Grit Blue Moon's Degenerate "True Grit Triumphs" Experience

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - A bad online event tourney... trivialised by a broken CO.

Last weekend had a dreadful Super Smash Bros. Ultimate online event tourney: True Grit Triumphs. There isn't really a theme to it: It's just two-stock free-for-all Stamina (150 HP) matches that last 3 minutes. No items, no Final Smash Meter, and no hazards on in the stages. No character restrictions. The only unique thing there is the presence of Stamina, which is otherwise ignored by people outside of a select few Classic Mode routes and some Spirit Battles. So why is that so bad?

In practice, Stamina just doesn't work with two stocks and only three minutes. The rules heavily encourage camping and avoiding direct combat until time runs out. Sudden Death is enacted based on stock count, not hit points remaining—so a player with 1 HP and 1 stock and a player with 150 HP and 1 stock when the three minutes are up will be considered tied, and they will both go to Sudden Death. When Sudden Death starts, all players will only have 1 HP... so any attack will KO them. That's different than normal %-based KOing that you would deal with in non-Stamina Sudden Death... as the video below should make abundantly clear:

In the above, Grit (represented as Fox McCloud) avoided direct combat and mostly stayed away from others and shot very long-range lasers. Grit has way more range than any of the other combatants, and can wipe out enemies’ stamina before they ever reach him. Once it became Sudden Death, one hit from the Blaster gun is enough to end the fight and do that 1 HP of damage, and there's pretty much nothing Ganondorf (...Von Bolt?) could do about it. The Blaster comes out very fast and goes very far... and he can keep shooting an endless stream of the lasers. (Von Bolt could've tried jumping to the higher platform instead of rolling, though.)

It's a true Grit triumph, done exactly how Grit would've approached it. (In a non-approaching way.)

While it's very in-character of Grit to fight that way... it's still very degenerate for everyone else. Grit is commonly seen as a top-tier commanding officer in the Advance Wars series (well, mostly Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising) because of the increased range and attack power of his indirect combat Artillery units. People hate fighting him. He's THE camping character in Advance Wars, after all. He will have rows of infantry to protect his Artillery and Rockets (and Missiles, if necessary) and then slowly advance...obliterating everything in the way to his opponent's headquarters. Very effective if there are chokepoints (limiting avenues to approach), like how Fox's lasers are harder to avoid if there is only one path to approach (no platforms). He can keep the path locked down. Advance Wars combat also runs on a Stamina mode with unit health, so it's pretty accurate to compare.

At least in Sudden Death for non-Stamina, you have to walk up to someone and hit them with a move that deals knockback. There are still many projectiles that will do that, but at least they tend to be more difficult to use than Blaster. At least this bad event tourney is over now.

By the way, for people who didn't get the meta of the event tourney and they actually lost both of their stocks before the three minutes were up, it was very common for them to just ragequit and disconnect, which causes the game to suddenly pause for SEVERAL seconds as it processes that this person has turned off their Nintendo Switch. This totally cuts into the mental momentum concentration that the remaining players have. That same problem would go for any stock-based free-for-all match. A lot of players are impatient and inconsiderate twits who don't care how the game ends. Stock is still the superior mode for singles and team matches... just not for online free-for-alls.


Ludwig didn't come up with the Fox strategy. Instead, he encountered someone else who was doing it first. Then Ludwig copied the strategy for the content (and easily won with it)... and then he decided to make it an Advance Wars thing because it's named after Grit. Maybe you'll want to comment on if you played the tour for yourself. Did you think it was fun? At all?


Want more Advance Wars Blue Moon content? Check out this analysis featuring Colin Blue Moon!
The event tour that got a KoopaTV article before this one was more thematic in nature, about characters from the 2010s.