At the tail end of the 2010s, an unlikely source of new opportunities for traditional fighting games was opening: Beyond the Summit was expanding their Summit series to them. For their first foray into traditional fighting games, they ran the Summit of Power at the height of the first year of DFBZ; they would follow this up the next year by doing the same for MK11 with Summit of Time. To christen in the New 20s, there were plenty of indicators that they would move towards showcasing a game with a richer history that includes positive momentum into the present day, whatever that may be.
Included within the insanity that was UNIST's 2019 was Climax of Night shifting from the UNI-inspired aesthetic the debut event had to the Adult Swim homage it would bear for the rest of its lifespan, ad bumps included. Early on in this promotion cycle one bump in particular included a throwaway gag about a potential Under Night summit aptly titled "Summit of Night". The throwaway gag itself lampshaded the fact that it was a pipe dream by adding special highlighting to it.[1] When Rick was taking time out of his increasingly busy (but not as loaded as today) travel schedule to do an AMA, him and Shinobi conversed in the thread about outlets for French Bread Fervor to grow, potential UNI summit included. Rick said he would look into getting it done and the excitement for just the fact that it was a possibility was palpable.
While multiple things go into constructing a Summit roster, the lineups as a whole capture the zeitgeist of the game being showcased at that point in history. For the tail end of UNIST's run looking forward into the transition to UNICLR, the zeitgeist was the North American UNI scene's battle for widespread recognition. This battle was the vector for the games growth in this time period: the momumtum gained within the first year and change built up to the first Climax of Night, a critically acclaimed power play that still elicits fond memories to this day. From there, the sky was the limit. With this in mind, any UNI summit would either solely highlight NA players or be evenly split between NA and the rest of the world to faciliate that exact team battle during the duration of the summit.
As for constructing our 16-player rosters for this exercise, there are some ground rules/points to keep in mind. Given the timeframe we're working with, we can't predict with complete certainty what ascents and departures will occur in a non-interrupted start to UNICLR, though at the end of UNIST there were definitely people priming themselves to be Next Season's Main Characters along with people looking for a swansong. Additionally, we are working to ensure that there is an abundance of diverse character/player matchups and crowdpleasers both within NA and across regions.
With all that out of the way, let's dive right in to both lineups...
A-NA-Zin'
So here's the deal: we're basking in the afterglow of Anime Ascension 2020, which occurred at the exact right time to be the sendoff of the UNIST era. What figures do we remember as trailblazers for the game in this era, surveying and building the tracks our scene will be riding into the future on? Who has already been identified as a potential captain of this train? From this deepening pool of players, what heavyweight battles have yet to come? Here's what I came up with, ordered by how much of a lock it is that they'll get namedropped during retrospectives of this era:[2]
Redblade
Squish
Infinity
Trill
Rikir
JJ
Brkrdave
Foxof
Rennala
Magnets
Masoma
Clim
Psykotik
SchoolBus
Spinach
$TANG
A lot to unpack here, isn't there? First off, this roughly matches up with who collected hardware during this era. Redblade and Squish were the most well represented players on the UNI maincord's server icon, and in a hypothetical draw, would be the only two pre-seeded players. Infinity, Rikir, Brkrdave, and Clim also put their names up there whenever they could. Additionally, it'd be remiss to avoid talking about the character spread: if we're going by who these players were associated with at the end of UNIST, the only duplicates (Phonon, Merkava, Wagner, and Carmine) are facilitated by dual threat players JJ, Clim, and SchoolBus. I also tried to get a good spread of geographic regions within NA represented even if a perfect distribution in this regard is impossible.
From the perspective of the moment in history we're looking at, Masoma is the most obvious candidate for the title of Next Season's Main Character. I also brought in $TANG as a deeper cut from this list. Other rising stars who were apparent at this time but omitted due to percieved redundancies with established forces already accounted for include Gosuda, Knotts, and Isaac.[3]
While we're talking about omissions, three players that I ultimately didn't consider with a field this tight included the original three members of Serial Dice Rollers (iThatGuy-_-, Silent, and nyczbrandon). Ultimately, I viewed the crew (sans extra member Rikir) as a package deal in this moment.[4]
World's A Stage
Now we tackle the question as to if this summit was global in scope. Let's take Redblade, Squish, Infinity, Trill, Rikir, JJ, Brkrdave, and Foxof from the top of the previous list and group them together as "Team NA". Who are we putting up from the rest of the world to fill out this lineup? Here's who I would go with:
Clearlamp
Kure
Hishigata
Hiari
Wauhti
Senaru
Ohittou
Watanabe Shachou
The primary goal here was to ensure that multiple representatives from Europe, east Japan, and west Japan all got in. I grouped the players by region and listed the regions in the order I would like to explain them further below.
Clearlamp was a defining force of this era. If UNI history were a battle shonen, the period of time stretching from the moment Clearlamp registered for CEOtaku 2018 to the moment he landed back in Japan after winning Evo 2019 would be a story arc named after him. Kure had become something of a career long running mate for him, the pairing forming the core of some superteams including winning Over The World back to back. This begs the question: which of those championship team's anchors, Hishigata or Eve, do we go with? I decided on Hishigata for admittedly sentimental reasons: it was Hishigata up there on stage celebrating Clearlamp's Evo 2019 win along with Kure, not Eve.[5]
On a pound-for-pound basis, Hiari loomed as large as anyone in the UNI scene. This reputation of being a boss fight was built on a dominating run in the EU scene, even setting up Kopingfest as a bugzapper for intercontinental talent to come to his home court. Wauhti has been there as a constantly forward moving target as well for most of this time.
Senaru inadvertently created a pretty important structural beam in the offline UNI experience: his run at the first Climax of Night inspired the creation of the Reload chant, which became a community staple and a throughline connecting those who were there in 2018 to the present and beyond. Ohittou is emblematic of the scene that built around him: putting on a show by gambling and somehow being right. For the last one in the field, I was torn between giving the nod to Shachou or Notes. Both of them have quite impressive cases, so much so that it is the closest thing to a coin-flip decision between two players I see happening in this series for a while. That's what I did, and Shachou got the nod.
At first glance, the character spread is similar enough to the NA-only field that one might accuse me of coming up with this list first and and doing some 1:1 replacements for that one (I didn't). A full list of duplicate characters would be hard to ascertain because I feel like the odds of pocket character bustouts depends on the vibe of the event.[6] A group stage draw with this field would aim to set up NA vs World in each group and as such I don't see there being any pre-seeded players as a result.
For posterity, let's draft commentators Brett, Fox, Suika, Tari, Cookie, and Juushichi.
The Vorpal Road
UNIST's meteoric rise towards being the 1v1 anime fighter to play in 2019 (bleeding into 2020) was an unprecedented[7] breaching of the fighting game glass ceiling that many have rose-colored glasses for to this day.[8] It would not be hyperbolic to state that it was one of the best runs a single fighting game has ever had. Everyone namedropped in this post has played a part in what the UNI scene was, is, and would become.
"2019 2" was a rallying cry of optimism for the franchise's escape from delay hell and the revival (and eventual metamorphosis) of Climax of Night potentially causing UNI2 to reclaim the place in the FGC zeitgeist that UNIST once had. When I think of the reasons why the UNI2 scene of right here, right now is so great, the picture painted does not look like the one from 2019. I see the player talent pool and the event calendar being deeper than ever. I look at UNI's all-time entrants leaderboard (at the time of this writing) and see 8 of the top 10 be for UNI2. I am proud to see that in wake of the North American scene winning their battle for recognition that the South American scene pick up the sword and successfully wage that fight too.[9]
After all of this year's hardware gets handed out, I'll revist the topic of a UNI Summit with the faces defining the game going into 2027 along with giving flowers to those who made their mark on UNI history entirely during the timeskip.