Some Megaman talk that I'd like to address.
holds his own with a good deal of the cast and invalidates some characters with his camp game. Nobody is playing him perfectly/optimally and there's a lot to be explored. Zucco, SSGuy, and NinjaLink are great players and have been great for the character in terms of representing and getting exposure, but they're all working on parts of their game that are lacking. He is a hard character to master mostly because he is unconventional with some AT-like things that are very important to his gameplay and his non-safe moves are so punishable. Things like item-tilting, z-drop aerials, and SH lemons
need to become second nature if you want to push the character to his potential.
And then his punish game requires you to be precise and confident. His grab game is so good, but I'm starting to think of it almost as a crutch for how punishing the character can actually be. It's the safe option that yields good reward, but he has better punishes. How many perfect shield utilt punishes have you seen? Furthermore, anything that has a 13 frame window of vulnerability in front of Mega Man's shield should be shield-drop utilted for a kill around 80%. However, shield grabbing is so much safer.
Since the game is so young and he's a new character, his potential is far and away above the level where he's being played at now. This is true for a lot of characters, but the more conventional ones have a foundation to be built off of (Sheik and Diddy thrive off of fundamentals built from previous Smash games) while there hasn't been a mid-range zoner like Mega Man in Smash before.
Very much agreed. Mega Man is definitely one of the more unique characters in this game (up there with duck hunt, pac-man, and bowser jr. imo) so it's natural that people would underestimate him. I remember back when the demo first came out and I picked him up. He felt so...abnormal in a very good way. However, everyone else in my circle of smash friends would say how terrible he is because of his unique playstyle. I've heard, "megaman sucks", "he feels disgusting" and even the rediculous notion of, "he's doesn't belong in a smash game".
But boy were they wrong. His pellet game lets him play a zoning game not yet seen in smash bros.
He brings the game down to his pace, and forces the opponent to play safe...which is just what mega man wants. He doesn't even have any severe weaknesses (like pac man's grab) , but rather smaller ones like large end lag and startup on his smashes (outside of the 6 frame startup usmash).
The only thing really holding him back is how much harder you have to work than your opponent, and the arguably low versatility in his moveset. You must have precision in everything you do, or get ready to be punished, and you have to think a few steps ahead of your opponent, or they will catch on to your shenanigans.
He also HAS to keep the opponent in the mid range, or he starts to falter (which is why people like samus and gunner can invalidate him with their long range playstyle, and why he struggles a bit against characters like captain falcon if they get too close)
I can definitely see him going places though. An optimal mega man sounds very scary, and I can definitely see him as a future high tier.
But on that note...
Onto Pac-Man
Now I know most of you are tired of me and my pac-man
fever talk. And I will admit that I may have been irrational in the past few pages while discussing pac-man's flaws. But I understand now.
His grab really hurts his nuetral game, his hydrant can be used against him in nuetral, his camping game can be worked around, and he struggles to kill right now...but each and every one of his weaknesses has a remedy.
Let me give you all some input from over at the pac-man thread:
I'm not going to lie, I am dying a little on the inside from both reading some of the messages and watching the Abadango videos in this thread.
I'm going to dump a huge wall of text here with a mixture of tech, general theory, strategies, matchup knowledge and stuff to avoid based on what I've experienced. I won't claim to be the best, but then again if Abadango is the best then wow we are coasting on opponents not knowing the matchup and need to step up our game (He gave away all 3 matches at least once but the opponents couldn't recognize it).
______
First off, let's talk about SH Fair.
You can, in one SH, do a Fair and any aerial or special before you land. If you did the Fair while rising and DON'T fast fall, you will also have no landing lag.
I need to test when my training partner comes over next against characters with really good OoS options, but most characters cannot punish a well spaced Fair if you retreat with it and don't Fast Fall. This makes it a relatively safe poke option (Still punishable on read obviously) and opens a lot of mixups.
Say they try to roll, even if you whiffed your Fair, if you were retreating back then you can punish the roll with Nair before you land (For far rolls, you can use fruit, but depends on which one you have). Spotdodge gets punished on reaction with Fair/Nair/fruit/etc.
This means that at spaced Fair range, they have to respect a SH and either shield or pre-emptively throw out a move to beat Fair. This is where the mindgames start. If your opponent tends to opt for shield, you can just empty hop into a grab (This is probably one of the most reliable ways to get grabs for me). You can also FF into a trampoline to make them feel like shield is not a safe option. If you're feeling ballsy you can even Fair then go behind them and throw a Bair to catch an OoS option.
If they decide to throw out a move to punish a Fair and you didn't throw out a move, then you can easily punish.
One option at this range to mix them up and make them feel like they can't just wait it out in shield is to empty jump at this range and not move forward at all (AKA stay out of most character's range) then just fast fall a fruit charge. At that point you can just release whatever fruit you have as soon as you see the shield drop (Or if you can't react to that then either shield cancel or guess and throw it; you're safe regardless, but make sure to stay close to stop them from grabbing the fruit).
______
Also one thing I'm seeing a lot in this thread is talk about how Pac rushes down, or how he deals with shields, or how he camps. I am getting flashbacks to the Injustice Joker forums where they assumed neutral game and traps were separate and 90% of them ended up playing the character completely wrong.
Pacman is not a zoner nor a rushdown; he is a setup/traps character. This character archetype is new to the series and Pacman actually differs from typical trap characters in fighting games in two important ways:
1) His traps can be used against him.
2) Unlike typical trap characters, Pacman is actually a well rounded character outside of his setups.
I do like the idea Dragontamer just presented about getting people off of the edge; this is the sort of thing we should be looking at. We need to limit our opponent's options whenever possible.
Take the ledge for example. At the ledge an opponent has 6 options:
-Ledge Jump
-Ledge Roll
-Ledge neutral getup
-Ledge getup attack
-Ledge drop
-Stay on the ledge
Worst case scenario, you want to be covering at least 3 of these options. With time to setup, you can and should cover all 6 at once (I already gave an example with hydrant, trampoline and bell a few weeks ago).
There are also actually a lot of ledge setups that look similar but cover different options based on how you do it. For example, in the bouncing hydrant setup Dragontamer just mentioned, there are a few ways out if you don't throw out an attack:
-Ledge roll
-A well timed Neutral Ledge wakeup
-An early ledge drop to avoid the hydrant
Now here's the thing: Based on what Pacman does, he can cover all of these options, just not all at the same time. Dsmash and Fsmash in either direction can cover the first two options, and a run off aerial or fruit can cover the 3rd. The opponent has to make a decision before he can check what you do otherwise his window to escape shrinks. This sets up a 33/33/33 guessing situation completely in our favor.
This was just an example, but these are the sort of things we need to mess with.
Here's another example that can be used in the neutral:
Grab your own apple. The best way I've found to do this is to throw it at a hydrant when the water is spraying. Once you have it in hand throwing it down makes it bounce in place, creating a wall.
If you can put this wall on one side of them and an active hydrant (I mean spraying water) on the other, their only options to avoid getting hit become to jump over the water, spotdodge the water, or shield the apple.
At this point throwing aerials at them is 100% safe (Unless they have an invul on startup move that makes them jump over the water like SL or Dolphin Slash) and punishes jumping and spotdodging.
A grab at this point beats spotdodging and shielding the fruit.
If you're riding the water charging a smash can beat the jump and the spotdodge, and is safe against shield.
If in this situation you somehow managed to set this up AND be behind the hydrant, then launching the hydrant behind the water is 100% safe, will punish anything except shield and will allow you to follow with anything against an opponent who did shield and probably shield poke if the hydrant didn't already do that.
These are just examples, and while I have landed both before in real matches, they are all situational.
That said, we are playing a trap character, so be creative and use whatever setup you can. Keep in mind that Apple and Melon when thrown up/down create a wall (In different ways, but still a wall) and that fruit gushing is a thing that can help a lot. In fact fruit gushing CAN be used to cover whiffed grabs. I've thrown bell upwards in front of an active hydrant, ran up and grabbed, then when they spotdodged and came to punish, they were hit by a gushed bell allowing me to punish.
I cannot stress this enough: Be creative and remember that we are playing a trap character. We should be trying to be tricky and set up stupidly broken traps. The goal should be to make the opponent feel like they have no options and that anyone who doesn't know the matchup should be completely free. Use slants. Use water. Use platforms. All of these things affect our ability to set up traps.
____________
On a related note... Key is not the only fruit. In fact I would say it's not even the best fruit unless you are really, REALLY needing to kill an opponent. It is strong, sure, and it moves fast, but it has less utility than any other fruit and picking it up is nigh impossible unless the opponent grabs it first.
Speaking of grabbing fruits, having the fruits in your hand is much MUCH better than having it charged but not out. For one your fruits get a lot more versatility in that you can Z-drop them and jump cancel glide toss them (Very important!), but they also act differently when thrown up and down than they normally do. This makes them all much more useful for setting up traps, punishing OoS (More on this later), and edge guarding.
For example, throwing a melon downwards/upwards in front of the ledge will prevent an opponent from grabbing the ledge for the melon's duration.
Now picking up the fruits in the first place can be a challenge. Here's some ways I've found to pick these up easily:
-Cherry: Just follow it, water gush it back to yourself, or throw it at a slant.
-Strawberry: Same as the above.
-Orange: I honestly don't have a clue on how to grab this one easily. Maybe with a slant? I don't remember if that works for Orange.
-Apple: Water gush it. Slants don't work, although it does get interesting properties on slants.
-Melon: Following it works, but the opponent can easily grab it away from you. Slants are another way, or hitting your hydrant then catching it.
-Galaga Ship: Follow it or throw it at a platform.
-Bell: Follow it. It can be caught through Hydrant gushing, but the water gushed bell is so good it's sometimes worth leaving it out.
-Key: I don't know. Have the opponent catch it, throw it back, then catch it yourself?
_________
Speaking of fruits... DON'T LET THE OPPONENT GRAB YOUR FRUIT (ESPECIALLY BELL)! This is very, VERY important, especially if the character in question has projectiles of any kind.
Once an opponent has your fruit, if they know the matchup then they know they have literally nothing to fear from you at a range anymore. Hydrant launches are reactable, so they can just wait and shield, or even worse, if they have a decent projectile, shoot it right when you are about to use a move that launches.
This forces Pacman to approach, and against some characters that can be very bad, or in some cases borderline impossible.
If the other player has the life lead, then they can literally just run away from you for the rest of the match, especially if they are someone like Sonic.
I had my training partner, air camp me as Kirby with my bell on the Kongo Jungle 64 stage the other day. After 4 minutes I killed myself and ended the match so we could play a less stupid match.
______
Now as for the reason I said to ESPECIALLY not let the opponent grab bell is the same reason as why I said having a fruit in hand helps with OoS game.
I'm sure many of you know that the fastest ways to drop shield are through either grabbing, jumping or jump canceled actions like UpB (By the way, UpB OoS is godlike) or Usmash.
However, there is one more jump canceled action: The jump canceled item toss. This allows you to drop shield as fast as the jumping or grabbing and throw the item in your hand, and item tosses are already fast. When the item in question is bell, this allows the person holding the bell to punish nearly anything with a jump canceled glide tossed stun which can combo into the kill move of your choice.
____
Another piece of random tech one of the guys at my local scene who dabbled in Pacman gave me:
When the opponent dies, throw a trampoline right where they will respawn.
This will kill their invulnerability time and can even sometimes lead to a punish as they have no choice but to hit that as soon as they come back.
If they got star KO'd/screen splatted, make it either red or set it to the highest bounce, depending on the stage (Example, free fall is less useful on a stage like BF since they won't fall far, but on Skyworld it can eat the entire invulnerability time and give you a punish.).
_________
I feel like I'm forgetting some important things, but oh well. I just wrote out 5 full pages, so I'm done for tonight.
________
EDIT:
Wait, actually I forgot some anti-diddy tech:
If Diddy throws out a banana, walk over to it and lay a trampoline right on top of it. It prevents Diddy from grabbing it while simultaneously preventing him from pulling one out, essentially taking it out of the game.
On a side note, I am still labbing and found some interesting things. And by interesting things, I mean we can set up Fsmash>Bell>Fsmash combos, footstool>hydrant>Bell>Fsmash combos and Bthrow>Bell>Fsmash combos.
With the exception of the footstool one, the other two are done by grabbing bell in your hand. After that throw out a hydrant, immediately run off of it and throw the bell up in the air. For the grab combo, run forward and grab. For the Fsmashx2 combo, start charging a smash roughly a character length in front of where you threw the bell.
For the Fsmashx2 combo, the water will push you to them, then push the bell right behind you so that no matter the %, the two will combo. After that you can connect a second Fsmash. I sadly am doing training mode alone right now, so I don't know what this does to shields.
For the Bthrow, you need to run forward and grab ASAP and throw them back towards the bell. If you do it right, the bell will hit right as they leave your hands, allowing you to Fsmash.
For the footstool combo, well that one is pretty self-explanatory. At %s where hydrant won't knock them too far (30-50% range), you can do a grounded footstool (Probably works for aerial too) into a dropped fire hydrant, and since throwing an item is faster than neutral B's normal startup time, you can throw bell after this and have it combo. At the percents, the bell will hit right next to you and a buffered Forward Smash will combo.
I will get a recording of this done in the next few days to better explain what I mean.
I really want to end a tournament match with one of these now.
EDIT:
When I get a training partner over, I'll test if a Fair can combo into the water gushed bell used in the first 2 setups to cover their ability to jump. If it does then this goes from a flashy and gimmicky trap to a truly stupid setup.
I noticed this glaring issue more so today. I did take some liberties and started learning how to use SIdeB as an effective kill move. I have made some progress on that. I lost to a megaman that out spaced me, that I whiffed one too many a throw. I changed it up with falcon in friendlies and grabbed much much easier. We need to expand on Pac-man's traps. That has been my number one most effective killing method. Baiting with hydrant and striking with a key when they go to strike, or even just going straight at hydrant with Side B has got me very effective kills. I have great ideas that I could take Pac-man up with, and I've been making suggestions in the critque thread. However, my own fundamentals need work, I've lost many from being unable to close stocks.
Not just traps, though those are indeed very useful. Pac-Man can play AT LEAST:
Pure Aggressive: Self-explanatory.
Pure Defensive: Hide behind hydrant and trampoline, punish opponent for getting too close, maintaining the area on the stage that you have. Fruit is useful to knock opponents out so that you can set up.
Spacing: Keep opponent out of your range with fruit and hydrants, doing as much damage as possible from a distance. While an aggressive Pac-Man would go offstage to gimp an opponent with aerials, a spacing one would use fruit (and hydrants) to kill from the stage.
From there, there are combinations of playstyles that we don't really have fully defined yet, such as: Passively Aggressive (responsive aggressiveness to bad actions that just happen, not forcing the opponent to mess up), Defensively Aggressive (use your defenses to force opponents into punishable positions before going ham), Defensively Spacing (use hydrant and trampoline to control stage, use fruit to do damage from afar), a potential combination of all three, and more that I'm positive I'm not thinking of.
We need to clearly define these, and use them all together for our most effective Pac-Man play.
Now you may be wondering, "why are you throwing such a large wall of text at me?!"
For those wondering, this is to show how undeveloped our character is right now. We still haven't fully unlocked his potential, and this is for a very good reason: he's just so damn versatile.
Pac-man can play in more ways than anyone else in the cast. He can camp, he can be more agressive due to his great frame data and well-rounded stats, he can set up awesome traps in nuetral to steal options and to kill opponents, and much more.
Each of his weaknesses can be solved by switching his playstyle during the match. Is the opponent pressuring you by ignoring your camp game by blasting the hydrant away? Then use it in another way, like using the water to launch your fruit to cover your approach.
Is the opponent shielding heavily because of your slow grab?
Use the trampoline to punish sheild happy opponents and condition them so that they don't feel safe in sheild, letting you go ham with the bonus fruit.
Lacking kill power?
Set up a trap with the red meteor trampoline and the hydrant or freak strawberry so that the opponent gets pushed into it, netting you a free Usmash punish.
There are so many things to do with this character that it is rediculous. And I can clearly see why there are so many differing opinions on his viability; because he's being judged by only one of the many things playstyles he can take on.
This ability to take on different roles and have an answer to everything really helps him hold his own against every top tier.
Diddy: trampoline stops diddy from grabbing and can take his banana out of the game if we plant a trampoline on top of it. We can also keep up with him in neutral with our long, fast tilts and lower tier fruit, that can space him out. Also, our hydrant gives us a good way to come back to the stage safely without an uair risk, and with the trampoline, helps us on the ground by messing up diddy's normal approach. Gimping him is too easy with the hydrant, side B, and BF.
Sheik: being on top of the hydrant is safe for us in this match up, as we can charge our fruit while the hydrant sheilds the needles. When she tries to knock the hydrant down with her fsmash, we can fall off and nair, or throw down an apple.
In this matchup, we force sheik to play very differently than normally, since she can't approach the way she wants to. EVERY fruit eats her needles, the strawberry and trampoline Out-of-shield stop her bread and butter SH approaches, and her bouncing fish is stopped by our fruit while we stand in our charging animation (the fruit has a hurtbox while charging, and blocks us from the attack)
This is definitely a battle of patience, as sheik is forced to approach us, while we can keep her at a safe distance with our fruit and traps. But sheik is still very threatning up close as her neutral is better than ours, and we can't set up many traps in neutral because planting a hydrant too close to her can get us punished pretty hard.
When it comes to killing, we win in this matchup because sheik's main kill options in uair, usmash, and bouncing fish become harder to land because of falling hydrant to cover our landing, and BF to stop her bouncing fish. Meanwhile our bell can steal a kill for us at around 90% since the stun is enough for us to kill her with a usmash or fsmash, or we can stage spike her with a well spaced bell during the vulnerability frames sheik has in the ledge after her recovery. The key also helps us steal kills at higher percentages if we catch her landing or we aim well in the air.
Of course, there is a lot more to the matchups than just these short descriptions, but you should be able get the big picture. We can compete.
There are also many more characters in top tier that we go toe to toe with.(captain falcon, ness, ZSS, pikachu, and yoshi comes to mind) but this post is getting long enough already lol. Maybe I'll discuss them in another post.
But I do hope that you all can see what pacman is about.
Pac-Man is a very strong character that thrives when the opponent is creative, versatile, and unpredictable with their options, and can definitely be a high tier threat in the future of the meta.
TL;DR:
Pac-Man's awesome versatility and unpredictability will be more than enough to allow him to keep up with the best in the game in the future.
Shaya
