The following is an archived post from the Amiibo Dojo. It has been uploaded to the Exion Vault for referential purposes and retains its original publication date; some of the post’s links may not function currently or exist at all.
As you may or may not know, I’ve been doing a lot of work with Pac-Man lately. Over the past month, I’ve put over fifty hours of training into this amiibo. You could say I’ve literally put my soul into Pac-Man’s training, because as I type this, I feel like I have no soul. You might be thinking “wait, didn’t your Pac-Man defeat some of your best amiibo?” To that, I answer yes – but now that they all have had experience against him, Pac-Man is losing hard.
So, let me enlighten you guys on what problems Pac-Man is suffering from. At the very least, I was able to identify why he’s losing. And boy, there are a lot of reasons. Ready? Take a deep breath, and I’ll start going over them.
- Pac-Man’s awful, laggy grab always gets him killed. This is probably the number one reason why I consider Pac-Man to be the worst amiibo in the game. Rather than, y’know, using his hand to grab an opponent like any sensible character, he goes overboard and creates a tractor beam. The beam is so slow that I could go mow the lawn and be back before it’s done (that’s an exaggeration). But in all seriousness, if he misses, which happens very often, the enemy has a perfect chance to charge up and kill with a smash attack.
- He randomly bursts into a dash and then stops. This is another big reason in Pac-Man’s losses. It’s one of the most puzzling situations any of my amiibo have ever been in. He’ll be standing next to his opponent, waiting to block an attack, but then suddenly burst into a dash – the foe will usually then forward smash and kill him. I have absolutely no idea why Pac-Man does this or how to fix it.
- The amiibo butchers almost all of his counterattacks. Pac-Man was playing a match against my Ganondorf amiibo today. Ganondorf made a bad decision and used his up special while he was already on the ground, giving Pac-Man a great opportunity to punish. He walked over to where Ganondorf was about to land and charged a smash attack…and never actually unleashed it. Nope, instead, Ganondorf recovered, and used a forward smash of his own, and killed Pac-Man. You see, Pac screws up the simplest of things. He can barely block with any sort of accuracy. And it’s not like I wasn’t trying.
- He is too reckless with his attacks. This issue has been starting to nullify over time, but Pac-Man keeps randomly throwing out forward smashes, which his foes are able to easily forward smash. And since a good amount of my amiibo have Explosive perfect shield, Pac-Man gets an explosion to the face and takes heavy damage.
If I could somehow fix these problems, Pac-Man would be decent. Not great, just decent. Right now, he isn’t even there yet, after over FIFTY hours of training. Fifty. With that amount of time, I could’ve trained two better amiibo and done well in tournaments with them.
Yet, I don’t think my experience with this amiibo are over. I do, however, advise that you do not train this character. If you do, don’t put too much time into him. Focus on better characters, like…anyone else. It’s really a shame. I grew up playing Pac-Man games, which might explain why I’m so determined for this guy to do well. Character-wise, Pac-Man is my favorite, so for now…I’m stuck in a rut where his amiibo hits rock bottom and I give up, but then after a day or so the determination to make him great comes back in full force. I’ll be sure to keep you guys updated. Thanks for reading!