j.A Morant? A Swell Guy. Wait, you're talking about Mike O-. Right.
On-Location is back and we return to the land without coast or kings that draws competition from all corners of the world, but y'all already know. It ain't CB if we don't sit down with one of Midwest's finest. In this long awaited installment, we have TO, community figure, and one of NA's best players in his own right; the one and only Juushichi.
Being introduced to French-Bread through Melty Blood: Actress Again: Current Code (MBAACC) during college and coming from Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Project M, Juushichi got in on the ground level with seeing the first Under Night In-Birth trailer at a local with friends. He wasn't shy about his early struggles with finding the right character and trying to overcome the execution barrier: \"...so young Juushichi, was definitely a ninja character type so I'm like gonna play Linne, I thought Yuzu was really sick and coming over from Smash; I could barely do any inputs. I was like ah shit, this is too hard who's the easiest character to play; and it ended up being Akatsuki.\"
His Smash roots also influenced his journey and style as a TO; wanting to give the game the maximum amount of love and time that you can, and admittedly sometimes to a detriment. His work with the Midwest Danisen; where the goal was to get more players playing more games, was an idea that started during locals as players often tie for placings at events (t-5th, 7th, 9th, 13th, etc.) In Danisen, the tied players play a round-robin to determine the actual placings. As a longtime sports fan, Juushichi took inspiration from the NBA Play-In tournament. Have more than just casuals but still promote the mindset of growth and improvement, so that the players could get something out of those games. \"It started small, like I would get bags of chips and like snacks for the winners, really low cost stuff.\"
Juushichi's vision for the Danisen also helped alleviate an issue that community organizers have been trying to address for years now, what do you do for the players who want more games and are out of tournament, but are beyond the beginner level and how do you continue to support the mid-level?
For all of his efforts and work as both a player and resource for the greater Under-Night community in not just the Midwest USA, but North America as a whole. In a short video clip at EVO from Lucky_Star901, Kamone-san, battle designer and director at French-Bread signed a poster for Juushichi and referred to him as \"the GOAT\". Further elaborating on the video in a post on X, Kamone-san remarked \"Juushichi is the GOAT. He is literally one of the people who saved UNI.\" His reaction?
\"Holy shit, like I try not to think of myself as a like big deal and definitely don't try to present that way. I like to be approachable, you know I'm just a guy at the end of the day. This is video games, they can lead you many ways, I try not to get a big head about it but it's like I got acknowledged by someone that I really deeply admire.\"
Links:
EnginoJuushichi on Medium
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