In my post-Climax writeup I took some time to argue that due to MBAACC, the UNI series, and their respective playerbases being purely passion projects, there is something extraordinary about discovering the games, giving them a spin, and sticking with them for the long haul. In turn, the stories about how these games have impacted people's lives are bigger and better than anything modern esports-centric fighting games can muster.
While readers may be thinking I am projecting my own personal experiences onto these communities as a whole, I have found origin stories specifically related to these games much more compelling than taking genre-wide/career-long look at how fighting game players' tastes have evolved. Consistent with everything I have said above, it is in my best interest to share how I discovered and committed to UNI and MBAACC with you all.
Cycles
While I didn't always consider myself strictly an "anime"[1] player, I was pretty hellbent on finding alternatives to the Capcom-centrism of the early 2010s. Arc System Works-published games just happened to be the most reliable vehicle in town for me, and I always tuned in to "anime FGC" streams across the world when I had time to watch livestreams as a teenager. One night, sometime after its western home release, UNIEL was the game highlighted on one of these streams. Captured by the gorgeous spritework and commitment to the urban fantasy setting, I saw that I had enough PSN money to purchase the game, and started messing around in training mode.
It should be noted I was diving in practically blind. I had no indication of the existing community's sentiments regarding the game's balance or its struggle for widespread recognition; in-game, I did not have much of an idea about how to actively factor the GRD cycle into my gameplay or even that you could reverse beat. I ended up settling on Gordeau, identifying that A Assim and B Reaper were eminemtly spammable from first principles, and started facerolling on ranked with him.
Around the time I was "most active" in this stage, I went on the SRK front page one day to see news of UNIST's initial announcement. The "Arcsys Cycle" was not new to me in the slightest, and my remedy for it had always been "just keep playing, the new installment will be available to you when it does". Throughout my last three semesters of high school, I was away from fighting games as a whole for one reason or another, and with that I was out of the loop regarding news of UNIST (or any other anime title update for that matter).
Fast forward to the end of orientation week at RIT, and I am itching to meet people outside of the predetermined orientation week groups and events I was required to attend. I circled the annual video/tabletop gaming event at night in the field house as a perfect avenue for doing so. Upon entering the fieldhouse for this event, I was excited to see that not only were there a handful of anime-centric fighting gamers, they all brought setups and showed off their imported copies of UNIST. Fortunately, there was a spare arcade stick I was allowed to borrow, and I spent much of the night in awe of how much fun offline UNI was. The Qanba Obsidian I had on order eventually arrived, I sterted to show up everywhere on-campus offline fighting games were being played, got a hang of the mechanics that make UNI unique, and decided a gameplan of harassing people in-game with Merkava was the vehicle towards my success.
On a macro scale, my freshman year of college coincided with the genesis of the UNI boom; bookended by CEOtaku 2017 and Combo Breaker 2018, the first two events in UNI history to break the 150 entrant barrier, which was monumental at the time. That these milestones seem quaint nowadays is a testament to years of sustained momentum.[2]
Ferocity
As 2017 turned into 2018, DBFZ launched with a clear lane to being the fighting game monoculture, at least for a little while. Most locals with various fighting game backgrounds had some level of interest in the game itself and how the top level competitive scene would play out in the game's first year.
Most players who ended up major finalists in DBFZ were names I had some level of familiarity with at the time. At the absolute top of the totem pole was a name I and many other rank-and-file fighting gamers had not heard much of at all: GO1. There was obviously no way he was truly new to the genre, so I set out to figure out what environment(s) allowed for him to develop his unprecedented mental game. Upon seeing that his primary legacy before this point was in the Melty Blood series, I was compelled to take a closer look at it.
I found a[3] CCCaster link and started looking at character pages on the Mizuumi wiki to see which characters had the most tools that I would enjoy in this moment, trying them all in training mode. My parents didn't have excess ethernet cables at this time, and I wanted to keep the one plugged into the PS4 there because the games I was already hard committed to were on there, so in this early state of involvement with MBAACC my main was defined by who I played when I got the chance to mess around offline, which was H-Kouma.
This all begged the question: what circumstances WOULD get MBAACC to graduate to "main game" status for me? The announcement of the first Climax of Night, which promised to lift the boats of all French Bread and adjacent games, not just UNIST, was a good start. Late night east coast time, looking at what AnimEVO events are still being livestreamed before side events close down, I catch MBAACC top 8. It's kind of a blowup, as MBAACC side brackets at Evo have historically been[4], but there's something about the play of the eventual winner that captured me. Ura's H-Satsuki displayed a level of ferocity I had not seen before in a fighting game. It was entrancing enough that I immediately shifted gears to playing H-Satsuki and started actively shilling and setting up MBAACC wherever I could.
The all-in approach to offense H-Satsuki provides fits my general fighting game playstyle quite well. After playing plenty of online and offline matches alike, I began to surmise that the grass might be greener on one of the moons that can EX Guard and hold shield. I loaded up Hare's Satsuki Simple Summary and ended up taking on C-Satsuki as well.[5] To this day, MBAACC is the only game I dual main in, as the two moons of Satsuki I play scratch two very different itches: I play Crescent like I'm trying to finesse people via Sandoori and Half by brute-forcing strike/strike and strike/throw.