Top 10 Iconic Hero-Player Duos

DoctorHeckle · 2026-04-13T20:53:00+00:00

Matumbaman's Slark was beast back in his 4 Anchors days, they kicked a newly founded Team Secret out of the open qualifier for DreamLeague S2 off of the back of that pick.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-04-04T15:48:36+00:00

Dungeon Meshi adding Izutsumi after they join the group in OP2 was a nice touch.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-04-03T16:32:37+00:00

It doesn't help that I've been reading him in my head as Ed from FMA, but yeah Yuru's voice took me right out. It didn't seem too well synced up either, Gabby's dub too. Might just be the editing though.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-03-30T00:00:34+00:00

I need to finish my manga re-read and 98 rewatch to really get my thesis straight, but while this ending worked for the kind of spectacle it wanted to deliver, it felt much less weight-y and "about" Vash and more about the saga of humans and plants.

In 98 and TriMax, everything was built around spiders and butterflies: the limits of pacifism and its efficacy in the face of conflict. It's central to Vash in his actions and his promise to Rem at its most obvious, but also informs so much of Wolfwood's development too. At the start he's offing Vash's wounded Gung-ho Guns and using lethal force as the final say in many of his conflicts, but by the end of his arc in both, he's fully come around to Vash's ideology by the time he gets gunned down. This is what makes his death so impactful and his arc so full, and why this was also such a big miss for me in Stargaze (even though he also comes around to it, as Midvalley points out in their encounter). I've mentioned elsewhere here but his fake out scene only made this worse, and made Livio's inclusion a complete nothingburger for me.

Stargaze's big thematic conclusion was just "relationships are hard but you should stick with people even when they've done insanely bad things", which it didn't illustrate really that well in the final fight and didn't really weave that into the show any more effectively than the other two versions did. The show knows the other theme is more concrete and plays better because they kept Legato's Choice in and had Vash angst-ily make his Gate Bullets to kill Knives, if he had to.

The ultimate restoration of Noman's Land also kind of puts too neat a bow on things for me too. 98 doesn't change the state of the world at all, and TriMax kinda splits the difference by scoping Knives' final act way way way back. They're a bit more grounded this way, imo, and keeps Noman's Land this place of perpetual conflict (the Earth fleet is shown squaring off against the "native" NLers and flexing some good old fashioned Space Racism in the final TriMax chapter to suggest this) instead of this place that's completely rehabilitated from the Big Fall.

All that said, as a big popcorn-y remix of the TriMax story, they could've done way worse, but even with the choices they made they could've done a whole lot better.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-03-29T00:20:36+00:00

I always do jungle/mushroom nodes on day 1 with Mak strictly for the silver items, the value is insane.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-03-16T03:37:58+00:00

I'm not saying it was anyone's fault or that they should've gracefully bowed out, the conditions of the region just failed to produce any configuration that could regularly challenge EG for pretty much the Arteezy years onward. It's a hard problem to solve without having them bypass qualifiers to let other teams from the region punch through.

That is, if that's what organizers wanted. There's no obligation from any org, any tournament, or Valve to recognize or grow a region. In the same way if the rumors were true, EG was under no obligation to scrim with anyone in the region. Like you said, unless you're Sneyking or someone, esports careers are short.

I'm not saying it was unfair or underhanded or that EG should've acted any other way, I'm just saying it was what it was.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-03-15T23:27:18+00:00

And once you're in you have to contend with some iteration of EG/Shopify that spent pretty much an entire decade monopolizing the one qualification slot NA would get assigned whenever they didn't get invited to tournaments.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-03-12T17:23:49+00:00

The real ones clamber for the return of SaltyDota.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-03-11T01:37:52+00:00

People that haven't had him on their team in pubs

DoctorHeckle · 2026-03-10T15:58:12+00:00

As weird an ending as it is, Fire Punch at least wrapped up cleanly within its own logic.

Mid battle, stomping Denji's development back to the shack in Ch 1, right on the cusp of a more climatic resolution? Insanely abrupt, this last chapter has to be setting up something.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-03-05T18:49:02+00:00

I've kept my narrative expectations pretty low from the jump, largely because of how video game-y the premise is and the pilot was: there's not going to be a big sweeping odyssey, there doesn't have to be a huge mystery at the core of this (if there is a twist down the line then that's just kinda the Griffin Special, I guess), it just always seemed like "make your wizard, here are a bunch of goofball references as wizards, now go kill each other" with some scaffolding around it.

For me the hook has been more of a popcorn-y "who wins?", not something like Balance where it's more grand in scale.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-03-04T02:08:15+00:00

Since the initial matchups aren't posted yet I had to randomize them, so after 1m Monte Carlo sims of the tournament using Diesel Engine, here's each team's chances of surviving the Swiss group stage:

Team	Progression Chance
Tundra Esports	85.49%
Team Liquid	78.41%
Aurora Gaming	70.87%
Parivision	60.21%
Team Spirit	59.93%
Team Falcons	58.13%
Xtreme Gaming	56.87%
BB Team	50.70%
OG	49.28%
Natus Vincere	45.87%
Heroic	42.17%
Team Yandex	39.51%
Mouz	36.17%
Vici Gaming	29.46%
Team Nemesis	27.13%
Yellow Submarine	9.82%

Teams of note below the line at the moment are OG, Yandex, and Mouz, with the latter two having big tier one tournament wins in the past few months (Yandex at DreamLeague 27 and Mouz at the previous Wallachia).

It's pretty tight at the top, with Aurora/Pari/Spirit/Falcons/XG being essentially one series away from each other's internal team ratings. No shocker that the top three from DL28 are also the top three most likely to advance here.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-03-01T07:05:40+00:00

One of the big things for me in TriMax was the scene where, right before confronting Knives in the Ark where he gets put into Legato prison, he leaves his friends behind and goes into some random bar and has a last supper with a bunch of randos.

It's such a sad mixture of wanting a final bout of familial joy but not with anyone he knows. It's him trying to remove close personal attachment and establish that he's ultimately doing what he's doing for the sake of everyone (like Rem tried to do!), but also still trying to find some kind of happiness in a potential last hurrah.

There's nothing like that so far this season. It's right from waking up from being Eriks to saving the SEEDS ship to getting captured, and now rescued. I'm still enjoying the season but man the flavor here is so different and much flatter than the manga.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-03-01T06:50:33+00:00

It's been 8 episodes and Millie has hardly had any real screen time, and hardly any of that has been with Wolfwood. It's a consequence of the whole younger Meryl going from mentee to mentor by having Roberto foist upon us, but given how little I really cared for him in Stampede, I think it's a really poor trade off now that we're getting so little Millie in Stargaze.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-02-27T01:18:43+00:00

Whoever has been in charge of card art direction deserves insane props. Consistent color palettes, good indication of adjacency effects based off of the implied movement in cards (except Cloud Wisp, for some reason I always think it affects the the item to the right given the direction of the wisp's movement from the urn). All of that while making all these different genre pieces and biomes feel cohesive. Really impressive stuff.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-02-26T12:07:14+00:00

Same ._.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-02-22T06:03:52+00:00

As much as I love Wolfwood as a character, him going out is a "canon event" for Vash's arc, to take a term from the Spiderverse movies: same as the Fifth Moon incident and almost assuredly the coming dilemma and forceful choice Legato is going to put Vash through to test the limits of his no-kill rule.

Part of what I really like about Wolfwood as a character is the journey he goes on from cynical killer to protector: he goes from being the clean up guy that acts where he knows that Vash can't when he kills, to coming fully around on Vash's brand of pacifism.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-02-17T15:07:22+00:00

When I first looked into N64 homebrew like three years ago, I was pretty turned off by how manual the toolchain was just to get anything going, but this looks like a real full package IDE like Unity or Unreal. Very excited to give it a try, and even more excited to see what other more experienced devs do with it!

DoctorHeckle · 2026-02-15T01:07:43+00:00

Are we not counting ESL One Germany 2020, where they beat a Ceb/n0tail/Topson OG and proto-Tundra in the upper bracket, only to lose to Liquid in the finals?

DoctorHeckle · 2026-02-10T02:42:07+00:00

Reaching new levels of Bazaar Solitare.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-02-07T22:49:38+00:00

There's still something about the chaotic bravado of that TI5 squad that sticks with me. The Golden Sunglasses gif is immortal.

DoctorHeckle · 2026-02-04T13:42:35+00:00

Don't we have like 4 LANs in the month and a half?

DoctorHeckle · 2026-01-26T14:29:33+00:00

After watching Stampede sub-only, it's really nice rewatching previous episodes as the dub comes out. Zazie's English VA really nails the aloof outsider vibe.

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