The following is an interview with Joe Muszynski, winner of
the Smash Ultimate tournament at this year’s Anime Milwaukee.
Joe Muszynski
Where are you from,
and how did you get into competitive Smash?
I'm actually local-from the Milwaukee area. I got into
competitive smash back in 2022, though there wasn't a scene in Milwaukee at the
time. due to COVID ruining things, so I started competing online.
How did you eventually start competing locally?
At that time, I was working at a restaurant that had a game
room attached to it and I brought the idea of local tournaments up to my boss.
He said he knew some people and every month on Sundays, Magik4FGC would hold
multiple tournaments that lit a spark in me, as well as others in the Milwaukee
Smash community.
"Hero" from
Dragon Quest seems to be your favorite character to play as. What do you like
about him?
Hero is probably my all-time favorite character in Smash. I
love the design behind him because he's designed to simply be fun and silly and
I think that matches with me extremely well. It also doesn't hurt that one of
my favorite JRPGs of all time is Dragon Quest 11, and the character of him is replicated perfectly into Smash. On top of that, there's the dopamine rush
of randomly killing someone at 0% with thwack or catching someone off guard
with a snooze or a shield break. He has so much depth to him that it doesn't
really feel like anything else in the game-he's definitely a unique character
(the only character I think comes close is Shulk because of his Monado Arts). I
also love being able to change my stats on the fly.
Other than the
finals, is there a match that stood out in the tournament?
One of the other matches I had a lot of fun with was
Winners’ finals, when I fought against a Pyra/Mythra. I know a lot of people dislike fighting
them due to how versatile they are, but I find them a blast to fight, and I feel
like I have a great understanding of how to approach them. The person I was
fighting was very skilled, and if I remember correctly that match was
relatively even, but I caught them off guard with a snooze, which was the ender
of that match.
In the finals, you
were facing a player that used the character "Joker" from Persona 5.
What's that matchup like?
Fighting Joker can be tricky, because the Joker player can
either be extremely aggressive or play super passively until they get Arsene.
As such, playing against Joker revolves around trying to match their pace.
Since a lot of Hero's moves are slow, you have to make the Joker whiff and
punish them when possible. Additionally, with Hero's down-b menu you have to
constantly mix up what you're doing with it, because if I'm always throwing out
projectiles he's gonna jump over it and punish me that way.
What else did you do
at Anime Milwaukee this year?
My girlfriend and I played a lot of the arcade games at AMKE I even hung out a friend and we played some Call of Duty: Zombies and tried out a bunch of games on the GameCube. Besides that, I got to see my girlfriend do her first ever cosplay photoshoot where she dressed up as Chompette. We watched a bit of the cosplay awards which was pretty awesome to see-it honestly made me wish that I had cosplayed this year. Otherwise, we mainly just hung out with friends it was a really good time.
A press pass was provided for this event.
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