My Video Game World Cup Competitor

While earlier this week I posted the sign-ups for my own community blogging competition, today is all about participating in someone else’s! Pix1001 from Shoot the Rookie has been doing some cool stuff in the game blogging community, graduating from participating in community events to hosting some of her own great concepts. I had the distinct pleasure of judging the High Score Haute Couture competition created by Pix along with Chris from Overthinker Y, and that event was a blast. The amount of joy and enthusiasm infused in each post made it an absolute pleasure to judge, and now Shoot the Rookie has brought something very unique to the table: sports.

Her challenge is simple: choose a video game character who could do some damage on the football field (or soccer, for my fellow Americans) in order to create the ultimate team for the Video Game World Cup! Once enough characters have been submitted, I’m excited to see what she has planned, but for today I’ll be focusing on which character I think would make a great soccer player. With that, if you will imagine a drum roll, please…are you imagining it? Alright! Then allow me to introduce the video game character best suited to a game of soccer:

Blaziken! Now I know very little about the sport itself, so I’ m going based off of the criteria that Pix laid out in her post: fast, strong, and tall. I also know that kicking is pretty important, and boy can Blaziken kick stuff. In fact, its signature move is the Blaze Kick, a kick so fierce that it sets the target on fire! Blaziken has other good kicks in its repertoire, too: Double Kick is a wicked fast pair of kicks, and then there’s High Jump Kick, a kick nearly as powerful as the well-known Pokemon move Hyper Beam (130 Power vs 150). But having impressive kicks isn’t the only thing recommending Blaziken for this competition.

Let’s talk stats. Blaziken is over two meters tall (6’3″ for us non-metric folk) so it definitely meets the tall aspect of our criteria. Its base attack power is 120 – that puts it on even ground with legendary Pokemon such as Dialga, Palkia, Giratina, and even Arceus, effectively the Pokemon God. Now its base speed is 80, which is decent but not astronomical – where Pokemon are concerned, you really want to break above 100 to be considered truly fast. However, Blaziken has an advantage thanks to a little ability called Speed Boost – every time Blaziken takes an action in battle, its speed goes up one stage. Now any one stat can be raised a total of six stages, which gives them four times the amount of speed. So while Blaziken may be average when it comes to speed starting out, it actually gets faster as the competition goes on and by the later parts of the match would be four times faster than it was at the beginning of the match!

As if this weren’t enough, Blaziken is capable of something special in the Pokemon world – Mega Evolution. A Mega Evolution is a temporary burst of power that allows a Pokemon to enhance their stats and even change abilities. When in its Mega form, Blaziken’s speed jumps to 100, putting it right on the line it wants to be as far as quickness, and it still has Speed Boost to multiply its speed by four times as the match goes on. When it comes to attack power, Mega Blaziken’s attack reaches a whopping 160 – that’s in the top 10 of all Pokemon ever as of the writing of this post.

Blaziken’s combination of speed and power is overwhelming. In the popular competitive Pokemon format called Smogon, Pokemon are placed in tiers based on their competitive viability and usage. The highest tier, called Ubers, consists of what are generally agreed to be the most powerful Pokemon in existence and they are not allowed to be used in most competitive formats. Mega Blaziken is one of only six non-legendary Mega Pokemon that rank in Ubers, and standard Blaziken is one of only two non-legendary standard Pokemon that rank in Ubers (and remember, there are over 800 Pokemon to choose from). In both of its forms, Blaziken is so fast and strong that it can hold its own in competition with some of the most broken legendary Pokemon to ever be conceived. And if that’s not a good choice for a Video Game soccer team, I don’t know what is!

So what are your thoughts, adventurers? If you have someone in mind for this competition, you’ve got til July 10th to check out Pix’s post and submit your own character for the Video Game World Cup! I hope to see you in the competition and may both of our characters find their way onto the final team!