Tuesday Morning Mythra — 11/28: What’s Going On With Game 5 Acola?
twitter. patreon. jvgrid. luminosity smash.
Hey everyone, I’m back! I’m really pleasantly surprised that these past few weeks of majors have been very fun to watch. I am, of course, referring to MaesumaTOP#15 Final and Ultimate Fighting Arena 2023, both of which featured a bunch of super cool character specialists all throughout and set up some really crazy sets!
One thing that stood out to me from Ultimate Fighting Arena was the deep seated hope, belief, that MkLeo was back. I woke up to him already in losers thanks to an upset from NaetorU, an opponent that even earlier this year he pretty effortlessly dispatched with his pockets at Summit, and I was ready to doom again.
Still, Leo mounted a pretty lengthy losers run — and snagged his first Top 20 win since Crown! — to make it to his losers semis set against Raflow where he robbed the utter hell out of Raflow to win Game 4. It would be easy, there, to believe that MkLeo was back — if game 5 didn’t happen, with Raflow taking another early lead and barely holding onto it by the end.
I preface this week’s article with Leo’s struggles at UFA not to dog on the man at all but more to point out that the concept of Game 4 Leo isn’t really predicated on any sort of reality. Sure, he melted Tweek’s soul at EVO, and he’d do it again to Samsora a week later at Smash Con, and the pivotal turning point in each set happened to be an insane comeback in Game 4, but from there, it was a narrative superimposed onto a player who truly, genuinely, was just the best player in the world.
Now, that’s a little unfair to Game 4 Leo. I mean, his strength in pulling off impossible comebacks in Game 4 and his general propensity for reverse 3–0s is something unique to him. I mean, it’s a skill he still seems to have, if his set against MVD at Port Priority seems to indicate anything. Game 4 was just an arbitrarily marker that was placed down after a couple insane comebacks wherein MkLeo seemed to keep much stronger composure and adaptability against his opponents. I think that’s the part of the original Game 4 Leo PGStats video (a piece of work so influential on my personal motivations that it motivated me to begin statswriting) that usually gets missed. Game 4 itself wasn’t really important, it was more that he was winning these sets! Nobody remembers Mainstage 2021’s grands (my favorite set in Ultimate history) because of Leo’s game 4!
It was never about Game 4s. It was about MkLeo the whole time.
So, with that said, it’s time to dissect a similar phenomena that has come about in recent times.
Before I even start fucking talking about any of this, let me preface it with: if your response is going to be “Well, he plays Steve”, or some permutation of it: I don’t care. Acola’s so clearly figured out something with the character that nobody else on Planet Earth has. He’s the only top level Steve player that’s figured out long term consistency, he’s the only guy in the global top 30 with the character, really, and he has a legacy that extremely few people can contest over their entire lives. You don’t need to like the character. You don’t even need to think the character is competitively healthy! You just need to understand that if it were so easy to do what acola does with Steve, you’d have seen so many more people start doing it. acola is, by all conventional understandings of Smash Ultimate, built different.
Acola’s Game 5 winrate is, for lack of better words fucking absurd. Here’s the graphic that Freezie made for the Port Priority video, to give the people a quick refresher:
For fun, I went to go tabulate the Game 5 winrate of 2019–2020 MkLeo, Leo his most dominant, up through Frostbite 2020. Here’s what I came back with.
(In fact, Leo’s Game 5 winrate in 2021 was 100%. Maybe we should re-assess what we think to be Leo’s best year of competition?)
So obviously, these two calculations are devoid of context. For example, Leo’s main rivals taking Game 5s off of him in Marss, Samsora, Tweek, and ESAM, are all people who he generally trades his game 5 wins and losses with. Compare this to acola’s recent stretch of being truly lost against Sparg0, where he’s unable to even take a game and force a game 5 situation. Furthermore, there was a lot less BO5 back in 2019, especially at EVO, so it was pretty rare for Leo to have the breathing room to struggle against his Top 128 opponents the way acola’s had to stare players down players like AK and Flow.
Still, it puts into context how truly impressive acola getting to this point was. I mean, normally I feel obligated to flesh out the meaning of the numbers, but here, I’ll just spell it out. acola is, quantifiably, more clutch than pre-pandemic Leo was. Let’s take a trip down memory lane and start walking through acola’s career, exploring the critical Game 5s that defined him and his legacy of closing out sets. Because by the end of this, I hope you’ll start to see a picture of where exactly his clutch factor came from, and how it hardened.
Maesuma offline (2/26/2022):
The legend has it that this invitational was his first ever offline bracket. That’s a bit of a misconception, though — it was actually his third. His first two were small events without any notable players in attendance, where he won both with little resistance. Acclimated to offline, though, acola got dropped into the deep end by Maedakun, a Wi-Fi TO in acola’s home prefecture of Kansai. acola — who was no stranger to Maedakun’s single elimination netplay brackets held on Smashmate — was a familiar name to Maedakun, but of course, he saw something special in the kid, and invited him to a small event in Osaka where he’d get some of the best talent in Japan to square off against the young Wi-Fi warrior. Maedakun invited Rarukun, another budding Smashmate fiend, and five established top 100 players in Raito (#96 2021 OR Eclipse), Yaura (#76), Hero (#41), Kome (#19), and Shuton (#8). Luminous was also there, but he’d become a top level player in his own right years later.
Here, acola would face off against his first world class opponent — Raito.
Look, it’s really funny in hindsight given the trajectory of both of their careers, but Raito was a massive household name at this point. He had been travelling overseas for years, and he got 5th at the biggest tournament in Ultimate’s history! Raito was acola’s first ever offline test against a player who had dedicated their all to this game for years and years on end.
Game 1’s close, but Acola baits a jump with a minecart, catching it with a diamond bair. Game 2 goes a lot worse for acola, though — Raito’s using Clay Pigeon and Can to snuff out lots of acola’s advantage, and eventually, Raito outpaces him in percent, with acola struggling to find a good kill move against Raito circlecamping Smashville, hucking chip damage in projectiles at him for all of the second stock. Eventually, acola finds the kill, but Game 2 is clipped, and Raito lands a bair after Clay Pigeon disrupts his jab string.
Acola goes to Town in Game 3 and three stocks him, but game 4 goes to Small Battlefield, and it looks like Raito’s initial strategy is working. Acola gets hit with a frankly evil combo, and Raito spends the rest of the game trying to circumnavigate and chip out acola from here. There’s one problem, though: Steve can put up a wall.
Acola chooses to play Duck Hunt’s game less and less through out the set, and slowly, he pulls it back from being a full stock behind into a last hit scenario. Raito’s giving him time to mine, and when he mines, he gets iron and gold — the recipe for powered carts. These minecarts — and the following uptilts — are enough to call out Raito’s hasty approaches enough to false kill screen three times in Game 4, before Raito barely closes the game out with a nair.
Game 5 starts on PS2, and acola initially looks a little lost, with an early called out jump by Raito putting him at a stock deficit.
Here, acola figures it out: he keeps getting hit by can whenever he approaches, but at the same time, if he wants to mount a comeback against the setplay zoner, he’s got to figure out a way to disincentivize the running away. acola realizes he can confuse both the can’s pathfinding AI and Raito by standing on top of a series of blocks while still pressuring him by shooting minecarts at him. Raito, floundering, tries to pivot his pressure by rushing acola down. He jumps into an anvil and dies for his troubles. Acola has only bled 50% this stock. Acola continues to dance around can, counterhitting a greedy gunman set with a cart, and hits Raito with a full combo out of it. Acola sets up a wall and replenishes mats, calls out a can set with a cart, and diamond bairs Raito’s approach. From here, the game is the acola show. Now that he knows Raito doesn’t have good ways to pressure stone walls, he waits for his opening, lands a jab, and brutally dismantles Raito on a missed tech.
Acola has just downloaded his first world class player.
But out of the frying pan and into the fryer — acola’s next opponent is Yaura.
In the future, Yaura will become a Top 25 player. He will travel to North America on multiple occasions, and generally become recognized enough as world class. He’ll even get good enough to flame the other top rep of his character on Twitter. But for now, Yaura’s just a guy who happens to be the biggest fish in his small pond of Shikoku. Whenever he leaves the region, he puts up pretty strong results, but he’s mostly pushing through, waiting for the holiday weekend where he takes a big win, where it’s his turn to shine. In a sense, Yaura has just as much of a chip on his shoulder for recognition as someone like acola does.
Game 1 begins, and Yaura starts playing a simple gameplan. Rush him down, then ledgetrap him. It works cleanly, and Yaura lands a simple bomb -> dash attack at ledge to clean up the game.
In sharp contrast, Yaura looks almost entirely lost in game 2. It feels like none of Yaura’s buttons are hitting, and acola seems to have the perfect solution lined up for everything. To put it bluntly, acola figured out the pattern to Yaura’s aggression, and more often than not, reversaled him to put him on the back foot. Acola cleanly two stocks him. In game 3, Yaura realizes something: acola has Wi-Fi brain.
Acola is panic airdodging and rolling an insane amount, and a few small reads lets Yaura cleanly zero-to-death acola for the first stock.
Acola manages to pull it back to even, including using a cheeky block edgeguard to even it up last stock again, but Yaura gets acola into the corner and hits two soulread chargeshots before reading a jump out of minecart with fair.
Game 4 begins, and acola starts finding the gaps. He hard calls out a whiffed up-air with an up-tilt into a full combo, and proceeds to call out a grab with a bair into yet another full combo. If Yaura’s going to keep his gameplan simple and try to outread me, I’m going to need to outread him first.
Acola cleans up Game 4, but in game 5, Yaura’s cleanly outpacing acola’s damage output. By the end of stock two, acola hasn’t had an opportunity to mine a single piece of iron, and the rest of his recovery options are being snuffed out by Samus. Yaura keeps up the constant pressure, waiting for acola to re-burn his iron so he can avoid the minecarts, and eventually, acola, iron deficient, tries to get off the ledge straight into Yaura’s grab. He mashes out…but the following fair ends the set.
Yaura has just defeated Game 5 acola in its second ever appearance.
What does this mean? Well, in my opinion, the biggest takeaway is seeing the counteradaptation and the swings in momentum. Yaura, as the primary aggressor throughout the set, started off with a clearly functional gameplan, but realized as the set went on that acola was figuring out his timings and cadence, and it was only with playing around acola’s style that he was able to pick up the win. Acola is a master of adaptation — sure, it might be Steve’s /gamemode 1 inherent to his kit, but it’s way more loaded than that. He figures out an opponent’s timings throughout a set, and he can pretty swiftly find a way to cleanly counteract it, whether it be by engaging/disengaging more, or even by the sheerly simple act of parrying, Lies of P style.
Anyway, he cleans up Kome in another Game 5 before facing Yaura down again in a Game 5 in Losers Finals. This time around, though, acola avoids Smashville, and instead gives up Battlefield. The two jockey around, but acola seems to keep getting hit by these clinical chargeshots, with Yaura taking a very clean lead. From here, acola realizes that he needs to jockey in Yaura’s midrange, where he can’t possibly accurately react to all of his options. Slowly but surely, acola finds his openings, and when Yaura aggressively jumps in, acola’s got the anvil ready.
From here, acola’s up against Shuton in grands.
Shuton begins the set, and cleanly gets the shit beat out of him while playing his new co-main, Aegis, for the first two games. From here, he switches to the EVO-winning Olimar, and acola seems to be absolutely lost. Shuton is just massively oupacing him in damage, finding good opportunities to swing, and calling out his acola’s disadvantage with the good ol purple aerials. Shuton pulls the set to game 5, and after faltering on FD and PS2, he goes to Town. Here, acola realizes something critical: he needs to kill the Pikmin. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done, and he’ll bleed damage even when uptilting all the lil guys latched to him. Acola realizes that if he keeps forcing Shuton to keep re-pulling, he’ll be more inclined to default to trying to zone to cover himself — and if he sticks to that gameplan, he won’t be ready for when I try to surprise him with minecart and bair. And it works — acola takes the first set of grands against Shuton.
Shuton wins the reset 3–0, and with it, the tournament, but the message is sent — this kid is figuring out the game at a rate nobody else has ever done before.
Kagaribi #7 (5/4/22)
Acola’s been going to tournaments for a few months now. The resume isn’t spotless, but it’s damn strong. And by “damn strong”, I mean that he hasn’t lost a tournament since Maesuma offline. He drops a few sets, sure, but he always managesd to pull it back during the losers run. Three out of four of the offline tournaments he attends between that first invitational and Kagaribi 7 he wins through losers, in fact, and all of them involve him dismantling his opponent in the runback (those people being Hikaru, Shirayuki, and Yoshidora).
With that said, Acola’s big debut is Kagaribi#7 — a tournament with international recognition. All of Japan’s top talent is gathered for Golden Week, and his path isn’t easy. It doesn’t help, in fact, that according to tradition, Kagaribi 7 was seeded based on results at prior Kagaribis specifically, a tournament series which acola himself has never attended, so his opponent to make it out of pools is Yoshidora, one of few players that he had actually lost to prior. Anyway, this tournament is stakes that acola’s never faced down prior.
But one thing even nerves won’t crack is his adaptability.
Acola makes it to Winners Finals winning four distinct game 5 sets — against yuzu, Yoshidora, Omuatsu, and Gackt. The only set I could find VODs of was the Omuatsu set. There, acola seems to troll a bit (he goes DK game 2 after two-stocking game 1? foreshadowing much?). Regardless of whether or not we have VODs, one thing is important — at an event with all of the old guard in attendance (Shuton, Banham, Tea, KEN) — acola ended up on top, at the forefront of Japanese Smash, and he did so through his ability to take information that he gathered in losing games to inevitably find a way to clutch in game 5.
But something tells me that I don’t think acola was going to settle for being simply the best in Japan.
The Gimvitational (06/16/2022)
Acola and Asimo, after making grands at Kagaribi 7, are coming over to Laurel, Maryland! There, they’ll be able to test out some ~zany stages~ that I’m sure people will play on, and not just default to Pokemon Stadium 2!
But more importantly, they’ll be able to go up against some of North America’s finest players.
All eyes were on acola’s performance. Sure, North America had seen Jake f-smash off the pen his way to 3rd in the very same venue a few months prior, but this was different. Jake wasn’t winning the biggest tournaments the way acola was.
In his first ever set on North American soil, acola would be up against…not a North American. In fact, he was up against another big unknown. Ferps had been at the forefront of South American Smash, and had worked to define Kazuya’s meta throughout 2021. Through crowd voting, he got in to the Gimvitational, and with it, he would be acola’s first challenge in the states.
Acola efficiently cleans up game 1, but in game 2, acola leaves FD open, and Ferps jumps at the opportunity. Ferps, barely pushed into rage by .4%, hits the Wi-Fi classic — a side b from ledge. Acola absolutely explodes at 70%.
Game 3 goes to last hit, but acola gambles on a dash attack that doesn’t pay off. Ferps goes up 2–1 in the set. It’s at this point that acola realizes something critical — Ferps is just as nervous as he is. At the end of game 4, Ferps goes for that exact same side-b from ledge, but acola’s ready — he jumps, and he punishes it, to win Game 4 with a two stock lead.
From there, Game 5 is all acola. acola loops his pressure, calls out his side b-s to ledge, and waits for his panic airdodges. Ferps looks entirely lost. He’s landing stray hits, but he can’t get any momentum started, and at the end of the day, acola cleanly takes Game 5.
Acola’s next important set is against Kola. It’s one thing to beat Ferps (and Larry Lurr), but at this point, Kola is a Top 20 player in the world. But after his loss to Jake — and his many, many local sets with DDee — he’s maybe the most dangerous person to go up against acola. Kola, also, picks Cloud for this set — another character that would come to cause problems for acola in the near future. Acola realizes that Cloud back-air effectively snuffs out any sort of disengaging for resource collection that acola could possibly want to do, and so he’ll need to manage his resources more carefully. These two trade games — Acola wins Games 1 and 3, but Kola wins Games 2 and 4. All go pretty much last hit.
In Game 5, acola tries something new — he starts off the game rushing Kola down, mining between interactions, and racks up a lead. Acola realized that playing reactively against Cloud’s sheer safety was never going to work for him — he takes a lead, then starts covering space with minecart, until Kola gets impatient, and jumps into an up-smash.
Hungrybox is not pleased by this.
At this point, Kola is omega tilted, and acola realized that all he needs to do is play around Kola’s frustration. acola is in his head. He stalls out limit, parries two of Kola’s aerials, and gets a punish and a stock, puttting him cleanly in the lead. Kola starts to pull it back, but Kola gets baited by a minecart jump back, and acola calls out the bait to win the set.
Yet again, acola, staring down an opponent confident in the tools needed to take him down, figured out that to win the set, he needed to figure out his opponent.
Sumabato SP29 (8/14/2022)
Acola’s back in Japan, and he’s took a very weird upset loss at his Kansai regional Sumabato — Meido the ZSS in pools. Nevertheless, he persisted through losers, taking down a smattering array of players. Six months ago, players like Yaura and Kome were pushing him to the brink, but now, he just effortlessly brushes past them to make his way to grand finals. There, he goes up against someone he has never played before — Miya.
Miya, at this point, saw Acola’s success at Golden Week, and figured he could do it too. After all, the two had similar backgrounds: young Smashmate grinders from Kansai. When the next iteration of Kagaribi came around, he strapped in, ready to take a triumphant tournament win. Unfortunately enough, around then was another wave of COVID, and thus, a bunch of top players dropped out citing safety concerns. Nevertheless, he still took down Shuton and ProtoBanham, so he still manageed to take a meaningful event win and put his name on the map.
Miya and Acola sit down, ready to play their first ever set.
What results is a 50 minute game 10 behemoth, wherein Miya counterpicks R.O.B in set one, a gamble that almost works. My ass is not dissecting this whole thing in this column. (If I make this Game 5 acola thing into a fleshed out video essay, I might, but that’ll only happen when I get let out of the Luminosity Gaming mines.) After the R.O.B gets torn apart, the two get to Game 10, last hit, a situation that these two would become increasingly familiar with. Acola bairs through Mr. Game & Watch’s fair, and with it, he wins Sumabato SP29, with two consecutive Game 5 victories.
Acola pops off, excited to have won the event, but he knows that he hasn’t fully solved the Miya problem yet. This guy’s here to stay, and he’s going to be a longer term issue.
Let’s Make Moves Miami (10/29/2022)
From here, Acola attended a fair few invitationals in the States that were much more stacked than the Gimvitational. At Summit 5, he clutched Game 5s on Cosmos, Anathema, and Tweek, and at LSI, he clutched game 5s on Dabuz, Light, Riddles, and Sparg0. He was still falling short of the gold, however — 4th at Summit, and 2nd at LSI.
Let’s Make Moves Miami was an opportunity for him — he had never entered an open bracket in North America, and the floodgates were open for everyone to take a crack at him. Unfortunately enough, he’d take an early, surprise upset loss to MuteAce, and have to wade through losers just out of top 8. From there, acola trusted his instincts, and did what he does best: he clutched game 5. He won Game 5s against Gen, Tweek, Zomba, and MuteAce in the runback, handily sweeping Riddles in Losers Semis as well. From there, he squared off against Onin in grands, in the only double Steve grand finals in Smash Ultimate major history.
Well, that’s not actually what went down. Acola forced Onin onto — heh — pocket after pocket, giving us one of the most decisive grand finals sets in Smash history, and one of the rawest pieces of Hungryclicker art.
This losers run is one of the most impressive singular feats in Ultimate history. Maybe it gets swept aside because grands was notoriously memorable in its own right, or maybe because he plays Steve, but to stare down players with cumulative decades of competitive Smash experience and come out on top only nine months into your offline career takes an amount of composure and mental fortitude few on Earth could develop. To clutch out this often against the world’s greatest players is unfathomable. It’s not like he doesn’t get nervous — it would be impossible not to be! But throughout everything, he finds a way to adapt and systemically break his opponent down. If his opponent is doing something that’s working, then he figures out a way around it.
It’s one thing to be an unbreakable wall. It’s another to be a wall that can patch up its damage faster than people can inflict it.
Smash Ultimate Summit 6 (3/24/2023)
Let’s jump ahead five months. Acola’s been struggling a bit (for his insanely high standards). He placed 7th (gasp) at Genesis in his only overseas journey prior to Summit. It took them a combined like, fifteen tries, but he placed 3th (gasp), losing to Miya and KEN at MaesumaTOP#11.
So he’s got a bit of a chip on his shoulder going into Summit, and it especially doesn’t help when he squares off against Big D and loses in Winners Quarters on Sunday, his first set of the day. At this point, I can imagine acola’s probably pretty broken down. He’s across the world, and his projected opponent is MkLeo, who brutally dismantled him at LSI.
From there, he makes a phone call.
It’s to Maedakun.
It’s around 5:30AM in Japan, but Maedakun’s up. The one confidant he’s had — the TO that saw something special in his play a year ago on Wi-Fi, and gave him the opportunity to play against the best of the best, the guy constantly prodding him to be more confident in his ability, the guy creating supermajors and infrastructure around acola’s hometown — has, of course, set an alarm to watch the event bright and early.
We don’t know the contents of this phone call, but we know that something shifted in Acola.
On a warpath, Acola finds himself back in Grand Finals against Tweek. Tweek and Acola had played twice prior, with both sets going to Game 5. Going in, Tweek is looking like the best player in the world.
In set one, the two go blow-for-blow, until Game 5 of set 1 rolls around. Here, the whole world is watching acola display his adaptation at work. He’s dashing in with a near-psychic knowledge on when Tweek’s swinging. He’s airdodging through Seph’s aerials, and he’s parrying everything. He two stocks Tweek.
From there, Set 2 is a victory lap. Acola wins the final Smash Ultimate Summit, and with it, he can finally take his throne as the best player in the world.
It’s an overblown narrative, but acola is, at the end of the day, a prodigy. But it’s not enough to be gifted. There will always be people who were also gifted that have been doing it for longer.
But acola’s gift is something special — he sees opponents differently than anyone else playing the game right now. I asked Dabuz about acola when doing my interviews for my TL piece, intending to add a part about acola there. It got cut because of scope creep, sadly. Anyway, Dabuz basically said that acola is different because he’s willing to play Smash and Steve to their fullest. He’s beaten Acola before, and the two have always had close sets, but of course, you all saw Smash Con. Acola figures people out at a rate nobody else possibly can. It’s no coincidence that there’s a single digit number of people on planet Earth with multiple set wins on him, especially for this season, where for five months there was literally only one guy that could possibly beat him. Sure, Steve being Top 1 helps with that, but even the most ardent Steve ban afficionado has to concede that acola has something figured out that nobody else does.
While game 4 Leo was about using big moments to snowball impossible comebacks, game 5 Acola is about how he can have an opponent fully figured out by the end of a set.
Acola’s biggest learning process throughout his past ~two years of offline competition has been confidence. But by now, he knows that he’s the best, and he knows that people are going to try to have it all figured out.
At the end of the day, his composure and adaptability make him one of the strongest gamesense players in fighting game history. If there’s a problem, you better believe Acola’s looking for a way to solve it for next time.
Looking forward to Throne coming up — it’s going to be a spicy ending to the year!
See you all next week,
Trade War
