#kf2 lore

Regarding Kirby Fighters 2, this is more or less a filler arc, but during the offseason, XanderT (famous for playing a tourney set on their hotspot in their car) decided to run a cute little tourney for only the kirbies and bandana dee.

You'll have to forgive me because I don't remember most of the tourney. But I don't think anyone will forget the end of the tourney. So the top pick to take home the event was Nuggetz, many other players couldn't use their mains, and others didn't have a character to check Yo-yo, who's still easily a top 3 character.

Nuggetz is notable because Yo-yo was a character chock full of dumb bullshit, most (in)famously being able to escape hitstun on some moves 10 frames earlier than the rest of the cast. Nuggetz didn't take advantage of Yo-yo's bullshit factor nearly as often as other players did in the future. He instead just played a really good neutral and had a pretty good combo game. As expected, he ends up in grand finals.

In losers finals, it's between biM, a Fighter main, and P47, who plays Magolor normally but can't this bracket. P47 actually doesn't have a competitive fighting game background, he's just a modern kirby expert. We saw his Bandana Dee, Artist, and Archer come out this bracket, but biM was able to take the win in losers finals. They also come from a lot of main series experience and we've stayed in touch to this day. Admittedly I used to not like biM very much but I honestly couldn't tell you why. I do really enjoy being friends with them so your guess is as good as mine. But I digress.

So biM rolls up into grand finals, a bit of an underdog but has the support of the people. And this shit gets hype as fuck.

It's important to note that biM is running the Goriath hat, based on the RTDL boss who goes super sayian and has his own kamehamehas and spirit bombs. So them playing up the whole DBZ power up sequence is really hype, even if I've never watched an episode of the show and also don't like DBFZ very much. Even as biM was taking losses, they still played to the crowd and it led to a really hype set to watch.

Oh, they still lost the set 5-2 but who gives a shit? It's the moment that counts and this is one of my favourite moments from the game. I love this community so much.

Regarding Kirby Fighters 2, when the game was relatively new, many YouTubers were trying to cash in on the new "kirby smash bros" hype. During this period I remember Mew2King coming into the KF2 server with interest in running a tournament for the game.

Wow! I couldn't believe this! Mew2King from funny YouTube compilations and competitive Super Smash Bros Melee (I had watched very little melee at that point, except for EmpLemon's There Will Never Be Another Melee Player Like HungryBox) was interested in our super cool Kirby game? Awesome!

At this point the game had garnered a rep as a pretty unserious competitive game, with many fake infinites being discovered and one real one as well. There was also Alpharad's video on the game that made it look...unflattering. It was unflattering for reasons other than just being a 'smash clone' but we didn't know why exactly yet. This was before 20XX, the first real KF2 tournament, for reference.

But Mew2King wanted to take a chance on us! He believed in our game and wanted to take a chance on a new, unique, exciting platform fighter! We were starstruck, plain and simple.

Which is why when M2K suggested MOBA style character bans everyone just kinda went with it????

Keep in mind this was before the first tourney, we didn't know shit about fuck, as fish would say.

They didn't go through with this.

So fast forward a couple months, and KF2's first appearance at Frame Perfect Series is upon us. As you'd expect, the community is really excited! This was one of the biggest brackets the community had ever seen, with a bunch of new faces! Mostly people we'd never see again but it was exciting at the time.

As for the commentator's bench, we were looking at M2K, who knew nothing about the game but was on comms for every game so whatever...and in the KF2 corner...Super Citrus. Who hadn't commentated an even since 20XX. Oh god. M2K was sprouting nonstop nonsense and Citrus just didn't have the game knowledge or confidence to debunk any of it. The VODs were a little painful to watch. Poor guy.

So FPS doesn't make the game look...great. It wasn't help that M2K was ridiculing the players he determined were 'lame' and I mean I don't like Ninja11 or Poyo but come the fuck on man. Commentary basics here. I could do a better job.

But what if I could actually? When FPS 4 was announced, we learned that KF2 would be making a return for it. I was more involved in the community at this point with one tournament under my belt (...which was New Generation) and did 2 major things for this FPS. Firstly, early on, KF2 wasn't looking great in the entrant count side of things. So, I got in touch with some of the folks in tourney committee and we talked about running a tourney where top 8 would get free entry to FPS4.

And this is where we talk about the unsung hero of this story, Thank You motherfucking Domo. When sponsoring Road to FPS, Domo offered to handle the free entry of anyone who we couldn't get people to pay for a gift sub for. In later Road to FPS events, he flat out offered to give any KF2 players free entry because he liked the game...and it makes for better content obviously but still. What a god damn legend. Rest in Power. (he lost his account in a phishing scam)

I realize that came off as kinda sarcastic but I was genuinely upset when his account got hacked. Shit sucks, I don't want to hear about phishing scams from Bool ever again.

OH, speaking of Domo, second major thing I did was apply for commentary! I had more tourneys and more experience under my belt at that point and I felt pretty confident all things considered! So I sent domo a few videos of my comms work, including a video where I have to make Bell look like a well designed interactive character for 30 minutes.

I didn't end up getting picked, but I thought to myself "well as long as it's not Citrus again we should be fine." lol. lmao. This time we did actually have a bit of time to give Cirtus a crash course in the current KF2 environment but it still wasn't great. In fact, it was maybe the worst video game commentary I'd ever seen.

For a long time, P47 had been seemingly untouchable. He was a KF2 expert, his Magolor inspired me to pick up the character fully, he was a lorehead, and a great guy to be around. The clip of him using Ultra Sword to push Nuggetz off a platform into an apple explosion is absolutely as iconic as it deserves to be. This was P47's last big tournament.

Now, remember how I said Mew2King was an asshole to anyone who he deemed lame. M2K was a Marth player in Melee by the way, I don't know if that's considered a lame character but I hope he is. P47 received the full force of this with constant hate from M2K's live chat, not to mention that Citrus also wasn't a Magolor fan. I'm not quite sure how bad it was exactly, but it was bad enough to lead to him quitting the game. Looking back on it, the whole situation is infuriating to me.

That was Citrus' last time commentating FPS, when FPS5 rolled around we had gotten Winters on comms, who was easily the most consistent commentator we had and also the person...you know...keeping the game alive. She was able to debunk a lot of M2K's bullshit and also was able to tell him that P47 quit because of M2K being an asshole last FPS. I don't think I ever told her how much I appreciated that.

Good time to mention that Mew2King also used he/him for EVERYONE. It led to me making this stupid fucking image.

But it gets worse. Of course it always gets worse. In top 8, Ninja11, one of my least favourite top players, was up against SoothingRuby, one of my favourite top players. Ninja11 kinda hates everyone in the community and Ruby hates people who are Like That so as you can expect these 2 get along great. This was reflected in the set between them.

It was a lot of this. Ruby would throw Kunai and Ninja would just crouch them. This matchup isn't even that bad for Magolor, I thinkj Mag wins it, Ninja's just an asshole. He ended up winning the set, of course he did. Great time was had by all, especially the twitch chat and M2K, who both already hated the game. Yikes.

So this brings us to FPS6, the final Frame Perfect event. Messages from M2K implied that Metafy, the main reason the tournament was being run, was on it's way out, but not before M2K was doing sketchy things in his own time.

Turns out Metafy still exists. Not sure what he was talking about with the whole final sale thing. Maybe it's an MLM thing. (Multi Level Marketing) Was I not supposed to think the platform was closing?

So the tourney rolls around on, of all days, the 4th of July. As a Canadian I don't give a shit, but as you can imagine, most people were not available. Zet ended up winning the whole thing. However there is one potentially sketchy set in there.

Somehow, before bracket, Qwertz had performed a coup d'etat and became TO of the bracket despite being on the other side of the globe. The actual TO didn't wake up in time, and all Qwertz used his power to do was changing the timeslot without communicating.

Then, when Zet "applied a taco to his router" (thank you Justin for giving my posts the rawest fucking quotes) Qwertz just said to play it out, though everyone knew this was mostly just because Qwertz didn't like Justin. Why do we let this man near any administrative privileges.

The stream also ended with Winters having to tell chat to have a happy 4th of july. She is a trans lesbian.

And that was the last FPS event. By the time the 3rd KF2 tournament had rolled around, we already knew M2K was doing more harm than good, but no one had the guts to tell him off. I think we were worried that he'd just run the game like a dumbass if we didn't stick around. To be fair, it happened with Kloudchasers.

So what's the moral of the story? Never meet your heroes? No, that's what we learned from Chuggaaconroy. Is Mew2King even my hero? Never meet a competitive Smash player is what we learned here. Though hopefully you all already knew that.

Regarding Kirby Fighters 2, back in the game's prime, we had these little joke teams, parodies of Liquid, TSM, FaZe, stuff like that. The first of these were Kracko Sunday, started by Fish wishing everyone a happy Kracko Sunday...every Sunday. I can't remember if there was some items tournament that was related to Kracko Sunday, but I know Fishie Funnies was after Kracko Sunday was first mentioned.

Regarding Kirby Fighters 2, After 20XX, the scene kinda started to pop off. Obviously some people only stuck around for that first tourney, but there were plenty of regulars. Soon after 20XX came KF2's first weeklies.

We were just getting started and didn't know the game that well, (Springy was a starter and we did stage picks before character picks) but one of the TOs, Wappatron, proposed a very very good idea. Lights Out, a tournament with no main stream where players were encouraged to stream their own runs. Not only did it allow people to build a following from within the KF2 scene, but it also meant that since tourneys wouldn't have a main stream, things wouldn't be held up by waiting from stream. By all accounts, it was a good idea. Except for the part where certain nasty people had their platform promoted but that's more of an unfortunate side effect.

Lights Out ran for about...6 or 7 weeks I believe? Soon after, we needed to refine the ruleset after more and more instances of stalling were discovered, so the other main early TO, Dougsauce, who is unfortunately not with us anymore,* comes in. Douglass Sauce proposes No Escape, a tournament implementing the new anti-stalling rules. Pretty clever name, and one that fish is very much against.

So I go through the tourney committee archives. As many of you may or may not know, the name this tourney landed on was KFTuesdays. I couldn't remember how it landed on that name so I scroll through and find out that it was suggested by my, uhh, favourite person, Qwertz. Names aside, this meant we were getting 2 tourneys a week during KF2's peak activity which is CRAZY.

Also, a little side note, other tournament series run during this era include names like After School Grind, Nebula Night, along with a bit of Bea Hive. They were all more or less the same, aside from some special events like Break the Stage or Qwertz running RoW brackets with really bad stagelists.

Also, while we're here, I HAVE to give a shoutout to Winters. She did such a crazy amount of work for the KF2 scene, whether it be a ton of streaming, constant help TOing, or just being generally really knowledgeable about the game. Competitive KF2 would not have lasted nearly as long without her and I appreciate that so much.

Oh, these series were also where we saw consistent appearances from legends like Pizza Time, Nuggetz, Celica, and P47, my personal favourite top player, along with Winters bringing the entire New England smash scene with her. It was a crazy time to be a KF2 fan and I value it so much. Eventually though, irl events starting coming back and the New England players started going back to those. Winters and Justinian still hang out though which is nice.

Regarding board games, when quarantine started I had an idea I was sitting on for a while. It was a board game, a combination of Unmatched and Smash Up, a miniature skirmish where you would form a team of characters then shuffle their cards together to form a deck. And then, I sat on it for years. I had no way of making it real so I dropped the idea. But I put 'please don't abandon' on the folder name. Just in case.

Fast forward many years and I get a new computer and it's something strong enough to run Tabletop Simulator! So, after about a year of nothing. I throw together the first edition of Smash Tactics! I don't really like Smash Ultimate but I also have no ideas for original characters so this is easier!

So the big things that Smash Tactics had going for it were A) the teambuilding, and B) the way attacks and defense were handled. I wanted to give some big moves intractability so DK couldn't get 40% of your life without you being able to do anything. So, the way I handled defense was making attackers declare attacks face down, then I let the defender play one of their cards to either reduce damage or move one space. These are the 2 pillars of Smash Tactics, and have stayed the same in every version of the game.

Most other things have changed. Obviously the game balance was out of whack, but the real issue is that the endgame SUCKED. You would never have enough cards to do anything, and you would constantly draw dead cards that you couldn't play. Ever since then, I've been discovering and fixing more issues, such as the game's pace, or unhealthy keywords. Status effects got plenty of changes, character design became more interesting.

I feel like I also learned a lot over the 3+ years I've been working on this game. I introduced a lot of things that didn't work, and a lot of things that did. Smash Tactics is a game I'm really happy with and I've printed out a physical copy to bring to my university's board game club. Turns out some other people had the same idea as me but that's a post for another day.