Recently I have come upon a blog who claims to be written by a bear or Panda. The come from the blog https://kingdomofrhetoric.family.blog/ titled A Cute Panda and as such I assume that they are pandas. So far they have talked about their interactions with major current events such as the Australian fire. It describes three brotherly bears with their own personalities. They seem to be much acquainted with human life.

    Non-human characters have always been slightly confusing to me. In video games in general, non-human characters always have an element of surprise that human characters do not. In a previous Guilty Gear title, there is a character known as Leopaldon. “His” in-humane form is a surprise for the game. In a game series filled with humans, the addition of this is just unbelievable. On the other hand, it is one of many occurrences of some nonhuman characters. In Tekken there is a panda called Panda who fights among the human characters.

    In Smash Bros, the creator has preferred to keep the animal-like characters more beastly attributes. Characters like Bowser, Donkey Kong, and many more use animal noises in contrast to human speak like their origins. For Donkey Kong, he loses all his character in Smash Bros. He loses some of his personality in his games. In Super Smash Bros for the Wii U and 3ds he has gained some of his personality back. He has eyes pop out of his eyes whenever he gets hit to give him a cartoonish look, but overall, his main trait is that he is a giant ape. This can be seen in the way he fights. He fights with strong meaty hits and uses his size to overwhelm his opponent.

    Unlike how these games tend to make the non-human characters emphasize their non-human parts, the blog A Cute Panda makes the pandas human. We can see that they think and act exactly like how a human would. I have noticed this in cartoons and less realistic novels. Cartoons always tend to make animals more human in contrast to games. I can understand that this is done to make the animal more relatable. 

In A Cute Panda, they are given clothes, human features, etc. They demonstrate thinking capabilities and that they are able to be human when in reality they are not. They talk about Australia and have a solid understanding of government. They utilize technology like humans, such as the television and cell phone. What also surprises me is that the bears seem to understand what a savings are. They also seem to be extremely emphatical, even more than some players in the community. When talking about the Australian fire, they demonstrate a strong urge to help them. One of them expresses that they will donate everything to charity to help.

    Overall, I found it interesting about the humane nature of the animals and how they are more human than animal and remind me of animals in cartoons and contrast the image of animals in fighting games.

In everyday life, except for a few people, people need a dependable source of income in order to survive. If there was one problem for those competing in Smash competitively, it would be the lack of a pot prize.

When competing in a smash tournament, one is expected to pay for registration, which can go from as low as priceless to as expensive as a few hundred dollars. These fees do not include housing fees and travel fees. What ends up happening is that most players who go to major tournaments will lose hundreds of dollars. Even those who place in the top one percentile may also lose money as the costs for travel will be greater than the pot.

I have been talking about the pot prize a lot, but most people will not realize how much the first place winner of the tournament may earn. With the recent release of the prize pool for Evo Japan 2020, the Smash community is in shock. The amount of entrants in the tournament for Smash is around 3,000 players while Street Fighter has nearly 1,500 entrants, half of that of Smash. Converted to USD currency, the first place prize for Street Fighter is $9000. To everyone’s surprise, the first place winner of a major tournament is a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller with a gold mark.

While it is cool that the Pro Controller will have a gold mark, it is tragic that the first place winner of such a competitive event will essentially lose money for participating. In general, if you compare the prize pool and amount of entrants in a tourney, one will notice something strange about Smash tournaments. Their prize pools are tragically small. There are reasons for this. For one, it was only in the last decade that Nintendo has recognized the competitive scene. For a while, Nintendo prevented the streaming of Smash tournaments on the internet and denied the competitive scenes existence. However, with Smash Ultimate, they have recognized the competitive scenes existence and often tweet about major tournaments on their twitter account.

On the other hand, Nintendo has not funded a tournament. This has resulted in most tournament organizers having to find sponsors themselves. Although what ends up happening is that the tournaments are underfunded in comparison to tournaments of other Esports. Recently, an organization known as Thunder Gaming has been funding a few tournaments with a lot of cash. The entrant of a company into the Smash scene has brought a lot of suspicion as in the past, a company entered the scene and never paid players. It has had a lot of issues due to some issues in its production and the companies spiteful twitlonger against Technicals who claimed that Thunder Gaming had ulterior motives. These claims were not helped by Thunder Gamings PR Team who wanted no opposition to them online and often took everything as criticism.

While the Smash scene is getting more money nowadays than it did in the past, the amount its top players earn is ridiculously low compared to that of other esports. Smash players would like new sources of money, but are often skeptical of new sources of money due to some past companies from not paying out. Nintendo does not help in this as Nintendo only provides minor support to the scene.

    After browsing through some sites, I stumbled on one who claims to be a time traveler. He claims that “[he travels] to a person with different time periods, different backgrounds and different gender.” In other words it can be said that he claims to have lid many lives and that by time traveling, he is really seeing one of his previous lives. This is a neat concept that plays off of the thought of reincarnation a bit. Reincarnation is a concept or belief that after one’s biological death, the living being can start a new life in a different physical form. 

This stood out to me as it is a common trope that Asian web novel writers use known as Isekai. Some well known titles that utilize this trope are I Reincarnated as a Slime, Reincarnation no Kaben, and Cheating Men Must Die. 

    I believe Ekko to be someone who time travels and knows that he travels into different lives without any memory. The time traveling part confuses me as time travel always tends to do.

One major difference between Ekko (the time traveler) and the others coming from similar genres is that the main character has lost his memories. There are other stories where the main character travels to the pasts of different people, but they usually have their own memory intact. The closest story that I can remember to this premise is I Will Die Soon. In that story, the main character’s punishment for committing suicide is to be constantly put into the body of different people right before they die without having an understanding of the situation. While my explanation does not make it seem similar, I insist that it is due to similarities in how the character becomes other people.

To the normal person, one might be wondering why an FGC professional player like me reads so many similar novels. It is all connected to one of the games I compete in, Guilty Gear. Guilty Gear is a fighting game developed by Arc System Works. Arc System Works has created another game called Blaz Blue Cross Tag Battle, which is a massive crossover with famous games and tv shows. Some examples include that of the Persona series and RWBY series. As a result, I was exposed to many different series and eventually stumbled onto the Asian webnovel market and got hooked. To this day, I still read web novels and the fantasy words they create.

    In his most recent post, he explains how he time travels. He apparently just relaxes and tries to search for his memories and then he gets sent into the past in someone else’s body. After being in the body for a while, he seems to learn information necessary to understand the situation. The event written about its the Chinese Spring Festival and how it ties into family. Despite being Chinese myself, I have not celebrated the event before. I am pleasantly surprised that they receive a decent amount of days off for the holidays.

    I personally relate to the ending of the post where Ekko decides to go back home to celebrate the holidays. As a competitive Esports player, such times are rare occurrences. As a competitor, you are expected to compete as much as possible and to never have a break. Even in times where you could have a break, you are expected to grind the game. Many professional video game players are unable to go back home and visit families. While that is not the case for me, it is the case for those who play other games, such as League of Legends. I am grateful for this post, not only for keeping my interest, but to also remind me the importance of family and why I am fortunate that I do not have to stay away for long periods of time.

Ekko’s Blog: https://oldtimetraveler.travel.blog/2020/01/13/welcome-to-my-blog/

Recently an infamous smash player by the name of Elliot Bastien “Ally” Carroza-Oyarce has come into the light again with his recent tweets. This brought about a lot of rumors about whether or not such a controversial player will return to the scene to compete again or whether or not the account has been hacked. To the average person, one might wonder who is “Ally,” and why is he so controversial. In order to understand why such a man is infamous, you would have to look at events that transpired all the way from the years of the previous Super Smash Bros title (2014-2018) to half a year ago. 

Ally was a top player in the previous Smash Bros title Super Smash Bros for the Wii U and 3ds as well as being a top player in Super Smash Bros Ultimate. Many people speculate that if the controversy did not happen, he would have been a top 10 player in Super Smash Bros Ultimate. Zack “Captain Zack” Lauth a top Super Smash Bros for the Wii U and 3ds player was also involved with Ally. Captain Zack has already been a controversial player before this event broke out. During Evolution 2018, Captain Zack and top player Lima responded to rage towards their character choice by talking mid game and stalling during grand finals. To stall and talk mid game is controversial enough, but to do it during grand finals of the most prestigious fighting game tournament of the year leaves a mark.

Going closer to the present, it was found out that Captain Zack was in a relationship with Ally when Captain Zack was 16 years old with Ally being 11 years older. Captain Zack is from Louisiana where the age of consent is 17 and Ally is from Canada where the age of consent 16. Their relationship was stuck in a gray area. The information was brought up to the Smash community when a friend of Captain Zack, claimed that Ally along with a few others were dating minors. Captain Zack and Ally both denied these claims at first but later admitted to them. After releasing a twitter confessment on having a relationship with Captain Zack, Ally retired from the competitive smash scene with many people hoping he comes back. Perhaps the decision to retire was made because of witch hunts going on in the Pokemon community where it was found that a famous member of the Pokemon community was dating a minor. 

Soon after Ally retired from Smash Bros events, Captain Zack confessed that he had made Ally throw matches in major tournaments. In other words, the duo had match fixed extremely important matches that would be the difference of a few hundred to a thousand dollars. As a consequence of breaking the rules, the two players have been banned from certain events indefinitely. However, they are still free to compete in other tournaments as there is no such thing as a global ban on these players as the competitive scene for Smash Bros comes from grass root scenes rather than one universal scene. 

In the end, the two players have not returned to the competitive smash scene, but Ally has implied that he is trying to return back, hence this issue resurfacing. I hope this information was informative for those curious.

The SSB Conduct Panel, the same unofficial group which recommended tournament organizers to ban the players, have recently updated this case after I have written out my thoughts on this issue. Perhaps, the Smash community will change their thoughts on the issue but here are my thoughts upon reaction. The panel has recommended that tournament organizers ban Captain Zack for at least 5 years. This is fine as he deserves punishment for his actions. Five years may be a bit too much since at the time of him doing his actions, he was just a teenager. The controversial part about their update on Zack is the fact that the panel recommends a lesser ban of around 2 and a half year for Mew2Queen. Mew2Queen has abused people on social media and has directly impacted members of the community through various acts in person. Both players have committed wrongs, but from my standpoint, Zack’s actions are less impactful compared to Mew2Queens and that the recommended ban times should be swapped.

Hello, it is me! FGCGamer! This is my first blog post and a test to see how Word Press works. I will use this post to reintroduce myself and my hopes for what I will post. I am a professional video game player and competitor. I primarily play the fighting game Super Smash Bros Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch. In this blog, I will be discussing events and my take on them. I will also respond to other blogs. Know that while I am a gamer, I will intentionally or unintentionally bring more my thoughts on topics. I am open for discussion and whether or not you think my thoughts are a “hot take.” Hope everyone reading this has a nice rest of the day.