Archerous' R1M25 Delib

Quality

An epic battle is sure to begin. Nothing beats a classic monster v. mech fight, even if the “monster” is a 15 year old, average-sized, crab kid. Grace Papāka vs. Judith Chen, with special guest James on her side! The storm is starting to pick up, which means it's time to act. So how do our combatants do?

Starting with Grace, we begin with the first of many crab facts, alongside a new way to achieve a “Super Leap”. This allows Grace to reach new heights, something especially necessary when going up against a large mech on a mountain. They also take the opening to introduce their “Spring Growths”, a ‘flower’ they can use to hinder the balance and aim of Chichi Wo Motomete. Combine the previous techs with the tactical use of “Crabman”, you’ve got yourself a good bit of mobility to work with, while working to hinder your opponents’, evening out the playing field as much as you can. This is incredibly useful when fighting an opponent far bigger than yourself.

But that’s not all. Grace also offers up defensive solutions, in the form of the Shell Cape for grabs, and the Decoy Crabman for counterattacks. One other method of note is the Crab Macros, allowing them to divvy up the thinking throughout his body, letting him react faster. I found this to be an incredibly clever use of Breathe, leveling the playing field even more between the giant and the crab.

Finally, Grace continues their destabilization tactics and expands them to the mech’s vital points in the joints and the cockpit. They know they can’t easily beat the armor of Chichi Wo Motomete, so they opt to make it inoperable. A wise decision. I also appreciate the varied methods of making noise to wake the babe up, from the noisemakers, to exploiting the stimuli from the mech’s weapons, something that will be harder to minimize as Grace destabilizes it further.

Overall, I’m going to give this strategy an 8 out of 10. I think Grace took incredible care in analyzing what would be necessary to fight their opponent, and executed on that analysis wonderfully. I found that their use of tech was plenty varied, but not scattered. Each was used for a very specific purpose, all working together to bring the mech down. Well done!

Onto Judith, she begins with an immediate assault on any constructs Grace could’ve made already, using missiles to take out constructs starting to form and Unibeams to take out the constructs proper. From there, Judith uses Chichi Wo Motomete’s Beam Sword to cut through the ice of the mountain, hoping to use the ice to trap Grace and take them out of the fight without too much injury to the kid. For swarms, Judith uses clumps of ice and rock to take out the clusters of constructs. It doubles as a quieter attack as well, to keep James asleep.

This was a fairly brief strategy, which is fine on its own. It hits the points it wants to hit, and gets to the point relatively well. There’s a problem, however. Though there are a few contingencies, the strat almost assumes that things will simply go Judith’s way. There isn’t much counterplay offered against the opponent beyond “CWM destroys the construct”. For that, I’m going to give this strategy a 3 out of 10.

Jojolity

As for Jojolities, I don’t have much to say, so I’ll be brief. For Grace, I think they did an excellent job inventing new ways to deal with their opponent. I touched on it briefly in the quality, but I appreciate when a set of techs work together to achieve a common goal. I believe Grace does this exceptionally well. Thus, I’m giving them an 8 out of 10.

As for Judith, there are efforts to protect not only the child, but Grace as well throughout the strat, using the glaciers to trap the kid rather than take them out. However, this could’ve been expanded upon much more, as Judith mostly focuses on attacking the opponents until they are down. Thus, I’m giving her a 3 out of 10.