Respect for RPG

Jay County High School juniors Kaleb Weaver and Mitchell Brown just want respect.

Sure, they also want to be among the very best Super Smash Bros. Ultimate players in the world, a goal they work countless hours every week toward, but that’s something that’s somewhat in their control.

Recognition and respect from others isn’t in their control, and that’s frustrating.

“We’re not just here playing video games,” said Weaver, president of the JCHS esports team Jay RPG, which sent a half dozen students this weekend to Detroit to compete at Frostbite, one of the biggest Smash tournaments in the country.

Weaver earned the respect of Frostbite attendees, finishing 513th of 1,280 players in the competitive 1 v 1 Smash tournament. (He entered the event as the 934th seed.) In total he went 2-2 with two sweeps in the loser’s bracket after dropping his opening match 2-1.

Weaver’s performance isn’t a surprise based on his run at a preliminary tournament on Feb. 19, where he went 3-2 to finish 13th out of 70 players.

Matches are determined on a best-of-three scenario in which players have a limited number of lives for their fighters in each round. Super Smash Bros. is a fighting game published by Nintendo with an arsenal of characters from dozens of video game series such as Mario, Pac-Man and others.

Started just over a year ago by Weaver, Brown and Lio Rose, a 2019 graduate, Jay RPG never thought it’d have an opportunity to represent the school while going head-to-head with some of the best Smash players in the region.

Two Jay RPG 2 v 2 squads finished ahead of their preliminary seeds at the tournament. Of 251 double teams, Weaver and Rose went 1-2 and finished 129th. Another team of Brown and fellow Patriot Dylan Burress went 0-2 but finished 193rd.

The Weaver-Rose duo was seeded 188th and Brown-Burress was ranked 209th, according to Frostbite’s website.

Jay RPG was born out of a conversation with art teacher Jacquelin Analco about hosting a Smash tournament at the school for fun.

Around 40 players attended, which was more than expected, and some came just to watch.

More tournaments were hosted before the team’s first duel with another school last fall against Clinton Central. Jay County swept the top five spots.

Members of Jay RPG, a group that is self-funded, have been selling chocolate bars and Starbucks and selling concessions locally and at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis to raise money for jerseys to go to Detroit to compete.

Each player had to pay about $300 to go to Detroit, compete and stay in a hotel. The team left early Friday morning and returned late Sunday night.

Weaver says there are a lot of skills that translate from competitive gaming to all walks of life.

“I’m extremely proud of how they’ve progressed,” Weaver said of Jay RPG members, a lot of whom are underclassmen.

The team, which is open to all JCHS students, hosts practices on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Players can come to learn about different strategies and moves for the complex fighting game, which currently has 80 playable characters and thousands of different moves and combos.

One day, for example, some of the team’s less experienced members learned how to parry, which is the process of timing a player’s shield to block incoming attacks.

“We’re a team. We try to get people to see us as that,” Weaver said.

Weaver and Brown, who are both involved in the school’s arts department and have a history in athletics, bristle at the stigma sometimes directed at esports and its participants.

“They don’t see the struggle,” said Brown.

Analco, who praised the team as being some of the most self-sufficient students she has worked with, said she expects that the change as the team becomes more established.

Jay RPG expects to open up its ranks to middle schoolers after they make the move to the high school building for the 2020-21 school year. The team also sent freshmen Marisa Posocco and Christian Renner and sophomore Rachel Skirvin to the tournament.



Weaver, Brown love the underdog

Mitchell Brown and Kaleb Weaver take a lot of pride in their go-to Smash players, also known as a “main.”

Weaver is a big advocate for King Dedede, who is seen as one of the weakest characters in the game’s latest installment. Brown has recently committed to Ice Climbers, who also isn’t seen as a very strong fighter.

They agreed that they would rather be seen as one of the best players for a less popular figther rather than try to achieve greatness by using a more commonly played “overpowered” character such as Pikachu or the recently added and heavily criticized Joker, who is seen as the most overpowered fighter in the game.

They watch videos online to try to learn the weaknesses and strengths of every character in the game. They often discuss with Jay RPG a “matchup chart,” which shows how certain characters perform against one another.

Brown’s Ice Climbers is one of the few fighters to have two synchronized characters under one fighter. The player controls the primary Ice Climber while an additional Ice Climber follows the same controls at a few frames behind the player’s control input.

In order to perform well with the Climbers, Brown said a player has to be aware of the designed lag. The Ice Climbers gained new life in Smash after previously only appearing in the Nintendo Entertainment System’s 1985 Ice Climber game.

Weaver said King Dedede, the antagonist of the Kirby series, is “misunderstood” and is brushed off for being too big despite his quick vertical speed. He said he takes a lot of pride in getting as good as he can with Dedede, who he described as “one of the most complex characters in the game.”