Monday Morning Marth 8/19/2024
For this week’s MMM, I have decided to cash in on a fa-I mean, strike while the iron is hot and join in on what is a current popular discussion topic in the Melee community: Donkey Kong. The “DK renaissance”, as I noted last week, hit what had to be a kind of peak at Supernova, with Junebug getting a shockingly high 3rd place finish and Quang landing what is probably the second biggest DK win ever with a victory over Moky. In the interest of exploring this, I spoke with two of Melee’s foremost DK players, Quang and Akir, as well as a handful of other players who have experience fighting the monkey. As for why I did not speak to Junebug, the reasons are twofold: First, I don’t know him. I’m friends with Quang and have interacted with Akir a significant amount in the past, and so getting a hold of them was no real issue. Secondly, he is the man of the hour. Other people will invariably speak with him about the topics I visit here, and he is often able to reach the community through his role as an excellent commentator and as a content creator. I thought it best to let some less familiar voices be heard, as amazing as Junebug is, he is hardly the sum total of the renaissance. In the following piece, I’ve created sections based on the questions that I asked these players, and will put together a portrait of each player’s responses rather than attempt to string together long quotes or link large sections of audio.
Who are you? How did you start with Melee, and how did you get here?
Akir always knew that he wanted to become someone in competitive gaming, first getting into CS: Source and then Global Offensive as a young child, and actually came to be aware of Melee in 2015 when perusing twitch for CS streams, running across Evo and watching Armada vs Hungrybox grand finals. In his own words “I watched Hbox plank Armada across all 5 games and I was immediately hooked”. His initial dabbling in Melee was pretty much exclusively online, as at the time he was still in middle school and unable to travel to locals, but eventually became able to travel, first in a limited fashion in 2019 and then in earnest in the 2022 and onward “post” COVID era.
Quang started slightly before Akir, beginning in 2014 as a Falco/Marth/Falcon multi main before switching to Fox and then ICs, the character with which he first started to see real results, and became a Michigan PR staple However, he grew bored with ICs and ended up switching at least partially back to Fox before in 2019, later moving onto the Donkey Kong we all know today during the pandemic era
Why DK? What draws players to the big monkey?
For Akir, he has always played tons of characters, specifically recalling spending around a month learning niche Mewtwo tech, up to and including his teleport edge cancel setups, only stopping because “that character is dogshit”. Specifically however, Akir points to two points as being formative on solidifying his DK journey. The first of which was a netplay set against Smash Papi (then Smashdaddy) all the way back in 2017, where he went down 2-0 with his Marth/Fox. He then switched to DK and brought things to a tight game 5, giving him increased confidence in the character and inspiring him to commit more time to him, later coming to use him as a Marth counterpick. The second point was finding himself at a point in college in 2022 where he was both working and going to school full time, leaving Akir, who had formerly had an enormous amount of free time to devote to Melee, with precious few spare moments. As a result, he decided to focus his efforts on one character, in the end deciding on DK over Marth simply because he enjoys that character more.
Quang’s story bears some differences, but ends in a similar place. He picked up DK over the course of the pandemic as a “fun” character that he could play more casually, uncertain if he would ever be able to attend major LAN events again. Eventually, Quang became enamored with DK’s punish game, loving the fact that he could get zero to death sequences after just a week of playing the character. Furthermore, Quang is a player who tends to take notably long Melee breaks, sometimes for around 6 months. He enjoyed that DK required much less executional “upkeep” than something like Fox, where he felt like he needed to grind for a week or more before being able to execute at a high level when returning to the game after a layoff. In short, Quang believed he could get a relatively high reward with DK with a relatively low time investment, echoing Akir’s sentiments in the end.
What are the challenges of playing DK relative to other characters, especially top tiers?
Quang is straightforward here: “The main challenge is his neutral is a lot harder than other characters”. Quang outlines that DK’s relatively limited neutral, leaning mostly on bair and cc/shield grab (and up b out of shield) is harder to find openings with than a top tier, and most top tiers have strong answers to these tools. He says that he has to play by understanding the counterplay to bair, and then figuring out the counterplay to the counterplay.
Akir is very similar here, pointing out that top tier mains are often looking for a tool or strategy that will “invalidate” DK, something they cannot do to each other, and acknowledging that often their option of choice is in fact hard to deal with. He says that in spite of this, that sort of approach actually plays to his strengths, as he values theory crafting and learning niche new situations that will give him opportunities to access DK’s powerful punish game.
Why here and now? What sparked the DK renaissance at this point in time?
Here, everyone I talked to, not just the DKs, began at the same place: The current meta is very kind to DK. Melee players today tend towards a very counterhit heavy style, incorporating techniques not just to mitigate their opponent’s DI, but even begin their own combos with slideoff, ASDI down techs, etc. In 2024, the old Isai truism “don’t get hit” doesn’t actually apply all the way. In fact, “try to get hit in a certain way” may be closer to the truth these days. DK is so strong in a world where so many players are focused on this because he largely bypasses it. He is able to carry his opponents away from the platforms they would try to slide off from with cargo throw. Repeated bairs/up bs render teching all but useless. Grabs cannot be crouch cancelled, and his gameplan is extremely grab-centric. He can even punish shield drop attempts with a powerful up b that always gets to hit disastrous DI as the other player falls through, showing that most modern defensive techniques (with the exception of SDI up, which both DKs mentioned) just don’t go as far vs DK as they do against other characters..
Akir also makes special emphasis on UCF and Slippi, believing DK to be the single biggest UCF beneficiary in the game of 100% dashback rate (thanks to bair), and says that Slippi allowing less popular characters to get more practice (especially in ranked where people don’t just quit out) allows for rapid development.
Lastly, there is also the fact that, while they are all too humble to say as much outright, Junebug, Quang, and Akir are all very strong Melee players with a proven track record of success regardless of whatever character they play. In my estimation, that, more so than anything else, is the true soul of the DK resurgence we have seen. A cold take, to be sure, but in the end is the secret ever anything besides being good at the game?.
Exactly how good is DK? Where is he on the tier list?
Bizarrely, everyone I talked to immediately said the same thing: About as good as Samus. Akir said above or below Samus, Quang leaned towards right above Samus, and all of the non-DKs also pointed to Samus in a pretty equivalence-drawing fashion. I have no idea what exactly about Samus would draw these comparisons; indeed, other than up b out of shield, I think the characters are radically different, but the comparison appeared with extreme consistency. Quang went as far as to say DK might even be as good as Pikachu, but Akir and the non-DK players seemed confident that he was firmly worse than Yoshi/ICs/Pikachu specifically, and better than the Mario Bros or Ganon.
Where does he go from here? Will people “solve” DK? Will DK lab monsters push the character even further?
Akir believes that DK is fundamentally strong enough that he will never be “solved” by the competition, but admits that a lack of knowledge/practice against the ape makes some bad MUs seem more doable than they might be in a more mature metagame. In particular, he cites Sheik and ICs, once they develop and rehearse their punish game on DK, as potential future problems. He also pushes back against the old idea that Falco is a nightmare MU, pointing out various means of laser counterplay (particularly dashback powershield) and declaring that the bird may be/will become one of DK’s stronger MUs. In terms of further labbing the character, he is not sure, but believes that the bulk of the work has already been done, and further developments will come more from implementing what is already known than new cutting edge discoveries.
For his part, Quang believes that the future of DK is uncertain. He, like Akir, believes that the character has a high probability of getting worse as more people learn the MU, but that the strength of his toolkit will always keep him in the mix. He points again to the importance of pushing neutral as DK, saying “the most important thing to work on as DK is your neutral”, because the punish is always going to be there. He believes that the character’s future is largely dependent on the players continuing to push the envelope in terms of how they find their hits, as mitigation vs DK’s combo game can only go so far, but players returning to a true “don’t get hit” style could be problematic. In terms of labbing, he points to Da as the guiding light in that arena, but expresses concerns that some of their tech is tricky enough/new enough that only Da seems to be able to implement it consistently, namely DK haxdash and zero swing turn around bair. However, if someone like Junebug or Quang could implement the Da tech, it could theoretically push the character to new heights.
Ultimately, the one thing that stuck out to me across the course of these interviews is the consistency of opinion across good players. I had originally intended to end this MMM with a section about my own thoughts on the DK renaissance, as someone who suffered probably the most crushing loss of my career against Nogh in 2022 and has since become fairly proficient in the matchup. However, I just don’t have anything to add; I largely just agree with the views of those I have interviewed, and would even tier him almost exactly where the field did, with him going right under Samus for me. Lower level commenters on Reddit or in regional Discords will always have a variety of takes, but most (hard quote/unquote here since I’m including myself) “good” players seem to have a very high level of consensus about what and where Donkey Kong is.