Note: I am not going to write about the venue/location in San Jose, as it hasn’t changed in four years. If you are interested in my takes on that, they can be read here:
Event
Over the weekend I participated and competed in Genesis X3, the 12th (not 13th) installation in the legendary series. Overall, I feel that this was the second best Genesis I have attended, after last year’s installment. While this Genesis was by no means bad (indeed, it was on the whole better than the first two I attended), I must say that it did have some slight issues compared to last year’s that prevent me calling it a “basically perfect” supermajor as I did for that one.
Most prominently, the top 8 staging/production was, in my humble opinion, the worst it has been for Genesis since COVID lockdowns ended. For my first Genesis, top 8 was done in a separate room of the venue, and for my second and third, at the illustrious Civic Center. Having top 8 on the same stage as used for the stream the first two days was…fine, but it lacked the sense of gravitas and ceremony that past years had done such a good job of imbuing the bracket with. Combined with the severe audio issues in the venue (production was completely inaudible at the back of the seating area where I was for top 8), and the top 8 just felt less important than it did in the past. Last year, sitting down in a theater and watching the Melee opening start the show felt genuinely magical, but this year, despite an even crazier top 8 line up, the whole thing felt like just another tournament. It was almost hard as as spectator to remember that this was Genesis, which is a shame, because if any event has earned a little pomp and circumstance, it’s this one.
Secondly, it would be remiss not to mention the stream situation, for both good and bad. As most readers will be aware, Genesis X3 only had one stream. What less tapped in readers may not know is the reason for this, which essentially boils down to money. There was a widely leaked breakdown of internet venue costs for the weekend, and, assuming it was accurate, it is immediately clear why there was only one stream. Venue internet costs (and venue costs in general) have exploded to wildly unsustainable heights, and an event that I’m guessing already runs at a loss cannot shell out untold tens of thousands of extra dollars for a bunch of side streams. To the event’s credit, they did the best job they possibly could in terms of mitigating this: every R2 pools set was recorded, and every top 64 pools set had a designated volunteer/staff member making sure the recording went off without a hitch. Furthermore, they did their best at facilitating community run “IRL” streams (shoutouts to dang3r) where people with a phone, a 5G connection, and an intense passion for the community streamed live sets so that the Melee faithful who couldn’t be there could tune in. Still, even all of that pales in comparison to the high production value side and quad streams that we’ve grown accustomed to, and generates a difficult quandary that brings my “reasons not to envy TOs” count to 1,233,483: Everyone loves having big supermajors in large venues in major cities, but the prices for such places are so extreme that we simply cannot have the same level of amenities there we can in smaller locales. I genuinely don’t know how to solve this problem. Many community leaders have hypothesized that the future lies with regionals rather than big convention center majors, but I cannot help but feel that such a move represents a sad regression (and I say this as the world’s #2 MW regional enjoyer, after Zamu). I do not have a solution for this, and so cannot really fault Genesis for it, but it did feel bad that Genesis had lesser stream footprint than a lot of random regionals.
Lastly, I should bring up the change in bracket in the way pools/bracket was scheduled. I did not care for the change in the way pools were scheduled this tournament, but will concede that a good portion of that could be chalked up to personal taste. For the past couple of years, R1 pools ran straight into R2 pools, and that was no longer the case with this year. Plenty of people had R1 pools Friday, R2 pools Saturday morning/afternoon, and then T64 in the evening. I really don’t like breaking things up that much because it requires competitors to be in “tournament mode” almost the entire weekend, and for my personal competitive style I don’t care for it because it gives me less of an opportunity to get in the zone. Still, I acknowledge this is a smaller complaint others might not share, and was fortunate at least in that my R2 pools at least did directly feed into T64.
In terms of positives, the bracket ran fantastically. In typical Genesis fashion, an army of staff and volunteers collaborated to run pools with a characteristic smoothness and timeliness that most events can only dream of. I also have to give Genesis credit for how long the setups stayed out. People were gaming until after the final top 8 finished, and I am oh so pleased that we were able to do so. To the organizers than enabled that to happen: Thank you. I still unreservedly recommend Genesis to any and all players considering travelling, and consider it the Mecca of the Melee community: If you play the game, make sure you go at least once in your life.
Bracket
As for the bracket itself…where to even begin? Brackets of this scope and magnitude almost require an entirely separate piece to do justice to, not just because of the size but because there are so many highlights. The three most obvious pieces are of course Cody’s unbelievable loser’s run, Zain’s placing (17th! When does the #1 player in the world get 17th???), and RapM’s monster performance. However, everyone is already Discoursing about the first one, I don’t want to beat my GOAT while he’s down for the second one (he should go to locals as community service though, at least in my opinion), and I’m sure Walt will pay his mortgage on the back of the third, so I’d like to instead focus on other bracket happenings. Firstly, I should mention Dial M’s incredible run, beating Gahtzu, Ossify(!), myself, and Daniel en route to an excellent 17th place finish, losing only to mid tier exterminator Salt and the mighty Krudo. The aforementioned Daniel also had a good run to 25th, beating Kevbot and Zasa, and quietly cementing his position as a heavy hitter in the currrent Melee landscape. Long time killer Falco Kacey also had a very solid run, beating Juicebox, S2J, and Khryke to get 17th. That none of those wins particularly surprise me should speak volumes to her perceived skill level by knowers in the community, as my opinion of that trio of foes could scarcely be higher. After his upset by Dial M, Ossify also had what would have been the loser’s run of the event if not for Cody’s history-making, carving his way through Vegas Matt, Aura, Preeminent, Swift, and Spark before finally losing to Joshman while hitting some of the craziest sequences ever put together on stage. Several great players also had their loser’s run prematurely ended in the great Cody Schwab extinction event, and honestly, my heart goes out to them. Not just Zain and Hbox, but Inky, Ginger, and SDJ could all have gone on to do big things otherwise.
Personal
As for my tournament experience at Genesis this year, it was a bit of a mixed bag. It was wonderful to see all the good friends that I did, but at the same time I felt the absences of some familiar faces pretty heavily. I placed to seed, beating some players that I respect a great deal, but at the same time did not feel that I played well and lost to two teenagers playing mid tiers, a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I had a great deal of fun playing doubles, but ultimately did not place well. I am ambivalent, but I suppose that is better than I have been after a good number of my runs. All that being said, my bracket path seemed to be almost handcrafted to be “Dillon’s personal hell”. After my first couple of pools matches, my path was Puff, Falcon (thank goodness), young mid tier player, two extremely powerful contraption wielders, and finally another young mid tier player. And then, had I won that, I would have received a mid tier contraption wielder. I must truly be God’s strongest soldier, for He is certainly handing me his hardest battles.
For round one pools, my first two sets were against spacie players called Veil and ke$ha nightcore. They were very pleasant people and I enjoyed meeting them, but I recall little about the content of the sets themselves and will not write about them here. My final set of R1 pools was against the IL Puff player Rocks, who I had the pleasure of playing on stream. I felt pretty good about the first game; somewhat nervy and stitled, but I was able to find what was working and establish a rythym pretty early on apply my game. Howver, after I got hit with a roll in rest game two I started to really get nervous and fell apart a bit. I knew from early on that he was swinging for the fences (tons of pounds, fsmashes, and rest attempts) and knew what I needed to do to deal with it (mostly spacing down tilt and avoid unneccessary risks), but I got rattled when one finally worked. You can watch the set and see me do a ton of unneccessary platform movement to try and stall and get myself back in the groove (which, amusingly a couple of twitch chatters called sick desepite being probably the lamest thing I did all tournament in terms of intent). It all culminated in me doing a really terrible recovery on my third stock and basically throwing it away due to not thinking clearly. I still ended up winning the game, but it was rough gameplay after that rest and I can’t say I was proud of it.
For my first set of R2 pools, I played the very good Falcon Alberto, who was really the only match of the weekend I got to warmup/prepare for (shoutout PicanteThought). Unfortunately, it was also a strong opponent as my first set of the day which is something I’ve always struggled with, and while I did manage to take it 3-0, there were a lot of nervous drops that didn’t really need to occur. Watching the first game, I counted four nervous mistakes in the first stock alone, and while my gameplan was still generally strong, I could have been so much bettera bout closing out stocks/extending punishes throughout the set. Game two in particular I did not have a lot of right to win, and largely only won because Alberto had two big dropped punishes last stock. Indeed, I think he also had a pretty significant number of drops in this set in general, and I’d love to run it back sometime when we’re both a little more primed. PPMD commented this set with DarkGenex and pointed out that I was relying too much on nair to edgeguard, and recommended that I opt for fair/bair instead, and while I generally agree with him, I’ll clarify for any viewers that I have a pretty fleshed out flowchart for Falcon edgeguards that I just did a really poor job adhering to due to nerves. The super high up Bs (where I cannot meet him at the crest) I generally mean to recombo with soft uair before he lands, and the ones where I can reach him at the top I do the fair/bair (usually bair) that PPMD recommends. I was simply too nervous/unconfident in a lot of spots to go for the soft uair extensions and was trying to freestyle a bandaid solution with nair, to mixed results.
For my next set I played RapM, who was the talk of the town during the weekend even before his colossal win over Zain. Probably the biggest thing that struck me about this set was how familiar it all felt. I’ve played a ton of good Luigis in my day (Eddy Mexico, Mad Tyro, Abate, Misfire, Goshard, and RapM and Jah Ridin in friendlies) and while several people warned me before the set about how Rap would be just COMPLETELY different…that wasn’t my experience at all. He’s not somehow playing a different character, nor is he introducing a ton of novel tech; he’s just really, really good. He was almost exactly what I expected, but I just wasn’t anywhere near precise enough to get the job done. My gameplan worked great; when I did the things I know to be strong vs Luigi, and didn’t mess up, things went very well for me. When I failed to adhere to it, or made mistakes, I was punished extremely hard, as I would expect of a player of RapM’s caliber. I did have one freestyled edgeguard with repeated jabs that I want to explore more for the future, but other than that my main takeaways from the set weren’t the bewildered sense of awe that a lot of people seem to have, but rather “this guy is good and I need to refresh/clean it up vs Luigi”. In a lot of ways, I find what he does more impressive than doing a bunch of new/novel stuff, because while excellence may not make headlines the way novelty does, it’s what I’d choose if I could pick one for myself any day of the week. As a funny little aside, I will also make a ridiculous sounding john here and say that getting glasses actually nerfed me for this set. I got glasses for the first time in my life about a month ago (I hate them), and I’ve had to learn all of the little microspacings in Melee again through a very literally different lens. I hadn’t played against a Luigi since I got them, and it showed in my juggling, where I usually feel extremely strong but couldn’t quite nail down the spacing. I know how absurd that all sounds (“seeing better makes me worse”), and I’d never claim that caused me to lose, but I swear I’m good at the juggle and just need to get some time in vs Luigi while wearing them.
After that I played Zealot in loser’s bracket, someone I think is extremely good and was not happy to see in my path. He was upset 3-0 by fellow Marth player Aerius, but at the time I wasn’t aware how that set went down and merely saw a very tough opponent waiting for me in my T64 qualifier match. The first two games of this set was mostly characterized by me going down in each game thanks to execution slop giving away openings, and then getting carried by punish to make the comeback. Indeed, game one I got one of the most BS Marth combos I’ve ever done (it was something to the tune of dash attack into up tiltx4 into tipper) to put me back in it after going down three stocks to one. Game three was the reverse, with me feeling in the driver’s seat the whole game before getting clutched on by a great sequence from Zealot. Game four I completely fell to pieces and gave into nerves after failing to edgeguard Zealot’s first stock, nearly getting four stocked on FD, freaking out so badly as to lose control of my character and start full hopping and swinging in the wrong direction. Fortunately, I was able to center myself in between games and recover my composure, and then win game 5 in relatively comfortable fashion. It was far from the cleanest play in the world, but I was proud that I was able to regain my footing after such a disastrous game four, and in tournament I think it’s sometimes important to consider mental successes as much as technical ones.
Next I played ember, a Sheik from the Northeast who I’ve played a decent bit on unranked who I knew would also be a tough opponent. I actually thought I was playing Dacky until just before this set (who was seeded to beat her), but was instead surprised when the match was called. I wasn’t shocked at the outcome; like I said, I knew Ember was good, but at the same time it’s always a little rough to get opponent whiplash at the last second. Still, I did a reasonably good job of not letting that bother me. This set was interesting in that I had a pretty solid idea of how I wanted to play it from the get-go, but I don’t like how I’ve come to play against this style of Sheik. Namely, Sheiks that are very conservative and do not mind being cornered because their neutral is more focused on finding CC counterhit opportunities than playing the undershoot/overshoot game. I’ve found that an extremely patient style holding space and down tilting works well (and indeed, when I go to a more dash dance heavy style it typically doesn’t work great for me, as they never really bite and I give up space), but it’s honestly a pretty lame and boring way of playing the game, and I wish I could figure out a better one. I did have a very clutch combo to make a comeback win during game 3 after taking her jump last stock (FINALLY getting some mileage out of the FD counterpick, after feeling that I had completely failed to make use of it all game), so it wasn’t all bad, but I need to spend more time playing Sheiks like her and Zanya (and Holiday…miss your Sheik brother) to figure out a more proactive way to generate offense. I also should acknowledge that, however much Melee is a skill based game in which chance matters relatively little, it is true that sometimes all the cards just come up one way or the other, which is what I feel happened game four of this set. I didn’t do anything particularly good or interesting, but still managed to up by a huge margin because almost every bounce of the metaphorical ball just happened to favor me. I think a lot of people tend to delude themselves into thinking they had mentally broken their opponent or had some kind of stroke of genius when they go up that much, but for the sake of growth (and humility) it’s important to recognize when that is not at all what happened.
Lastly, I played Dial M, the young DK main from Colorado. I am going to refrain from commenting too much on my opponent for this set, as he is a young child, and I don’t really feel comfortable analyzing him/his play publicly as a result. As for the set itself, it was for me overwhelmingly about winning game one by much more than I deserved (he essentially threw an entire stock away at sub-30 percent) and then getting tilted into oblivion by an extremely loud and invested crowd. I think me going into depth about the intensity of my hostility towards the observers or how much I despise melee crowd culture would just be beating a dead horse, and maybe even get me into trouble, so I am only going to say that the set convinced to invest in another pair of active noise cancelling (ANC) headphones after switching to normal ones after my old ANC ones broke.