While he still had great block pressure and explosive damage, he was outclassed in basically every other way, and he remained a bottom tier character until Pokkén DX for Switch.īlaziken did get some cool buffs towards the end of Pokken’s patch cycle, like this practical infinite that only ends when you hit 12PSP. Blaziken also had very poor neutral and a nearly non-existent fireball game, which mattered a lot when characters like Chandelure, Braixen, and the Mewtwos were very strong, and you spent half of the game in the projectile-oriented Field Phase. He was one of two characters who spent HP on his EX special moves, and unlike the other one, Shadow Mewtwo, he couldn’t heal it back without relying on system mechanics or an assist.

My main during Pokkén Wii U was Blaziken, an easy to pick up rushdown character who fit my typical playstyle and happened to be one of my favorite Pokémon in general. Between the release history and the difficulty in running it at local events (you needed two Wii Us for a single LAN setup, which no tournament organizer was willing to sacrifice when Smash 4 was so popular,) I didn’t compete in it as much as I would have liked. This early console version had 16 characters and would not receive the DLC characters that the Japanese arcade release got until the Switch port launched in 2017. When I first started competing in Pokkén Tournament, it was the Wii U version of the game that released around 2015–2016. Who have you picked up now that the BBCF rollback beta has dropped? I’ve tried out a bunch of characters, including Litchi, Izayoi, and Mai.

Pokken tournament