Yesterday (2024-08-24), I participated in my first ever Splatoon 3 LAN tournament! It was not a significant one, but it sure was very fun! I want to put those great memories in this blog post.
I probably should introduce the tournament a bit. It was a Nintendo official tournament, and happens to be in Hong Kong! I could never join LAN tournaments because they never happen in Hong Kong, so this is great.
Let's start off with how I even know about this tournament. I learnt about this tourney from my dearest Twitch viewer, noob1957. He also found this pickup team for me, consisting of primary and secondary schoolers. (Meanwhile, I'm a university student.)
Only 14 teams are allowed to sign up, and let me tell you, these kids did not prepare for it at all and just panicked the whole sign up process. We still ended signing up as the 13th team luckily, so we got to play this.
The organizer said on their website they will notify us if we are in, but we never received any confirmation email or what not. We only knew we got accepted when they posted the schedule. Speaking of the schedule...
Even though it was a Nintendo official tournament, it was a promotion event. The 14 teams don't even get to battle every other team. It's just 2 teams fighting in a best-of-3, 7 times (because 14 teams).
They had the details of the tourney on their website, but basically, they said it would start at 2pm. Without the confirmation notification, we never knew when was the meetup time, so I went there at 2pm (but my team plays at 4:30pm). It was worth it though, I got to watch other people play.
Because of that, the commentators have to explain some very basic stuff. I'm gonna skip most of those, but highlight some funny stuff.
At one point, there was a Rainmaker match in Brinewater Springs. One team pushed it pretty far into the other team's spawn already, so that team popped the shield, grabbed it and jumped off. The audience were very confused, and the commentators have to explain how this is a very viable strategy.
For the first 3 sets, 5 ranked matches were played, and somehow Clam Blitz was never played. It was until the 4th set, Clam Blitz got picked twice as the 2nd and 3rd match. And the commentators had to explain how Clam Blitz work. They did a good job explaining, to be honest. It's just Clam Blitz is probably too complicated for people to understand.
Welcome to the exciting part.
I should probably explain the format first. This is a best-of-3, so there are at most 3 rounds between 2 teams. The 1st round is always Turf War, and the next 2 will be random ranked modes. We drew both 2nd and 3rd matches to be Splat Zones.
Let's be real for a second. Our team lacked practices, so we just went with some painting weapons for TW. I, being the Brella ethusiast, picked the Vanilla Undercover Brella. It went pretty well. The other team had a sharking Roller, who kept getting destroyed by my Reefslider. It seems like the spectator picked that up pretty well too, as I heard cheers from the crowd whenever my Reefslider blew up someone. The commentators were more focused on my teammates though. We lost this round, with the typical TW mistake of not painting our base.
Second round was AWESOME. We ended with Flouder Heights Splat Zones. Not the best for Brellas, so I picked Tenta Sorella Brella. I was basically constantly launching my shield between the 2 zones of the map, and kept chasing down the Ballpoint on the other team. Saved my teammates multiple times as well.
In the middle of the match, the commentator caught on to my Brella. At that moment I was like, "Yes! Everyone should know about Brellas!" And he DELIVERED. He talked about how I was painting twice with my gun and the shield, and how I can keep myself safe. There's more to this. I'll cover it in the next part. Just note that we CRUSHED the 2nd round.
Third round was Hagglefish Market Zones. I decided to switch to Sorella Brella, just to show all 3 Brellas, but they was probably the mistake. I hit some pretty cool Inkjet shots, but I was down most of the time. At one point we almost made the comeback. We were 1 point away, but we were 3 down and the zone got flipped, and that was basically game over. My teammate did tell me afterwards, that they ran out of ink when we were about to get that ONE point. How unfortunate.
Honestly, losing doesn't really matter to me. But the part that made this tournament felt way more worth it for me, were the friends I made after the match.
Let's talk a bit about the team we fought. Those guys had SPLATOON BUSINESS CARDS. They gave us one. It is very cool. And then they started asking who was Brella player. Of course that was me, so I told them. They were like, "Woah dude you played it so damn well". That was my 1.5-year, 2000 hours Brella experience getting approved. We chatted a bit about how we couldn't find Hong Kong players, and they just straight up invited us to 2 Discord servers.
The best part was I showed them how much I play Brellas with SplatNet 3 stats, and they called their backup teammate over. This guy played more Undercover Brella than me. Like, double my wins. And then he revealed his net name.
I KNEW HIM.
It turns out, he was the player that got matched with me multiple times in a row in X Battle, where we were both playing Brellas. I just randomly sent him a friend request back then. He said he tried finding me in different groups, but to no avail. I said I couldn't even find the groups (it's true). Anyway, now we can actually contact each other.
So we played in the 2nd last set. There were 2 more teams competing after us. We were told that, these two teams... They are Hong Kong No. 1 and No. 2. Not kidding, they were the Hong Kong representatives from last (or this) year's Splatoon 3 World Championship. (They didn't make it in though. The Taiwan team got them.) They disbanded, and rebanded into these 2 teams. So that was a wild last round.
The tournament was a lot of fun! I got WAY more out of it than I could ever imagine. Maybe I'll do another one in the future!