Ep. 1: Kagaribi and the Race for Number 1

Kagaribi was a very exciting tournament this year, with many players from all over the world travelling to compete against Japan's finest players. This resulted in some very interesting results, with many of the players that were expected to do well placing much lower than they were seeded. The main event of this tournament was the grand finals between Sparg0 and Acola, where Sparg0 managed to beat out Acola, possibly cementing himself as the current best player in the world.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Upset Factor. I'm your host Lukas, and today we have a pretty big episode ahead of us. We're gonna be taking a deep dive into what happened at Kagaribi this year, talking about some of the sets I found to be interesting, as well as taking a look at what I thought was the main theme of this tournament, with Spargo and Acola facing off in Grand Finals, further cementing Spargo as the number one player in the world as of now. However, before we get into that, I just want to take a second to talk about what this podcast's gonna be about going into this episode, as well as any of the episodes coming up in the future. Each episode we're gonna be taking a look at the major tournaments happening in the SMASH ultimate scene, taking a look at the sets I think are worth watching and talking about any interesting things currently going on in the community. Each episode will be focused mainly on one tournament so that might be, for instance, for this episode, Kagaribi for next episode it'll likely be Battle of BC and in the future it might be tournaments like Smash Con, Get On My Level and any other things like that that I think were prominent between episodes. Then from that tournament, I'm gonna take a theme that I think was a major part of the event, such as a player having an unexpected tournament run, a character that isn't normally seen making a big appearance or a development in an existing storyline, such as the race for number one in the world, and I'll dive even deeper, going back to look at what happened in the past that led to the events that transpired at that tournament. So now that we've gotten that outta the way, let's jump into what happened this year at Kagaribi. I think a lot of stuff happened at Kagaribi that is worth talking about, and mainly the big thing that I think happened was to do with a lot of the North American players that traveled to Japan to attend this tournament. Because a lot of these players don't normally compete in Japan, there were a lot of matchups between North American players and Japanese players that we don't normally get to see and this led to some pretty big upsets that I don't think a lot of people were expecting. A big commonality between a lot of these North American players was that they all seemed to underperform compared to what they were seeded at a lot of these tournaments except for really spargo but we'll talk more about him later. At Kagaribi this was no exception. Most of the big names such as MuteAce, Dabuz, Riddles, Lima and a few other players had some pretty tough times with a lot of the players that are not as well known in Japan. And we're gonna be taking a look at some of those sets and how I think that all played out. So let's just get into the first one here. We're gonna be talking about this match between MuteAce and an inkling player, Levi, who is from Japan. Sadly the whole thing wasn't on stream, so I couldn't see the start of the first game. But it started off with Levi doing pretty well in the matchup . with inkling not being a very common character in North America, this could be some possible matchup inexperience on MuteAce's part. It was pretty obvious in the player cam that MuteAce seemed a bit frustrated while he was playing against Levi in this match. Levi was able to get some pretty big combos on MuteAce and while Peach is normally a character that should be getting combos just like that, it seemed like MuteAce was struggling to hit a lot of the combos he normally does. And like I said, sadly, there were some pretty big stream issues, so I wasn't able to see most of this set, but it was definitely not what you normally expect to see from MuteAce, with him being honestly a player that I think a lot of people think is maybe top 10, maybe top 20 in the world right now. He did very well at a few tournaments leading up to this in North America, getting second at Genesis nine, and then ninth at the most recent summit, which kind of brought him into the forefront for a lot of people, I think. And yeah, it was definitely surprising to see him not do so well at a lot of these pretty big tournaments that were happening in Japan. That's all I have to say about this one. Moving on, there was Dabuz versus Mossan, a Pi chu player also from Japan. And Dabuz was one of the other players that seemed to be having trouble while he was in Japan. In this first game of his set against Mossan, he opted for Olimar over Rosalina to deal with Mossan's Pichu possibly to avoid getting stuck in some pretty big pichu combos since Rosalina has a pretty big hit box as well as to rack up a lot of easy damage over time with Olimar's pikmin since Pichu is so light and this also makes it harder for Pichu to justify using his moves with self damage since that will just make him rack up percent even faster. And so in the first match Dabuz looked pretty solid for a majority of the match. It was looking like Musan was having a pretty hard time getting in, he definitely wasn't able to use a lot of the thunder jolts that Pichu and Pikachu would normally use to get in on a character like Olimar. Since he could just block all of those projectiles with the Pikmin and while this wouldn't be a huge deal for Pikachu with Pichu, since every thunder jolt is gonna be doing a little bit of damage to Pichu, this makes it really hard to use this tool that is very core to Pichu's main game plan. While Mossan almost stole the game back with a pretty clutch thunderbolt. He sadly missed and SDed in the process giving Dabuz the first game of the set. In the second game It seemed like Mossan was starting to adapt a little bit. He was using less self damaging moves, but Dabuz still looked very, very comfortable in the matchup, taking the game with a very convincing JV3 over Mossan. Now moving on to game three, it definitely seemed like Mossan started to get his footing in this game, taking the first stock of the match and somehow keeping his stock until 190%, which is very surprising for Pichu. You could definitely tell he was landing a lot more of the combos that you need to be landing as pichu in this third game, maybe getting used to the matchup more as the set was progressing. Especially with Olimar being a bit smaller and with him having his whistle, which can be a very good get out of jail free card for Olimar since it has Super Armor and him getting more comfortable, definitely paid off as he won his first game of the set. Because he was maybe getting more comfortable, Dabuz decided to switch to Rosalina for the fourth game, possibly feeling like this could shake up the kind of feeling of the matchup a little bit. And it seemed like he was having a pretty hard time at the beginning of the game. With Mossan now being able to camp out with Pichu's Thunder Jolts much more effectively now that Olimar's pikmin were out of the way. But after the first stock Dabuz definitely started to take control of the game again, not letting Mossan anywhere near him or center stage and taking the final game and the set three to one. Following that, we're gonna talk about a set between a player that maybe isn't on as many people's radars, but I thought this was a pretty interesting set. This was between Jahzo and a Japanese Kazuya player named Kalas. Jahzo was looking pretty good in the first match and not letting Kazuya get away with all of his Kazuya things, you know, zero to deaths electric wind God fists and stuff like that. And he took the game with a pretty decisive two stock. In the second match it did not seem like Jahzo was gonna show any signs of slowing down. He was hitting a lot of the parries that he's known for, if you've seen his clips on Twitter. And he took the final game in the match with another two stock taking this Set 2 - 0. Next this was a set not between a North American player and a Japanese player, but I still thought it was worth talking about because this set in particular was between Miya and Umeki, a Daisy player, and since the main theme of this episode, is gonna be talking about the race for the best player in the world, I thought it would be good to talk about this set with Mia as while he might not be one of the people in talks of being the best player in the world, he's definitely up there and he might be someone to watch out for as this year progresses. And so with him being one of the best players currently in Japan and also one of the best in the world, he was looking very dominant in his first game against Umeki, however, while he was definitely one of the players to look out for at this tournament, he fell into losers pretty early on in winners final of his pool, which seemed to be a theme of Kagaribi like I've been talking about with a lot of the top players of this tournament, being forced to make some pretty huge losers runs to get a good standing in the tournament. In the first game, it was looking like everything was in Miya's favor until Umeki stole away. Miya's lead with a pretty nasty upB off the top, catching Miya maybe getting a little bit greedy, doing an upB pretty high up into the blast zone, which gave Umeki a very, very good opportunity to hit him off the top for a pretty early kill. But Miya still stayed composed even after this and took the first game off of Umeki. Game two was looking very tough for Umeki as Miya didn't give him any leeway after losing that stock off the top to Umeki's upB and Miy Miya took the game with a two stock lead, with Umeki seeming very lost in the matchup. You could definitely tell that Miya didn't wanna let another cheesy stock happen like it did in the first game, he was playing much more safe, and you could definitely tell that it was throwing a bit of a wrench in Umeki's game plan. Game three was looking like a repeat of game two for Umeki's first two stocks, but near the end of the match he started to pick up steam taking two of Miya's stocks and bringing the game to a pretty even state. However, sadly it wasn't quite enough and Mia took the game and the set 3 - 0. I must say though, even though this was a 3 - 0 victory on Miya's part, other than that second game each of these three games were pretty intense and honestly, it could have gone either way for a lot of these games. It was pretty entertaining to watch, this set between Umeki and Miya. Okay, so moving on I'm gonna talk about one more set before I get into the main event of this tournament. And that's gonna be this set between HungryBox and again, Miya. So the reason I wanted to talk about this was since a lot of the other North American players underperformed during their time in Japan a lot of people likely expected the same from Hungry Box with him definitely being better at melee than he normally is at ultimate. However, unlike the other North American Players Hungry Box, actually did pretty well at all of the events he attended in Japan, at least compared to what he was seeded. So starting off with game one, though HungryBox had been doing pretty well so far on his run through Kagaribi, you could definitely see a difference between him and Miya, with Miya very easily, taking this first game with a two stock lead over Hungrybox. Then going into game two, it seemed a bit more, even at first with both players staying pretty even in percent all the way to about a hundred. However, just like in the first game, Miya was able to keep the match under control and took the game with another two stock victory over Hungrybox. Now, one thing that was pretty consistent through all of the games in this set Was Hungrybox was going for a lot of very risky rests on Miya and a lot of the time these were not really paying off. With Game and Watch being a very combo heavy character as well as having some pretty high power killing moves, especially against Jigglypuff, with Jigglypuff being so light. You really have to be careful when you're going for a move like rest because I mean, if you miss that, it's a free combo or kill from game and watch. But in this third game a lot of these rests that kind of weren't working in games one and two kind of started to pay off funnily enough. You could tell that Hungrybox did not wanna be out of this tournament just yet, as he actually ended up hitting a rest for all three of Miya's stocks this game, taking his first win of the set. Now I do say that he was doing a lot of these more risky rests that weren't paying off, but you could definitely tell that rather than taking more risks with a lot of the rests that Hungrybox went for in this set, they were a lot more calculated, it was a lot more of getting confirms into the rests and that was definitely what he kind of needed to be doing in this set compared to what he did in the first two games. And yeah, with Game and Watch, also being a pretty light character, actually hitting those was very big. And you could tell Hungrybox was pretty excited about it, as we got to see one of his trademark Popoffs, even though it was only his first win in this set against Miya. But moving on going into game four, it started off looking like it might be a repeat of game three with Hungry Box, taking yet another one of Miya's stocks with an early rest kill to start the game, however, this time Miya didn't let that faze him as he quickly returned the favor, taking Hungrybox's first stock, followed by the set, winning three one over Hungrybox. Now that's kind of all I want to talk about for the sets not pertaining to the main story of this episode. I think all of those sets were really entertaining, so if you are curious about any of them from what I was just talking about, I definitely recommend watching them. You can find them all on the VG Bootcamp YouTube channel as well as all of the other sets that happened on the stream for Kagaribi. And now I'm gonna get into kind of the main story of this episode. So like I said at the beginning of this episode I really think that the highlight of this tournament was seeing Acola and Spargo make their big runs through the tournament, which brought them to Grand Finals once again, playing against each other, which has seemed to become a bit of a trend lately, with each tournament ending with either Acola or Spargo in Grand Finals, or if they're both at that tournament, usually both of them. That is kind of why I wanted to talk about this because obviously for the first few years of ultimate's lifespan, it's been pretty cut and dry, that MKLeo has been the number one player in the world pretty unanimously. For a very long time he got first at literally every single tournament that he attended lasting through the era before covid, the online era, and for a while after that as well. But this year and kind of near the end of last year, we've seen MKLeo sort of have a bit of a fall from Grace. Obviously he's still doing very well, placing pretty high at all of the tournaments he goes to, but it's definitely been a bit of a change compared to the dominance that we used to see from him. With a ninth place finish at Smash Ultimate Summit six another ninth at Collision right before that fourth at Let's Make Big Moves, and the only really big win for him was Genesis Nine beating out MuteAce for first in grand finals at that tournament. And so, it's been interesting to see this shift that we've seen where before it was MK Leo being the clear first and then everyone else fighting to maybe get close to his level, whereas now, He's sort of fallen to the wayside a little bit in the conversation for who's number one and players like Tweek, Acola and Spargo are the main three that a lot of people have been talking about lately. So obviously for this tournament, the focus was on Acola and Spargo, and so I'm gonna talk about what led to this happening and to start, we're gonna talk about Spargo. So Spargo was a player that, like many other young players in the scene right now, got his start during the online era of smash that was forced upon us in 2020 because of Covid and while he did compete, Before this in some tournaments, he really, really started to pop off during this time, placing very, very well at a lot of the online tournaments happening around this time. And he quickly made a name for himself as one of the best online players, doing very well at tournaments, like the quarantine series, the Box, and many others. And. After this online era sort of ended and we were allowed back in person, it was very interesting to see whether Spargo would continue to keep getting better and better, or if he would just be an online competitor. And , obviously as we see now, he definitely continued to get better as he quickly became the number two player in the world after the quarantine ended only being beat out by MKLeo, but even MKLeo at the time said that it's only a matter of time before Spargo beats him and does become the number one player. And so this trend continued as. Mk Leo and Spargo were the two fighting for number one, but then at the end of last year a shift really started to happen. And while this was kind of a long time coming, he was already doing very well, he started very consistently winning tournaments or placing very, very high With fourth place at the Ludwig Smash Invitational, first at Main Stage 2022, and another first at the Scuffed World Tour, which ended up kind of being the final tournament of the Smash World Tour, which was sadly canceled. And this continued into 2023 with a second at Let's Make Big Moves, third at collision and first at Major Upset and the only tournament that he really had a rough performance at was SMASH Ultimate Summit six, where he placed 13th losing to Void to be knocked out of the bracket. And this was very surprising, I think this was a time for Spargo where it seemed like maybe people had been overestimating him. This was a pretty big loss, but with major upset happening right after this, I think it made people realize oh yeah, this is just a fluke. He really is the best player right now and in my opinion, this was definitely confirmed at Kagaribi this year with him placing first over Acola. Now, before I move on to talking about Acola, I think one other really interesting thing when talking about Spargo that I think is worth mentioning is the fact that when you look at his head to heads against a lot of the other top players, he has a very consistent winning record against almost every top 10 player right now, where, for instance, his record against Sonix is 36 to 16, Maister 32 to 10, Riddles 17 to eight Tweek nine to seven. All of these records are really crazy and the only person that he doesn't have a winning record against that is often in the conversation is MKLeo, which is the person that he was always fighting against to be the number one player. So when you look at that, it's very impressive and it's hard to denote that when you're talking about who the best player might be because can anyone else really say anything to put themselves over him when pretty much everyone has a losing record against him? And I mentioned this because now when we talk about Acola, this is another player that spargo has a very favorable record against, with him having six sets over, Acola's one set in their matchup, and so not to discredit Acola, he very similarly to Spargo, has some very good records against a lot of the top players in Japan, who he plays very often against since he is from Japan. He has a record of nine wins, five losses against Yoshidora, eight wins, one losses against Asimo. Tea he has six wins, one loss. And so he's a player that's very similar to Spargo, where he has all these winning records. And I think that's why he has become this person that people think could be the best player in the world right now. And , the records that he has aren't the only similarity to Spargo. Acola was another player that really got his start playing online and not so much in the quarantine era, playing in huge online tournaments, but he played on the smash ladder in Japan and was consistently, and if I'm not mistaken, still is the number one player on Japan's online leaderboards, and he has held this title for a very long time now. And so I think this kind of made Acola a bit different to Spargo where as soon as Spargo started really popping off, he was immediately recognized as this player to watch out for. Whereas Acola was a lot more hidden until he suddenly started competing in offline brackets, because if you look at his tournaments in his first offline brackets that he ever entered, he straight away got first at both events, which were Maesuma and Kagaribi, which are two very big tournaments in Japan, one of which being a major and one of which being a super major, which is pretty unheard of for any player to immediately have that huge of a success coming into the offline tournament scene. And After this, he did not slow down one bit. He got first at pretty much every tournament he attended in Japan since these tournaments in 2022 last year. And so quickly what seemed like it was out of nowhere, he became this player that a ton of people really thought could be the best and the only thing stopping him at this time from really being considered the best was the fact that he hadn't really traveled outta Japan very much. He had huge records on all of the top Japanese players, but when it came to players in North America, he hadn't really played against them very much. However, this definitely changed near the end of 2022 when he finally traveled to North America to play in the Ludwig Smash Invitational, placing second only losing to MKLeo. And then after that he came again for the Scuffed World Tour placing fourth, and since then he has continued to do very well, placing seventh at Genesis nine, losing only to Spargo and MuteAce and the tournament that I really think was the turning point for Acola was Smash Ultimate Summit Six. At this tournament he placed first. And I think this was the time when a lot more people that maybe weren't so sure that he was number one, started to believe that he could be number one. Because obviously with the Summit tournaments, all of the best players are there. And if you're winning at that, that means you're winning against all of the top talent in the game. And so while spargo placed very poorly at this tournament, Acola got first. Now that we've talked about both of these players stories leading up to this episode, let's start talking about both of their sets at Kagaribi leading up to Grand finals. They both made some pretty huge runs, beating a lot of very significant players on their way to grand finals. And there were a few sets that I think are worth talking about when talking about these two players. So first we'll start off with a set between Spargo and Asimo, who is a Ryu player from Japan, that has been very consistent since he started playing. In game, one Spargo decided to go with Pyra and Mythra over Cloud interestingly enough and I'm not sure why this is. I feel like against Ryu, they both have similar tools and at least for the last little while, it's definitely seemed that Spargo is more confident playing cloud than he is playing Pyra and Mythra, and I don't really know the ins and outs of their matchup charts, so maybe this was for a specific reason, but either way, it definitely did not go very well for him. Starting off the first game, Asimo took off the first two stocks from Spargo very quickly. And while Spargo didn't seem totally lost for these first two stocks, with Mythra requiring so many neutral wins if you're not the optimal combos, It really is hard to make up the percent that Ryu can make with just one or two combos since his attacks do so much damage. And it definitely seemed like that might've been the deciding factor in this matchup letting Asimo take the first game with a two stock lead over Spargo. And I think this might have held some truth because Spargo switched off Pyra and Mythra in game two in favor of cloud. Possibly to give himself some more space between himself and Asimo as in the last match. Even with Pyra and Mythra swords providing spargo with superior range over Ryu's fists and feet. He wasn't really able to keep him from getting up close and personal where he can get those huge combos that were causing him to lose this match. And so obviously cloud has his back air, which is a great spacing tool, and his neutral b, which is a very, very good projectile. And another big thing in this matchup that I think bodes well is, with Ryu needing to come so close to Spargo to get his hits off, cloud has a very good out of shield game and when someone has to come right up to you if they're hitting your shield, this gives you a lot of opportunities to punish them. And Pyra and Mythra's punish game when it comes to out of shield just isn't there nearly enough as it is for cloud. Getting into the second game, while it still started off pretty rocky for Spargo with him having to use his limit after getting hit offstage, it seemed like he was gradually starting to pick up some steam, bringing the percents back to even, and keeping Asimo away with his projectiles and spaced back airs like I was talking about before. However, Asimo was still able to take the first stock off of Spargo even after he lost his own immediately after. Taking this first stock definitely seemed to shift the momentum in Spargo's favor. As Asimo struggled to approach through cloud's, many spacing tools, letting Spargo take Asimo's second stock with a very well-placed up smash to hit Ryu right out of the air. And after Asimo's second stock fell, Spargo definitely did not slow down, taking advantage of lacking vertical recovery to get a very early kill offstage to take the second game. After that rough first game, Spargo was definitely looking more comfortable. He was on his main again, and he was definitely in what seemed like a better matchup for him. So going into game three, this game was pretty similar to game two. Asimo, since he lost the last game, got his counter pick, so he was looking pretty dominant for the first stock. But again, Spargo quickly took back control of the match taking the game in a very intense last stock situation. Game four started off looking like it was gonna be a very straightforward victory on the part of Spargo, but Asimo quickly turned the tides with a very clean punish on cloud's limit cross slash taking spargo's first stock yet again, just as he did in games two and three and this is definitely not something you see very often because it always feels like, at least when I'm playing against cloud, this move has negative end lag and so him punishing that was very impressive. However, this wasn't the only thing that repeated from the prior games, as Spargo quickly fired back, taking Asimo's first stock and subsequently the set in another very intense last stock situation. Next I want to talk about this set between Acola and another player, foreign to Japan, Lima, who is a very, very good Bayonetta player. And so just before I started talking about some of the sets between Acola and some of the Japanese players, I thought this set was interesting because this was an example of. One of these foreign players traveling to Japan, and obviously if you're losing to Acola, you can't feel too bad about that. But it kind of continued this trend of the Japanese players beating out the foreign players when they traveled to Japan. So coming into game one it was very interesting because Lima was looking very good at the start of this match. It was looking like there was nothing Acola could do against Lima's Bayonetta with Lima catching Acola off the side with Bayonetta's guns and countering Steve's minecarts with witch time for a decisive two stock win. However, game two started with an unfortunate SD from Lima, which gave Acola plenty of momentum to return the favor from the first game with a two stock win of his own. However, even without the sd, Acola seemed to be much more comfortable in the matchup during the second game, spacing, his moves right where they needed to be to catch Lima, going for his combo starters and not giving as many opportunities to be caught with witch time. Game three looked much more even between the two players with Lima regaining some of the steam he lost after his SD in the second game, both players went back and forth for the majority of the match with one player hitting a huge combo and the other coming right back with a combo of their own. However, after Acola took the first stock, Lima wasn't really able to take one of his own before giving Acola a sizable lead, which led to Acola taking the game. Game four was looking pretty even at the start, but even with both players being at a similar percent on their first stocks, it definitely seemed like it was impossible for Lima to get past the walls Acola put up on the stage. After taking the first stock with a down tilt at the ledge, it seemed like Acola would be the clear winner of this first game. However, Lima came right back with a very, very impressive Bayonetta combo, taking Acola all the way across the stage and reading his air Dodge for the kill off the side with his F smash. This definitely put the momentum back in Lima's favor with him, negating the lead Acola had gained and then proceeding to gain the lead himself. However, it still wasn't quite enough as Acola stayed composed, built his walls and took the game, ending the set three one. So now I'm gonna move on to another set with Spargo. This one is going to be between Spargo and Miya again. So I figured I would talk about this one because as I was saying before, Miya is another player that's kind of in contention for the top right now. While he may not be quite as close as Spargo and Acola are, he is still making a name for himself and I thought this would be a cool one to talk about. So, game one, saw Spargo opting for Pyra and Mythra over cloud possibly due to game and watch being a very light character, letting Spargo get some very early kills, and that was definitely the case as Spargo started the set by taking Miya's first stock with Pyra's Jab of all things. And he didn't stop there quickly, taking the rest of Miya's stocks like it was nothing. Getting some very early kills with Pyra's huge kill power. Game two started off with Spargo dominating the game, keeping Miya out completely with his huge sword swings and getting a huge kill off the top. Using foresight to escape game and watch's relentless juggle game, and even getting a kill off of it with Mythra's up smash, yet again taking advantage of game and watches light weight. And this is especially something you don't see often. Usually when you're playing Pyra and Mythra, you're switching off of Mythra to Pyra so that you can use her superior kill power to seal off stocks but with game and watch being so light, you almost don't even need to do that. Especially when you're in a position like Spargo was here, where he was able to use the platform to get closer to the blast zone using his smash attack to kill game and watch far earlier than a lot of other characters might die. While Miya was able to eventually take Spargo's first stock, this cost him 90% off his own second stock. However, taking this first stock did seem to light a spark in Miya as he was able to close the gap on Spargo. Taking advantage of Mythra's relatively poor recovery to kill Spargo off the side, making it an even game. Sadly for Miya, however, this still wasn't quite enough to win him the game as Spargo yet again racked up the percent with Mythra's combos and got another early kill this time with Mythra's up air of all things really showing just how light game and watch really is. After these two games, it was tough to imagine Mia making the comeback to secure this set, but suddenly something seemed to click in his gameplay and it honestly seemed like we were watching a different player in this third game as Miya got a very clean three stock on Spargo, not letting him play even for a second landing combo after combo and getting some very, very early kills off stage, taking advantage of Mythra's very poor recovery. I think one thing that really became evident after this game was the fact that in these first two games, it really felt like there was a difference between the level that Spargo was at versus the level Miya was at. It was seeming like Spargo was just playing his game and Miya was just there to be combo food for him. But this game really showed that Mia has what it takes to be the best, it's just that he requires some of the consistency that players like Spargo and Acola have to really bridge that gap. Moving on to game four, it seemed like it could have been anyone's game at this point with both players going back and forth, landing some hefty combos, and eventually both of the stocks. This continued into their second stocks as neither of the players seemed to be able to break away from the other, until Spargo trapped Miya at the ledge reading him like a book over and over again until he finally took Miya's second stock off the side with Pyra's immense kill power. And he didn't stop there, keeping Miya in what seemed like an endless disadvantage state landing hit after hit with his superior reach, and finally taking the set three to one. So now moving on, we're gonna talk about one more set between Acola and Zackray before we move on to Grand Finals. So this set I thought would be cool to talk about because Zackray is a player that's been around for a really long time. And this set to me represents the old versus the new guard in Japan with Zackray being maybe one of the best players previously in Japan, and now Acola, kind of taking up that mantle for himself. Another reason I thought this would be an interesting set to talk about is the fact that, while Zachary used to play Some pretty run of the mill characters such as Joker or Rob, now he's opting for Pit, which is a very odd choice if you only really pay attention to the scene in North America where the meta is a lot more centralized, there's not too much representation for, more of the mid-tier characters, but in Japan, This is a lot more common with the characters you see being a lot more varied and this makes this set very interesting to watch if you're new to watching tournaments in Japan. So let's just get right into it. game one started with a great display from Zackray, keeping Acola at bay with his many multi hit sword attacks as well as his arrows, and he was able to keep this momentum going, taking the first stock of the set off of Acola with an up tilt confirm into an up air. However, Acola wasn't too far behind, only giving Zackray a measly 20% on his second stock before taking one for himself. Acola didn't stop there as he continued playing his game and brought Zackray down to his final stock and then some, bringing Zackray up to 90% before he could finally return the favor, taking Acola's second stock. Zackray took this in stride, bringing the match back to even using his back air to hit Acola through the blocks on stage and his arrows to keep him from mining. But it sadly wasn't enough as Acola took the first game with Steve's up smash. Now, one thing that I think worked really well for Zackray in this match, and I kind of talked about it a bit in this first game, was the fact that Pit has a lot of tools to keep Steve from mining and building up his resources, which is crucial to his game plan. And so even if Pit isn't generally regarded as a top tier character in this game, he definitely has the tools that are needed to play against a character like Steve, and when the best player in your region is a Steve Main, maybe I can see why Zackray has opted for Pit lately. So moving on into game two. This one started off strong for Zackray once again with him building up a sizable lead against Acola hitting some Snipes off stage with his arrows to make it difficult for Acola to recover. And though he missed his up, tilt up air confirm he was able to read Acola's Air Dodge and take his stock with a back air. This didn't stop Acola however, as he took Zackray's stock right back without letting him build too big of a lead, and then with a series of neutral wins, brought the game back to even on both players' second stocks. The game continued on being even for a while with both players slowly racking up percent and taking each other's second stocks in quick succession. However, Zachary didn't let the game stay even for long as he used Acola's blocks against him, bouncing him off the blocks and into the lower blast zone, quickly bringing the game to an end. Now, for anyone that knows Acola this was pretty surprising, as he's usually very good at hitting the techs on his own blocks so that he doesn't die like this. And generally he's placing these blocks in the places he does so that he can do this to other people that he's playing against. So when. Zachary used this against him, it was definitely a bit of a shake up that brought the momentum into his favor at least that's how it seemed going into the last bit of this game. And so moving on to game three, this game started just like the second with both players staying at very even percents and taking each other's first stocks in quick succession. However, this time, even though it seemed like Zackray might have some momentum after that second game, it was Acola that actually took the lead, taking Zackray's stock with a diamond back air, and finally bringing the momentum in his direction, keeping his lead going until he finally took Zackray's last stock for a two stock victory in game three. Now, Zackray didn't let the last game get him down. Going into game four with him building up a big lead and taking Acola's first stock with only 44% on his own. He then continued building that lead, taking yet another stock using Acola's blocks against him again, getting an early kill to bring Acola to his final stock, which. Like I was saying before, having this happen two times in a set is very big and I think was a pretty big reason for Acola losing this fourth game. Even though it seemed like Acola wasn't letting his nerves get the best of him, he still ended up losing out on this game with Zackray taking game four, bringing this to a Game five set. Game five started off with some momentum in Acola's favor. For the first time this set with him gaining a sizable lead and taking Zachary's first stock and then a hundred percent on his second stock before finally falling to Zachary's forward air off the side. This wasn't enough to kill Acola's Momentum, though, as Acola continued to dominate the game and win the set, cementing his spot in grand finals on winner's side of the tournament. And so this brings us to Grand Finals and for Grand Finals, rather than going into detail about the ins and outs of each game of this set, I'm gonna talk about how each player played in general and what that means going forward in regards to who the best player in the world might be right now. Right off the bat, it definitely seemed like Spargo was very comfortable in this matchup, being one of the only players I watched in all the matches from Kagaribi that was able to effectively stop Acola from playing his game, building up resources until he had everything he needed and instead, Spargo's relentless pressure forced Acola into a very aggressive play style that we didn't see too much of before this set in the tournament. It really didn't seem like Acola could take a single moment to catch his breath, with cloud chasing him down with his quick movement speed and using his huge sword and projectiles to keep Acola from doing anything Spargo didn't want him to be doing. In my opinion, this definitely feels like the catalyst that cements Spargo as the best player in the world, at least for now. As with how things are, both players have similarly good matchups against a lot of top players. However, Spargo has a much more favorable matchup against Acola himself with six wins to Acola's one between the two. The only thing I could really see shaking this up moving forward would be if Acola was to possibly change things up with a character that might give Spargo some more trouble than Steve, however, when you're already using the best character in the game, it's hard to say what character could really serve you much better than Steve could. And other than that if he was to maybe take a really big set off of Spargo at some of the tournaments that are coming up, such as Battle of BC which at least at the time that I'm recording this hasn't happened yet, it's definitely hard to argue in Acola's favor with Spargo looking so dominant in this whole tournament and a lot of the recent times that these two players have played against each other. I'm curious what everyone else will be thinking right now about who the best player is and with that, I think this episode comes to a close. Thank you so much for listening if you did. We'll be back next week with another episode talking about Battle of BC and after that episodes will be biweekly moving forward. So yeah, I hope you enjoyed this episode. This has been Lukas, your host of upset factor, and that's pretty much it. Have a good one, and I'll see you next week.