Recently I made the very horrible decision of reading through Youtube comments on various GG and BB vids.  Man, the stupidity level there is really off the charts sometimes.  One recurring thing I noticed was that there are a good number of people who worship GG/BB player Kaqn, and these people will make all sorts of excuses every time he loses in a video.  Instead of joining the stupidity by replying to Youtube comments, I figured I would just write about Kaqn here.  Maybe some people who are curious about him could then find this page through Google searching and the like.

My opinion of Kaqn is that he’s an above average player who just happens to get a lot of exposure in Japanese match videos because of his employment at Gamechariot.  With this in mind it’s actually not difficult to understand why so many people seem to worship him as the god of Order Sol/Ragna.  For most non-Japanese Guilty Gear and Blazblue players, their only exposure to the Japanese scene are through videos released on Nico and Youtube.  Since the late GGXX #Reload days, Gamechariot was one of the few arcades that would release match videos on a semi frequent basis.  Kaqn actually started working at Chariot during GGXX Slash era, so it’s not surprising that he would begin appearing in the majority of the videos released from that arcade.

Observant people will also notice that the Gamechariot casual match videos are handpicked.  This is most obvious if you pay attention to the winstreaks: one player could have a 4 game winstreak on one match, and then the streaks will suddenly jump or change in the next match.  I remember way back in the early days of Blazblue Continuum Shift I, there was a lot of buzz surrounding the Kaqn/Buppa/Zakiyama vids.  Even among the Japanese viewers, some of them were accusing the Chariot players(particularly Zakiyama) of using tool assistance because of the crazy things that kept happening in their matches.  Which is silly because I don’t know how you would do a tool assisted play of an arcade game.  The truth, of course, was that those 3 had played an endless amount of BB with each other and just handpicked the matches they thought were the coolest to upload online.

The take home message of this is that you shouldn’t judge how good players are purely from match videos(especially casual matches).  The best way to judge is to travel around Japan and play in every major arcade.  Obviously this is not feasible unless you’re a real baller, and even then it would still take a great amount of time.  A much more reasonable method of judgment is in tournament results.  And tourney results don’t lie, especially in Japan where everything is single elimination.  Everybody needs to be on their game 100% because there really is no room for error when your fate could be determined by just one match.

When we look at Kaqn’s tournament results, we can see that they match up chronologically with when he started working at Chariot.  I guess this means it’s time for some history.  I don’t know when Kaqn started playing fighting games, but he first started showing up on the radar during the Guilty Gear X days.  He played a pretty good Baiken but wasn’t able to win any big tournaments.

Then XX came along and this is when Kaqn really developed and became a top player.  He continued playing Baiken for the early days of XX, but switched to Millia before the very first Tougeki Super Battle Opera in 2003.  Tougeki 2003 was infamous for spawning the whole Umehara ga Kimeta meme, thanks to Denpa’s vocal chord destroying commentary.  I don’t think his voice was ever the same after that.  But anyway, Kaqn teamed up with Yukinose(Bridget) and Hokushin(Eddie) and they ended up winning this tournament.  You can actually watch the entire top 4 in the GGXX videos under Silent Force’s Millia gameplay section.

#Reload came along and kaqn was still pretty strong.  He played Millia in the early days of #R but switched to Jam before Tougeki 2004.  Kaqn teamed up with Nemo(Faust) and Imo(Zappa) and they made an impressive showing, finishing in 2nd place after getting reverse OCVed by Matsu’s Millia.  You can watch the top4 of this tournament in Matsu’s subsection in the GGXX #R Millia videos page.  Tougeki 2005 was also #R, and Kaqn ended up teaming with Ogawa(Eddie) and Pachi(Faust).  They were able to win this tournament after an extremely close grand finals.

And this is the last big tournament that Kaqn has ever won!  Ever since then, Kaqn has never even gotten close to winning a major tournament.  The timing of this perfectly matches up with his Gamechariot employment beginning in Slash era.  He probably had much less free time from then on(it might seem like fun, but working for an arcade is really tough).

So his tournament record starting from 2006 has been pretty terrible, so why does a good portion of the English speaking Guilty Gear/Blazblue community think he’s the god of Order Sol and Ragna?  Well I hope that what I’ve written basically answers this, but to sum it up, it’s because he had previous fame from being a top player during the GGXX and #Reload days combined with his Gamechariot employment ensuring that he would appear in many match videos.

I also want to point out that this wasn’t meant to bash kaqn or anyone else; it was just me trying to figure out why all these Youtube users thought a person who had a terrible GG/BB tournament record was amazing at those games.  Another thing is that I was just looking for an excuse to share this video:

This shows Kaqn, Yukinose, and Hokushin(the team who won Tougeki 2003) traveling all the way to Kansai for the 1st GGXX #R a-cho Cup.  It’s a pretty funny bit of footage that I thought was interesting.