T7R2M5 Quality

Pour One Out For Judge Ken Nard (Arch)

Though this would usually be a time of mourning, you can’t quell the fighting spirits within our combatants for that long, especially given the guy whose life we’re remembering. Brick really knows how to put the ‘fun’ in funeral! Honoring our beloved Brickwell is his fellow Cause for Concern, Amelia Flores, alongside Esmond Root of the Lotus Street Manifold! Joining our combatants are Bonnie “Diamond” Wes, local bartender, and Minali Meteora, local yoga instructor, respectively. Both sides hope to honor Brick’s will, so how do they hold up?

Starting with Ameila and Bonnie, they move to turn this 2v2 into a 3v2, and upon having Cigarette Daydreams grab Brick’s coffin, transform it into a 4v2! What an opening move. From there, the two attempt to divide their opponents, prioritizing their own targets, with Bonnie on Minali and Amelia on Esmond. Amelia makes a point to start attacking his vitals in an effort to bleed him out. This is a smart play, especially when you know your opponent is already spilling his own blood to make attacks. Bonnie, on the other hand, is taking every opportunity to stay within close quarters of her opponents, making sure she’s always in the midst of a brawl. Meanwhile, Cigarette Daydreams is using Brick to provide support, be it on hand removal duty or backup whenever a teammate is in trouble.

Once priorities are in order, Bonnie will try to take on both foes while Amelia takes a backseat to the combat. She’s busy setting up a wrestling ring, after all. I find that this section highlights great teamwork from the duo, allowing Bonnie to take hits and build meter while Amelia rounds them up, making the arena smaller and smaller until the final showdown. Once they have their foes where they want them, they send Brick on one final attack, blowing him up with the Brick Bomb, as well as a tattered Esmond and Minali.

Overall, I’m giving this duo an 8! I find the strategy to be rather to-the-point, but incredibly efficient. They waste no time in confronting their opponents and keeping that pressure up until the explosive finale. Well done!

Onto Esmond and Minali, we start with a simple (yet effective) set up, with Esmond’s focus on converting as much ground as he can into territory and Minali providing support with her Chair Snares to protect the duo from oncoming projectiles and bartenders. The versatility of the Snares in particular are nothing to sneeze at, offering an immediate, though admittedly limited solution to many problems at once, good for trapping and disrupting as good as they defend, giving the crew even more time to set up.

Once the field is ready, the next phase of their plan comes into motion, using the Breaking the Habit/Figure.09 combo to charge up ways to further disrupt their foes. Using Esmond’s sap arms for mobility, while charging up a Habit is a pretty efficient way to play keep away from their opponents, all the while biding your time until the time is right to strike. The Absence Engine is a wonderful use of teamwork, giving this team an edge against their enemy combatants.

Finally, the two divide and conquer, stunning Bonnie before taking out the smaller, more evasive threat. Once Amelia is dealt with, they finish Bonnie off, ending the game. Like the strat above, its not a complex strat. Its direct, even when they’re playing keepaway. And even if I would’ve liked to see a little more attention on dealing with Bonnie’s intense amount of power and durability, especially once the stun goes down after a beatdown, I think this strat is solid, landing it a solid 7! Well done!

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Sweet Dreams, Judge Andrew Lennox (Yuri)

It’s me! Judge Yuri, back at it again. I’m quite fond of this match - it was originally going to be at Paris’s funeral, but we decided that would’ve been in poor taste narratively, so instead we went with the far funnier option of making it a player character’s funeral! Thanks to Pixel for letting us go through with this one, and thanks to the participating teams for playing ball. Both of these were super fun, so let’s get into the deliberations!

Esmond immediately understands his situation - this is not a match where he excels in the early game. Set up character will set up, and all - the chair snares to impede movement and the blood spray to accelerate Esmond’s set up are both solid options, but what I really like about this opening is how efficient it is. The two need a rapid solution to deal with rapid threats. The snares and stuff aren’t a show stopper or anything, but they do the job, and that’s important. While I appreciate the confidence on handling Amelia, I would’ve appreciated some more concrete tactics on how to deal with her. She’s got a powerful Stand weapon, a skill in boxing (with a knife, owchie) and can generally get herself out of harm’s way through teleportation. It’s a risky move for her to get in close, certainly, but not as signed-sealed-delivered as the strat would hope. She’s scary anywhere!

The absence engine is a pretty fun way to exploit the debuffs, while still applying pressure. I would’ve liked some explanation on how the charges applied - while they’re absolutely worth getting on there, getting in close with Bonnie without sufficient planning is extremely risky, and Amelia’s got her own tricks too. I would’ve appreciated a bit more pressure here as well, that said - while it’s a handy way to build up debuffs that can be very useful, it’s also a handy way to give your opponents a lot of time to set up. Perhaps some thrown Esmond projectiles (guy’s got C POW A PRE, he can certainly make that work) or perhaps some more dangerous Minali tactics. A little more to keep the opponents from potentially abusing your tactics would’ve gone the extra mile.

Your finisher is alright, and builds well on what you previously established - like with the previous section I would’ve liked a little more explicit tactics here for how you put out charges and properly RETIRE your opponents. Ultimately, though, not a bad job! Your biggest flaws are pretty small missteps, which is an accomplishment in its own right. You get a **7**!

Onto Amelia. I’m always a bit bearish on “one guy takes one guy and the other takes the other guy” tactics, given it can be pretty hard to actually enforce, but I feel you do a decent enough job of immediately taking the opponents off guard. Giving CD the coffin as a weapon is both an inspired jojolity play (more on that later) and genuinely a pretty solid way to give Amelia some extra sauce in a confrontation, making her far deadlier as an immediate threat to Esmond. As brain dead as using blood loss tactics on the blood guy *seems* at face value, I think it’s pretty clever here. It forces Esmond to be far more careful with how he uses his resources from early on, which could potentially rip the momentum away from LSM for the rest of the match. Well played! Bonnie does as Bonnie does, going all in on Minali in order to force the two apart. I like the emphasis on beating the shit out of Esmond here - the fact that both of them *will* go down on Esmond if Minali retreats makes that initial opening a lot more scary than if it was a simple “turn a 2v2 into 2 1v1s” opening.

Moving onwards, I think Amelia is a lil happy path here - I don’t care how much you can teleport, the other guy will *always* figure out how to catch up. They always figure something out, and in an ideal world the teleporter should always prepare for that inevitability - especially when her Stand also gives the other guy teleportation. Regardless, I think having Bonnie and CD bringing the smack down while Amelia plays keepaway and set up is smart, and it allows Amelia to get in some deceptively debilitating hits - a single gun wound is going to *massively* accelerate the blood loss tactics from the early game, and can put an opponent off their game enough for Bonnie to do some combo bullshit that I imagine probably looks really cool.

The finisher is both BAD ASS (more on that in jojolity) and pretty effective. I think you could’ve done a bit more work on making sure A: you don’t get hit by this, and B: the opponents actually stay where they’re supposed to, but considering how effective it is I think it’s a fine enough finisher to deal some major damage. In general I would’ve liked to see more Bonnie tactics and see more of how you batter down the opponents, but ultimately the strat does a fine enough job of establishing tactics in the early game that you can pretty easily imagine how exactly Bonnie does that pressure later on. Good strat! A fun read, and pretty effective where it counts - you get an **8**!

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Say a Prayer for Father Blue (Coop)

Yippee! First Assists Match. It’s good to see the first go around seeming to work alright for both teams.

	Starting with Esmond and Minali, I don’t really have much to say but that’s because this is a pretty solid strat all around. The early item-play and use of Foreward/Session with Minali is a decent initial defense against the onslaught their opponents may bring. I find the use of Session’s “breathing” to spray Esmond’s blood out to create Territory more efficiently to also be a really creative play here and the Absence Engine is a really smart method for constantly keeping the enemy debuffed in one way or another. If I had any complaints/advice for upcoming matches, it’d be that this strat feels like it loses steam and focus at the end. Very much a “yeah we keep repeating our mid game til we win” approach, which can work but also allows your opponent a wider window to finish you off first if they're more prepared for the end game. Overall a solid strategy though, I give Esmond a **7**.

	Amelia and Bonnie certainly have a flashy and fun strategy that works in tandem with their Jojolity very well. The general gameplan is well thought out and the use of ｢Highroller｣’s one-way portals to effectively “wall off” areas of the stage is an inspired (if flawed) approach to using a teleportation/portal ability. Unlike my fellow judges however, I feel it necessary to dock points from this strategy for Technical Understanding.
	Mainly this comes in the form of how Amelia’s ACT 2 is used. While the utility of this ability is greatly leveraged throughout the strat, the drawbacks to using it seem effectively unmentioned throughout the entire strat. It’s sure to mention the slight dizzy spell whenever the opponent may be dropped into an open portal, but conveniently forgets about it when Amelia is setting up the numerous warp-holes needed to wall off a single segment of the stage.
	There is also the matter of Highroller’s cooldown to teleporting. If it’s going to take 5 seconds between each portal for Amelia to teleport again and create a new one, it’s debatable whether she would even be able to set that up before the fight is over - at the very least it piles a lot of the fighting onto Bonnie despite the main attack plan being to divide and conquer them. Also, there is a note made in the strat that although this large amount of portals will also guarantee Esmond and Minali free teleports, that Amelia’s “3:1” ratio on being to use her own ability will allow her to avoid being surprise-attacked by her Stand’s own weakness. I’m not seeing how the math here checks out though when the vast majority of Amelia’s teleports will be very predictably leading to the central area of the stage instead of being saved in copious amounts to warp herself away faster than the enemy.
	All of this combined with a general underestimation of the crowd control E&M can inflict upon the two of them, I think the highest I can give Amelia and Bonnie is a **6**.