Pichu shared a few of the tools that ultimately made Pikachu a solid pick. Despite Pichu's theoretically worse matchup spread and barren results, most players believed that the former was attributed to a different metagame and the latter has other bottom-tier characters that have also failed to achieve significant results.