After testing and talking to chibi mains, it can be agreed that he isn't that great. He still has the problems from 9b, although his recovery is fixed he still has bad MUs against chars above him.
I can see your argument for sora, he is underrated imo and just needs dedicated players.
At the start of the release, sandbag was considered good, but he's really easy to avoid. His moves have tons of startup and you mentioned his recovery. Any character can basically outneutral sandbag and beat them.

Sandbag sucks

IMO he has more room for counterplay than growth as people figure out how to abuse his lack of recovery/ability to grab edge. Also his mobility is still lackluster, and I've been able to time out multiple sandbags from platform camping or camping in the air. True, he hits hard once he gets the open up, but he also gets mauled just as hard by many characters.

I can see him moving up a few spots though.

Le happy.

I have to say, PMAN is definitely S-tier. Don't believe me? Check out the bit of tech I found and posted in the PMAN Char Community section.

Thoughts:

PMAN has few "ragingly glorious" MUs. Honestly, I haven't found many chars that he just ridiculously bodies. On the flip side, he doesn't have any bad MUs either. There are some MUs that are better than others, to be sure; others put him in more of a pinch -- still, from what I've been able to gather he doesn't have any glaring weaknesses.

Addition: Also...PMAN is ridiculously OP on Sand Ocean. His trampoline allows him to camp way off the normal stage (or directly under it) over the passing ground, meaning any char that attempts to attack him is more likely to suicide than actually accomplish anything.

I think PAC primarily struggles with kill power and a rather gimpable recovery.

His smash attacks have long startup, rather short range, and rather low power, and none of his aerials/hydrant are going to necessarily kill you early.

Regarding recovery, if his first trampoline doesn't make it, you have seconds (aka an eternity) to whack a yellow ball with no hitbox (or steal tramp or what-have-you). While he's good and has some serious jank to rely on at a high level, there are plenty of top tiers that will abuse his recovery avoid smash attacks/kill confirms.

I've been able to repeatedly get kills on a number of different chars in the 80% range with PMAN.

Also, want easy kills?

Fruit-toss a key > neutral to catch > let yourself get hit. The key will drop and remain spinning, fixed in mid-air. You can move it up (and sideways, to a certain extent). Combo your opponents into the key for an easy 16% damage with powerful knockback and hitstun. Better still, just leave the key somewhere super awkward for them and let them hit it themselves. Oh, and don't forget you can leave as many of these floating around as you like....16% damage bombs per hit (they can be later grabbed and thrown too). Also if you have a "roof" on your stage (solid platform parts) Galaga will become stuck without even worrying about the whole grab-drop sequence.

Edgeguarding with hydrant, items, and red-trampolines works great. Your Side thrust is also a great edgeguarding move.

I feel that his standard attacks are drastically underestimated. They are above-average (not necessarily damage-wise directly, but can be chained without stopping). Note that his standard attacks are also quite fast and with good range -- I can easily use standards to keep fox and falco at bay when in close range. Toss in forward and down tilts too for this close melee, as well as Dashes (which are great). With these alone you can quickly jack up opponent damage into the kill range in short bursts of combos. Once the damage starts getting to the 80% mark that's where your Key/Galaga, Hydrant, and Smash attacks will become more reliable kill moves.

Also, having put most of my time into this char (the rest is being spread around trying to find the #2 main as well as secondaries) I can say that his smashes, unlike many chars, aren't his main game. PMAN's projectiles are what can easily be used to shift the balance in his favor. On the plus side, his smashes do have some good qualities: even if a char is hanging off the side of the stage you can still hit them with a forward smash; your ghosts go through solid obstacles, which means up-smash is a great tool for hitting chars that you couldn't hit with a normal melee-type attack or projectile; all his smashes have good knockback and hitstun).

Still, look at his moveset. His highest damage move is the Forward Smash, which deals 21% on a good solid hit. Down smash is okay at 19%, and Up Smash barely deals more damage than his Key (17% vs 16%). His weakest projectile (the cherry) does 5% and can be tossed non-stop faster than any other projectile in game (I could be wrong on the ANY other, but it is still extremely fast for a 5% + knockback + hitstun projectile). They each have different dynamics you can seriously maximize off.

The Hydrant can be dropped for 10%, but with 14% damage on hit (stacking with each hit, I believe) and great knockback and hitstun, one foul encounter with your Hydrant will see your opponents 24-52% (technically I've gotten 4 hits once plus the drop, which was 66%, but that was the absolute perfect set-up that I haven't had since) worse off than they were before...and in position to be Fruited to death.

His trampoline isn't the greatest...I've already said I think that move needs tweaks. Still, it has knockback against vertical attacks so that ledge-grabbing is less of a risk. Besides, it gives PMAN the highest vertical recovery in game. You have to be careful about using it when you can get punished, but the only times I use it repeatedly are when I'm so far below the stage that it would be suicide for someone to try to attack me from the side, and they can't very well do it from above thankfully. For this penalty, however, you get something that is yet another wonderful piece of tech that can be manipulated, and the Red-Trampoline is a definite kill condition when well placed, and is at least a hit confirm no matter where it is placed.

His side-special is also a great move, acting like a dash attack as well as being a great recovery option (if I'm somewhere beside or above stage and need to recover laterally, I'll use this instead of the trampoline so I'm not just a floating hitbox). The damage it deals is good, but the knockback is great at high %s, and can be used as a kill move.

Overall, though, what makes PMAN so good (and why I think tson placed him in the S tier) is that while on light examination he's relatively benign mid-tier, PMAN is a seriously tech-intensive char with tons of potential, as well as high mobility. He's not the best in any one area, but he's certainly the most versatile. As I said above, he has few great MUs (although I've done repeatedly well against MK, Fox, Falco, and Cpt. Falcon, so these are likely what will be his better MUs), but he gains the plus of no truly bad MUs either.

If that's the case, Fox, Falco and Lloyd should be in E tier lol.

Solved by his techs.

Honestly, why is Bomberman Bottom 3? And Pacman Bottom 5? Sure Pac-Man isn't Top Tier and I wouldn't even call him a High-Tier since he has a lot of issues with counterplay and has a below average neutral along with doing terrible against reflectors in general but He certainly needs to be much higher. Sora is a bit too high but its at least a justified placement I guess? Link and Samus are definently too high, I explained my reasons towards Link but Samus has issues with utilizing her close range options, gets bodied by reflectors, and is basically combo meat while also being easy to kill vertically. Ichigo is a bit high tbh can you explain that? Isaac and Falco DEFINENTLY need to switch, I would say Isaac has a much worse overall matchup spread and he seems to have more exploitable flaws which is his poor frame data along with him having recovery safety problems similar to falco, but falco's tools seems to be a lot more overwhelming along with having a better neutral to prevent being offstage as much as Isaac. DK needs to be a bit lower due to his matchup spread issues against most of the cast since he heavily struggles against projectile characters and characters with disjoints along with lacking anything in neutral for him to get the grab, and he is very reliant on stages which is not good in a tournament environment when players can strike stages. Also explain Zelda for being so low?

He doesn't have lack of recovery ROFL his recovery is literally infinite both vertically and horizontally... A good sandbag can recover even at high percentages by wall teching a reverse upB (since you can only DI backwards, if you face away from the direction you want to go you can slope your recovery) and then doing a rising downB. And honestly the lack of ledgegrabbing doesn't really matter for that reason.


You must not be playing very good Sandbags, cos there's not really anywhere you can camp him out with sand-boosting (run, let go of run and scoot forward without having to wait for the jump), and downB-up.

Yeah it's infinite. Too infinite. At high percents, sandbag has exactly one option. You can just charge fsmash to cover it.
His side B also has loads of landing lag, which makes rising down B not a valuable mixup unless Sandbag is high enough.

I might be doing it wrong, but sand-boosting doesn't make him fast in any sense of the word. Yes, he has good vertical mobility, but anyone Mario or faster can run circles around sandbag.

Sandbarg's base dash speed is the 2nd slowest in the game. Taunt cancelling his dash will improve it along with Tson's technique but it still won't hold up compared to other characters. Btw Mario is actually a lot faster than you may think. But i'm suprised that no one also mentions the fact that sandbag lacks disjoints in his moves and his one projectile outside of bomb has very high startup for it to be campable or to safely approach. And that will pretty much hurt him a ton in the matchup department and he doesn't have good enough mobility to be considered a rushdown character, nor the survivability to be a heavy.

It also doesn't help that Sandbag's neutral is problematic due to his subpar groundgame which makes it hard for him to even utilize his tools before he dies.

From the right height, there is no landing lag from the move

If you are all complaining about being slow you certainly arent soaping (which is really just dash boosting with a fancy name, simply hold a direction and mash down) enough. Just look at Bedoops sig for reference.


@Pawn Who exactly did you talk to? Chibi still has issues (as any other character), but Bottom 3 is hilariously misinformed and just wrong on so many levels. You trying to tell me that a character with a godlike projectile, a straight up busted recovery, solid edgeguarding game, good range (and disjointed no less!) and a powerful anti-air game is Bottom 3?

Chibi admittedly has one of the worst disadvantage states in the entire game, he hates rushdown and dumb pressure (aka Spacies, Falcon), but he has a fair shot against just about anyone else - and even then those MUs arent nearly as bad as they used to be. If I can get a Fox main to switch off the character to another one in tournament play that should be enough of an indicator for that. Not a top tier sadly, but anything lower than middle of mid tier is really just silly if we are being pessimistic about the character (aka me), even if only because Chibi has a really really good neutral game now. And Blaster.

I think chibi can move up if there's some more representation because rn I really don't see anyone doing too great with the character to move him to mid tier

That's why I said "unless Sandbag is high enough." My point is that if sandbag is too low, side B will have landing lag, so you can just cover rising down B side B, and if you gessed wrong, you still have time to punish low side B.