R2M20 Quality

Judge Grill (Cory)

Oh, cooking matches. My number one enemy.

Luckily, both strats here execute on the objective well, if each focusing on their own aspect of it. Specifically, Neptunia goes for a strategy of production quantity, making as much food as she can and protecting it from sabotage. Food quality is more or less an afterthought, but that's not something I'll ding you for (nor does that preclude you from having fun tricks up your sleeve; the cocaine is probably one of the more fun strat moves i've seen involving drugs). The Lagtrain works really well as a means of serving and sabotage protection, your own sabotage is fun, and there's some neat crowdwork beyond just being cute (Though I mention that in detail in jojolity). Not too much to say here, an 8!

As for Val, I've similar praise. You aim more for the attracting customers angle; a good read, given your lack of an ability to mass-produce like Nep can. There's more of an ordered set of actions and dishes served at specific times to get certain reactions from the crowd; This is more of a Jojolity factor, but I do think that of the two of you, you appeal to the sensibilities of the crowd a bit better than Nep does. I might have sprinkled the sabotage plays throughout the strat rather than putting them all in one section, but that's pretty much the only problem I have with this strat. An 8, good job!

Judge Barbecue (Dice)

Neptunia:

Going through this strategy piece by piece. The turn one sabotage I think might be downplaying the difficulty for this to work. Firstly on the gum, the pocky game I find a bit difficult to imagine working without any sort of prior set up or conditioning, (doing it with other people first, setting up a situation where their refusal is socially worse for them, etc) . Onto the contingency plan, there really isn’t that much stated there either. With the end goal of getting a piece of Love Taste in her mouth, you don’t really set up the distance, try to get her to face you if she turns away, or even set up a situation where she’d open her mouth beyond sticking your tongue out at her. If you do manage to pull this off though, I’m not really seeing a situation where it can’t be removed given its relative size will diminish its effective power and Valentine having a Stand that could remove it. For this to fully work you’d have to be able to lock both her jaw and her lips, and while I can give you some benefit of the doubt with your Body and Blood stat, I’m not sure if Love Tastes can hold a solid/sticky enough shape to do both under these circumstances and the Stand isn’t noted as adhesive in its ability.

Onto the second sabotage, I think you could have planned this out better where you could have globs of Love Tastes already hidden or moving into position since doing it while your gumming distraction is already in motion invites more suspicion from the opponent and overall less time for this sabotage where it could be prepared more in advance. On another note the amount of Love Taste needed to cover the surface area of a grill to shrink/break it is not insignificant. There’s also a lack of description as to how you are breaking the grill besides generally shrinking them, say targeting the ignition to make it difficult to start, knocking them over, shrinking a leg off to off balance it, any one of these could have worked to delay Valentine or break the grill outright, but here it treats the breaking of the grill as a much more binary state than it may actually be. Overall it’s difficult to say if you can get away with either of these, not without some effort or cost at least. There were other ways you could try to set up distraction sabotages and better solidify your chances of getting away with your goal, but that’s not really worth going over further beyond, you could plan better here.

Onto the actual grilling, here you set up a mobile food stand of sorts with a good number of food options. Not as much specifics as to the grilling as I’d like, especially with regard to Lagtrain’s grilling set up. The image helps but I don’t imagine the grill will be held at an angle and the tentacle set up could be better explained. I could see a number of ways it can be done between using the tentacles as dispensers for food to grill or shifting the mass around to get food to drop onto the grill and then onto plates.

For the serving portion, I’m a bit skeptical of the mobile approach. While you do have a working grill set up. Moving prepared food around is another matter where I think the assumption here is that you’d be handing out the food on plates fresh from the grill at all times. While this can work, consider that you don’t have a set table for people to pick and choose from like you would normally. This drastically decreases your effective menu at any given time where you don’t have as much room to prepare dishes in bulk. What you are doing here is similar to catering staff that walk up to people with plates of small party foods, but with full plates of grilled food instead. That said you do have the unique benefit of being able to take and deal orders, which I think you could have potentially played more into. Specifically, advertising what you are doing to the crowd can help a lot, making sure they know you’ll fulfill requests as well as what food you have ready at any given moment to find any takers. Especially with your unique set up you have going, it's important that people get what you have to offer.

The Fangs are interesting, and can work as stated, but also could stand to use a bit more detail as you don’t really state how many you’d have, how spread out they would be, or elaborate on their methods in different cases. In terms of counterplay overall with Lagtrain, I don’t have too much to say here where the set up is probably the safest approach you could do in general. You might be underestimating Blanks somewhat though because they can be shaped as any small object.

Onto the finisher/dessert menu, I don’t have too much to say here. It is a neat specialized set of dishes and a decent spectacle, but lacks oomph. That said this isn’t really the type of match where a finisher is needed per say, with hungry people milling about all you really need to do is catch their interest and hunger.

I’m going to give this an **8/10**, could use work in a few places and more planning and consideration to your set ups.  For a strategy as short as this though it covers your bases. Overall you have a decently competent strategy that plans around the opponent and uses the technical capabilities of your Stand well enough. I think the narrative aspect and how it plays Neptunia fit well with and around the strategy but that’s left more for jojolity here.

Valentine:

A very fast paced strategy here, the formatting, perspective, and way things are broken up here help sell the impression of speed in the narrative pacing. The use of dialogue in place of longer explained actions also helps shorten paragraphs and get straight to the point of things. Keeping people high energy and attracting them with music seem very in-character and a pretty good approach.

The menu you have is short but very workable, giving you a lean set up where your Stand can easily monitor and work like a smoothly running machine. The detail in the menu is also very nice showing how much research was put into this. The contingency food substitutions as well show how well researched and considered this is. There may have been some lost opportunities here in utilizing the Stand’s ability as more than Stand bodies, but this works well enough.

The sabotages against Neptunia are interesting, the breadcrumbs to summon seagulls is something particularly out of Yakuza: Like A Dragon. While the idea is very funny, the likelihood of spawning seagulls are few and far between. The rat trick could work but I’m also not sure how well it’d work. The dead seagulls though might make a decent nuisance that works once or twice.

I’m going to give this an **8/10**, a lot of this score is due to the appeal to narrative, but it does what it wants to really well. The usage of the Stand the few times it was actively used was well described, allocating your units as well as doing your trick with the bullet and bread crumbs. The biggest thing I will commend you on was being able to create a strategy that flowed very smoothly from topic to topic, it could be a bit disjointed at times, but overall the short paragraphs and use of sound effects and formatting to break up blocks of text made a strategy of almost 20k words into something quick to read.

Judge Smoke (Flamechar)

Starting with Neptunia, I will immediately point out the Pocky Game being an interesting piece of ‘Counterplay’ against Valentine’s charisma, and that the respective Contingency is a decent attempt to ensure said counterplay is enacted. The whole thing also being used as a distraction either way to further the objective in her favor is something I’ve also noted.
Onto AP’s gameplan for cooking, I really enjoy the Lagtrain (having already liked its namesake) and I think that it is a really cool Technical Use of your stand to reach the objective, and in this kind of match figuring a way to move your base of operations can be quite strong. The Fangs are also a fun little tech to attract attention and to Counter any towards Val. The finale of the Desert Party is a fun little piece as well, topping off a very Creative strategy with a focus on Counterplay and a bit of Elegance. **8**!

Moving onto Valentine, also overall a really solid strategy! You’ve done good with your Logistics and Technical Understanding through planning out your cooking strategy (the Choukouya being cooked to serve at the end is a nice touch), and I feel that a lot of your entertainment plays to get people to eat at your place is very good (the can chugging, the 2 hour soundtrack, though a lot of these are more Jojolity)!

However, I do feel you have a couple little bits that hold this back from an 8 and keep it at a **7**. Firstly, I do believe you might be overestimating how much 1 second of visual effects can give, seen a little in the firework at the start (though you weren’t clear on whether or not the words were spoken or shown) but mainly seen in your Rat sabotage. While I believe this could work to an extent, I do not believe that everyone would be able to turn to look at it within one second - and that is ignoring the fact that the voiceline being made probably takes a second as well.

While on this own this probably wouldn’t be enough to give you a 7, there’s then the seagull sabotage techs. Getting them to fly onto Neptunia’s side to eat the breadcrumbs and become a nuisance is an iffy tech in terms of if it works or not, and shooting them down onto her while more reasonable in terms of execution is still unlikely to be that useful. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I have found your sabotage techs easily the weakest part of your strategy, and while these not working wouldn’t impact your strat overall, it still does hamper an overall great strategy.