Over half a year since Climax of Night Type-4 [arising!] and a few events travelled since. I had a healthy Top-8 appearance at Frosty Faustings this year and a respectable 3rd place showing at Crossover Arc in New York, where I bought the new laptop that I'm keying this blogpost with! Then, with my sponsor Sugoi Factory disbanding and the sort of lull that I've been in since. Let me say that there's nothing for me to go into in regards the the last point and I would prefer not to be asked about it either. I'm very appreciative of the many years that I'd been able to work with such a cool team and the achievements that sponsorship has allowed me to hit. I won't say that I'm opposed to joining any sort of team that might be interested in having me, but I'm also not actively looking for anything right now either. Understandably, I also understand that Under Night (UNI) is not a sexy draw for this sort of thing at the moment in spite of it's dedicated player base and I'm not the most decorated player either. It is what it is.
With all of that out of the way, we are now over a week past Combo Breaker 2022.
I find myself pausing as I write that without too much to say actually... and this will be meaningful as I transition into a recap of that weekend's events:
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Friday was a pretty up and down day. My stomach was still messing with me a bit, but Suna, Silmerion and I took a trip to the grocery store nearby. I picked up some pedialyte, high fiber protein shakes, cliff bars, a fruit blend and water for the morning/midday. As mentioned in one of my tweets, I always try to eat lean on the days that I will actually be playing and will attempt to hydrate myself as much as possible. Today was going to be a long day as: I expected to run a good batch of the exhibitions I had planned for the weekend, had my own pool wave to play at 3pm CST and also had the exhibition on Pange Battaile vs Clim's Phonon later in the day. The distance from the hotel rooms to the ballrooms in question weren't terribly long, but they were not short either.
Nevertheless, things didn't start as planned. Canada had gotten held up with rescheduled flights the previous day and also a good bulk of the players would be arriving in the morning. I feel like I didn't quite communicate that I would not be waiting in the ballroom, but would be waiting in the lobby to commence the exhibitions. I made an assumption that they would know some information and I was wrong. For the record, when doing anything with recording setups like the Avermedia LGP series, the official tournament consoles are leased out by third-party affiliates (like DeadState or Gaming Generations) and they have a strict clause about what gets plugged into their peripherals. My stuff cannot be used on tournament setups at any given time. It'd been a while since we did an event and I think people navigate naturally to the ballrooms and stay there, much to my chagrin. After waiting until a bit after noon and not hearing much from anyone, the only initial set that I had been able to record was Carp vs Smartsteer. I was already annoyed and short, annoyed at yet another setback on something I was making time to arrange and be present for and tweeted in frustration that I was never going to do something like this again. It's like the 3rd time I said I'd stop doing it or so, but we'll try our best to stick to it lol.
Either way, I'll soapbox for a little bit for the readers of the blog: By nature of how events work and how people tend to act at events, I think it is absolutely imperative that players who are interested in improving do *something* to make a record of their progress. In the past, I ran exhibitions and other events with the goal of showcasing talent of players in longer formats that you may not see in tournament sections or to show of competitions between regions that do not normally see each other. Honestly speaking, I think I'm one of the few people with this interest. There's more people now than there were, but I think it'd pretty damning for players to ignore the opportunity to showcase themselves. I get really annoyed and feel like I'm wasting my time organizing for people who might say that they want things--- showcases, opportunities for improvement, footage to study, but don't take advantage of opportunities I or someone else gives them. I've tried to be flexible and organize around people and I've consistently come out more bitter about doing it. So, I won't! I'll try to hold my tongue and stop being pedantic if I see complaints though. Either way, I don't think I should have to ask people to record themselves. You should know who you want to play and how you want this information recorded. If you want to improve, do the work. I'm still willing to help anyone who wants to help themselves, but you have to fucking want it for yourself. There's no point in me having all this equipment, knowledge and so on and not using it.
Off the soap box and back to the tournament. I want to say that I felt like I was mostly playing at the level that I expected could do well. My stomach was still bothering me quite a bit, but I think it was still within reasonable expectation for me to do well. My first match was against BigBoyFargo who also played Akatsuki. It honestly didn't start all that good and I felt like I was reverting back to some of the old habits from previous tournaments rather than the stuff I was practicing leading up to CB. I got a 2-0 win after struggling at first and sat down to play Spoinkman in WQF of the pool. The first game basically went according the expectations and I felt like I won it pretty convincingly, but the second match felt... weird. There wasn't really anything in particular that wasn't working from a gameplan perspective, but all of my timings were off. Things that I felt would be combos would drop because I was too slow, extensions that I would be automatic I would miss and tactical unforced errors just kept adding up to a 1-1 split. Then Spoink simply took it from me in Game 3. Just like that, I was in losers.
With a congratulations to Spoinkman, I turned to focus on my next few opponents. I had to fight from a deficit vs SlamDonkey and against Miller2B, two Linne's... a matchup that I positively despise lol. Well, vs Miller is more or less a 50/50 considering our history and familiarity with each other. He'd beaten me in our last CB appearance (CB2018) and beat me in Columbus, so I was happy to get some revenge on both of those counts. Finally, I had to play against EthicsBuster's Byakuya to get out of the pool. If I'm to be honest, I don't remember much about this set except that I survived it. I think I won game three by timeout?
In any case, I wouldn't know my opponent until the next day so I finished my pool and went back to my hotel room to rest for a bit. I had thought that my exhibition was at 7pm, but it was actually at 9... right next to the stage that Tekken was doing NA vs EU. So, I went down and loitered for a little bit before returning to my room to lay down. Thankfully, I had requested to go first because I am "old". Prior to the tournament, I had asked Gosuda to help me prepare for Clim and so I was able to take some notes and write up some of the things I expected of him and what my approach would be. Around 9, I made my way to the Low Kick stage and helped brrrr set up the console in question before sitting up and waiting for things to begin.
The first two games started really slow as I was still feeling a bit lethargic and wanting to catch what sort of patterns that clim would be shooting for. I basically knew and had internalized that there was a spacing where he would disengage from Akatsuki and shifted up to playing a resource game from there. When I got hit at first, I more or less allowed myself to get thrown to death to feel out what sort of offense he would be running before making more decisions. I went down 0-2 and then made a run to 4 straight after I felt more acclimated. After two more games, we finished up at 5-3 my favor! Honestly speaking, there was a lot more that I was hoping to show off, but I'm thankful for the opportunity against such a strong opponent. I basically left the stage and went back to my room to fall asleep, lol.
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Saturday was a lot less exciting of a time in the morning. I went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast with Miller and Silent and then went down to play in the ballroom. I had told myself and the people yet to do exhibitions that I would not even bother to attempt to run exhibitions or lug my recording setup anywhere on this day. I personally didn't have to play again until 4pm or so and had planned to spend a good chunk of the morning watching Vampire Savior after pools began. Upon getting my personal fill of casual matches just before pools for UNI and Melty were to start, I was making my way to the exit when I saw Shinobi looking around. I said what's up and he asked me if I knew where Suika was. Unfortunately, he had mentioned that he was held back in Vancouver due to a positive COVID test. It didn't seem like that was quite communicated to staff, so it seemed like Shinobi needed someone to fill in for the block. We did a short look around, but I didn't see anyone who would be ready as it was going to start imminently. With that said, I offered to help out with commentary if he needed. Lo and behold, I ended up taking the 10am MBTL block alongside Akimi out of nowhere. It was actually really fun and I got to learn more Lumina and provide color commentary for a game I hadn't played too much! Unfortunately, I missed a lot of VSav going back and forth between UNI pools and that room but it was still pretty enjoyable.
After VSav Top 24 was settled, I ended up chilling in the crowd to await my own Top 32 match after the last pool wave. The rest of the morning and early afternoon's festivities lead SwirlyGlasses to be my opponent. By this point, I was actually fairly confident in my abilites vs Hilda and felt like I had a good shot to win the set. I hadn't actually gotten any Hilda games during the weekend, which was probably to my detriment but even when I went down 0-1, I had mostly felt like I was a few adjustments off from taking the set in 3 games. I felt like I had a pretty dominant game 2 in spite of some mishaps, but things fell apart much like they did in the 2nd game vs Spoinkman. One thing that stuck out in particular were two opportunities to land Kamikaze against no resource Hilda that I had messed up. In game 3, it was more of the same and some long perfects sealed my fate at 25th place. As it turned out, had I won I would have had to fight Masoma... so I suppose I wasn't too beat up about it. I watched the rest of the crazy results until we had settled on our Top 8, then went to get some food with Ebonic Plague and Miller at Miller's Tavern. After a pleasant dinner, I turned in for the night.
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Sunday was another pretty chill morning, where I went down and mashed casuals until it was time for UNI Top 8. I got to root for my boy Foxof as he progressed to winning his first major along with the many hype sets along the way. I also finally got to sit in Vampire Savior from Top 24 to Top 8 and had a good time. I pitched for VMP to try to make it up for the tournament I'm hosting in Columbus on July 16th and hopefully we'll be able to see a bunch of people come through for it. It was amazing to see Ethan (MiniMaw)'s run to 2nd place and also to see Zach (Ailerus)'s consistency in winning yet another Combo Breaker. I believe it's his 3rd one? Honestly, the North American Vsav scene has to be one of my favorite FGC scenes and I'm always happy to be around them and watch them. I don't play it as much as I probably should, but I've always said that them, the NA Skullgirls scene and the Midwest Brawl/PM scene were my inspirations as far as TO and event organization goes. But after that, I lingered around to see a couple of the people I hadn't seen up to that point and left the ballroom to set up my stuff in the hotel lobby.
It was there that I ended up finishing the last three of the planned exhibitions. Unfortunately, because Silent and Psykotik were too good at their games, I wasn't able to record their "secret" FT10 that I had planned. Joe went on to get 3rd in BBCF after doing the same in UNICLR, so he ended up pretty busy. Silent and I ordered a deep dish as I had the last few people do exhibitions. We were eventually joined by Yuuno, squish and many of the others later who all ended up playing on the setup for a while. I had sat down to play Ayr for a bit, intending to record a set when str4ng3r walked up and asked to pull Ayr away for a picture with the rest of the Vatista players there (flank, wootboost, jaca, foxof, and of course foxof42). It was there that I consigned them for the birthday kumite that I had been planning--- turned into a Vatista kumite, minus Foxof. The result is already up on Youtube, but it was really fun! Afterwards, we went to the bar and they all bought me drinks to celebrate my birthday! I turned 31 on the day and had passed it more or less the way I had wanted. Compy and some of the CBus VSAV crew joined us in drinks, since yesterday had been Compy's birthday as well. After we departed from the bar, I chilled over by my setup for a bit before breaking it down and going back to the room.
Monday we just checked out and went home, lol.
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In recap... though it didn't start the best, I had experienced a pretty good birthday weekend. Now that I'm past it, I'm in a bit of a bind as far as what I want to do. I have a tournament on the horizon to prepare in Juu Yon Kakuto Geemu in July, a potential travel destination for MOsh Pit in Missouri, but other than that I think I'm going to chill until September for potentially CEOtaku. I don't have any tournament aspirations except for putting myself in the position to play my best and so things feel a bit hollow. Spitballing it with Gosuda and Vynis last night after mulling it over with myself during the week, I think for the rest of the year I'll be seeking out specific opponents at each of the events that I'm at to play long sets at. I want to take notes and prepare specifically for certain opponents, which is something that I haven't actually done much of since the Yomi days. So, for JYKG, CEOtaku and CoN5, I'll be diligently working on people to play FT10s with. This is the next step for me to keep myself invested, I think. Maybe I'll also approach people for money matches as well.
Anyway, thanks for reading. I recently made a new matchup chart for Akatsuki, but honestly I don't feel like I have things together enough to feel comfortable about it. We'll see what other content I ended up making. I do plan to restream cool stuff and tournaments coming in the future though, so look forward to that. Until next time.
