Some parts of this article, however, lead me to believe that not the write fail to research anything about the Melee scene since the 2013 release of The Smash Brothers documentary, a series I highly recommend to anyone interested in getting into the scene, but that they didn’t even bother to watch the actual top 8 event. Let’s dig in.

The biggest question coming into Evo 2018’s Super Smash Bros. Melee competition is whether or not one of the game’s “gods” would win a sixth title in a row. And now, we have our answer: the gods are dead, long live Leffen.

For those not familiar with competitive Melee lore, the “Gods” of the game (Mang0, Armada, Hungrybox, PPMD and Mew2King) were five players that were considered unstoppable. During a stretch that spanned many years every tournament attended by two or more “Gods” was won by one of them. That was until Leffen rocked the boat…

… in 2015.

In reality, “God” is now more of a historic title. It’s a point of contention as to whether Leffen achieved “Godhood” in his own right or if he toppled them when he started winning large, multi-“God” tournaments in 2015. There was a long period of time when Leffen was easily considered one of the six best players of the game. Nowadays things are more hectic, with both Plup and Wizzrobe winning large tournaments over multiple “Gods” so the idea that the “Gods” still exist is a fading one. They’re all certainly still some of the best players in the world, barring PPMD’s current absence from the scene, but the mortals are now up there with them. The idea that the “Gods” died this Sunday is entirely out of touch.

[In top 8] were three of the community’s strongest players: Adam “Armada” Lindgren, Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma, and Joseph “Mango” Marquez.

A quick look at the SSBM rankings shows that both Plup and Leffen are considered better than Mang0 and both have been considered better than every “God” in the past*. Again, we’re putting a lot of weight on the whole “Gods” narrative, aren’t we Kotaku?

William “Leffen” Hjelte and Justin “Plup” McGrath are no strangers to high-level competition, and both have defeated their share of gods in the past, albeit on smaller stages than Evo…

Now, I don’t want to nitpick… that’s a lie. Yes I do.

There have been eight Melee tournaments larger than EVO 2018 (1,353 entrants). One of those, GENESIS 5 (1,359 entrants), was won by Plup. Leffen got third at GENESIS 5 with wins over Mang0 and Armada. I’m not going to go over every other occasion Plup and Leffen have beater a God at a larger tournament but it’s a damn site more than none. Not only had these two players defeated “Gods” on larger stages, one of them had won an entire tournament.

[Armada’s] loss to James “Swedish Delight” Liu during competition pools…

This is a less fun nitpick. Armada lost to Swedish Delight in what EVO called the “Semi-Finals” bracket. This was the third round of the tournament and was a single bracket for the 48 remaining competitors so couldn’t really be considered “pools”.

See, I told you that one was less fun.

It was against Hungrybox that he looked most dominant, utilizing Peach’s tools to counteract Jigglypuff’s deadly spacing abilities.

So, this is the smoking gun. While a lazy writer looking to get an idea of the top eight of the tournament might opt to look at the bracket instead of watching the matches you would be at the mercy of the people that updated that bracket and any mistakes they made would inevitably make their way into your article. Surely a professional writer for one of the leading online gaming news sites wouldn’t do that?

I myself was shocked when I saw the above image. Unable to watch the stream due to being on limited data I opted to watch the bracket slowly update and chat to friends on discord. Upon seeing that Armada had not only chosen to play Peach to fight Hungrybox, something he hasn’t done for literally years due to Peach having a hard time fighting Hungrybox’s main character Jigglypuff, he went on to win the set. Upon bringing this up to my friends on discord they informed that Armada had played and won with Fox, as one would expect due to Fox’s better matchup against Jigglypuff. Anyone who’d seen the match would obviously know this.

Armada chose to run Fox against Leffen’s own Fox, a mirror match that frequently leads to stalemates due to the similarities in tools that each player can use.

My only thought on this sentence is that the writer either doesn’t know what a stalemate is or they just imagined what they thought a Fox ditto would look like and wrote about that instead. The Fox ditto is one of the quickest and most aggressive matchups in the game so the idea of there being a “stalemate” at any point is peculiar. As I previously mentioned, I didn’t actually watch the set and won’t be able to until my internet gets turned on. Maybe they did stand at opposite ends of the stage and laser each other for eight minutes.

Maybe.

How about one more for the nitpick pile?

It all came down to one final game on Final Destination, the flat, featureless stage that has become the most ubiquitous of Melee’s arenas.

Battlefield is Melee’s most ubiquitous stage. I don’t have any hard data but I’m willing to bet money that it was the most played on stage in the EVO top 8. The number of people that ask me to “just play Battlefield” instead of stage striking is sickening.

So there we go. An article written by someone that knows a bit about Melee pretending to know a lot more about Melee and also literally making stuff up while throwing in some fancy terminology like “counteract” and “spacing”. This was clearly written by someone that had seen the documentary and thought that nothing had changed in the past five years.

The annoying thing is that articles on Melee written by people that don’t know about Melee are the most engaging for people that aren’t in the scene. I imagine people that don’t follow competitive Melee (and if you’re still here give yourself a pat on the back) didn’t understand quite a few things I wrote in this article. Someone that didn’t know Melee however would write about what they did know. How loud the audience was, how exciting the matches were, the to and fro of the competition and the sense of community in the air. For many in the scene Melee is a community before it’s a game, and it doesn’t deserve hatchet jobs like this from Kotaku.

*OK, so Plup has never been ranked higher than Hungrybox but if a Kotaku writer can make stuff up then at the very least I can have this footnote, yeah?

Thanks for reading. My name’s Dan Soup, I’m a TO with Team Heir and I used to run a stream called Big Good. You can follow me on Twitter @DanielSoup where I will be live-tweeting from Heir 5 behind-the-scenes in a weeks time.