Just an observation, take or leave, I no care...
Shrink the hit box on the panda to just the area around the lower 2/3 of his body, exclude 1 or 2 pixels on each side of his body, and increase the size of the hit box on the sword so that you can hit things about 3-4 pixels to each side of the sword that it seems like you shouldn't be able to. Remember Link's sword was 4 pixels wide and it had about 3-4 inches of fudge on either side of it.
Have fun