I had the pleasure of interviewing Smash United's The Wall. The Wall is a professional Yoshi player in Texas' Smash 4 scene. He is well known for his aggressive playstyle and highlight-reel combos. Although The Wall only entered the competitive scene in 2015, he has already cemeted his place as one of best -- if not the best-- Yoshi players in the world. In this interview, we'll discuss his life prior to Smash 4, his rise in the competitive scene, and his opinion of Yoshi on patch 1.1.5.

You really burst into the Smash 4 scene in 2015. Can you talk about your life experiences prior to that? 

I kind of entered the scene in January of last year. The game was kind of new -- and of course I bought it the second it came out. I was like, “Yo, I want this game. I used to play Melee and this game’s gonna be awesome,” so I bought it. I was in the military at the time. I served from 2009 to January of 2015 -- six years in the air force. I ended up getting out, and I moved back to Houston. I was living with a friend of mine, and he was like, “It’s been a while since I played old school games.” Stuff like Dreamcast and N64, and I was like “there’s this Games + store down the street. I was gonna roll over there and pick up a Dreamcast so we could get Gauntlet Dark Legacy or one of those really fun old school games going. 

I went over there and saw a little poster that said, “Settle it in Smash! We’re hosting a small Smash tournament.” I was like, “Dude, I used to be the shit at this game! I’m gonna roll in and wreck all these kids and get some free cash!” I showed up to the tournament with some janky controller setup--  one of those chinese wiimote controllers that’s like a gamecube controller. 

I showed up to that tournament and got bodied. I got straight up annihilated. It was by a guy in the scene called Krebs. He’s one of our TOs for Houston. He told me it’s cool to see me come out. He gave me the smashboard links, so I showed up to the Texas Gaming Championship -- which is the biggest tournament that we hold every couple months. I showed up to that, got bodied again and said, “Screw this, imma learn Yoshi.” That’s how it went from there, and that’s how I found Yoshi. Before that, I was a Captain Falcon main.

What was the first Smash game you played? 

I absolutely played 64 and Melee. When Brawl came out, I played it a little bit, but I thought that game was cheesy. I didn’t like it, so I kind of gave it up. I didn’t like the whole tripping aspect or Metaknight. I peaced out of that game. 

Did you follow competitive Smash at the time? I followed competitive Melee back in 07-09, so back when Ken was reigning, and M2k and that kind of stuff. Then, Mango was on his come-up. When I joined the military, [for] a solid five years I didn’t look at anything. 

The Wall followed the melee competitive scene before enterting the military

Do you ever find inspiration from aMSa? What are your thoughts on amSA’s playstyle in melee? I watched aMSa’s melee play. I saw him take the set off M2k and it was good, but when I used to play melee, I couldn’t stand Yoshi. He was so crazy technical, and I was used to swordy characters like Marth, Roy and Link. Picking up Yoshi in that game was not happening! When I saw aMSa play him, I was like, “Cool. Maybe Yoshi is not that bad in melee if you’re really good at him.” I never had aspiring dreams to get back into Melee after taking such a long hiatus. 

What brought you and Yoshi together? After I got bodied in those tournaments and I needed a new character, I went onto Google and searched up current tier lists for the game. Everybody had their own home-brewed tier lists that they made. The one I stumbled upon was from Japan. They had Sheik No. 1, Zero Suit No. 2 and Yoshi No. 3. I was like, “Really? Yoshi No. 3? That doesn’t make sense to me because I know this character was bad in Melee and bad in Brawl.” 

I played him for a little bit and was like, “Holy crap!” He actually does seem really good. I decided to make him my main and that I was gonna learn him. All I did was go on For Glory and played 1,000 For Glory matches. I started going to tournaments at the same time. In Houston, we have too many tournaments, really. I ended up attending four to five tournaments every week. On top of that, I was playing all day, as soon as I got home from work, until I went to sleep. 

I started to teach myself how to do Yoshi things. I started labbing out tech. I never watched any Yoshi videos or anybody’s gameplay from Smash 4. 

Do you think the tournaments were more useful than online play or vice-versa?  Online play is very different from tournaments. Honestly, from seeing how I progressed by playing through tournaments and playing online: Don’t play online! It’s really bad. If you want to learn the basics of a character, then sure. When I wanted to play Wario, cause I played Wario for fun, I just played a bunch of For Glory matches and saw I was suiciding with the bike. I just constantly practiced that until I wasn’t doing that anymore. When you’re looking to learn really good techs, how to read and do frame-perfect options then online just doesn’t work. 

I actually rage a lot online. You can have pretty good latency if you have a LAN adapter and you’re relatively close, and it’s basically lagless at that point. If you connect to someone on For Glory, or someone wants to play you from Switzerland, of course it is laggy. Yoshi suffers so hard from lag, and I just hate not feeling in control of my character.

How did you progress from some guy experimenting with Yoshi to the competitor we know today? When I started out, I just had this general idea that I was just gonna throw dair on your shield and I thought it was unpunishable. “It’s perfect! It’s the best approach ever!” Then I started playing this guy Karna in our scene who’s probably our best Sheik in Texas. Every time I faired his shield, he just ran over and bodied me. I was like, “What the heck? This is not right! You shouldn’t be able to do that! That’s not allowed!” So I had to start evolving my gameplay based on playing him a lot.  I went up against Karna probably a good eight times in tournaments, and he just bodied me 2-0 -- or 3-0 if it was in Grand Finals-- every single time. I was getting rather mad at the situation. I was like, “why can’t I beat this stupid character? I just can’t beat Sheik! I don’t get it.” I could beat other Sheiks, but I couldn’t beat HIS Sheik. 

Finally I had one breakthrough-- I guess my first kind-of breakthrough was in a tournament that was hosted in a garage, but it had a couple of our PR members in Houston. It had BC, who is one of our best villagers, Karna was there, AvoiD, who was one of our top ten players,Big Boss, who is currently our No. 6 player on the Power Ranking (PR), but he just left. So it had all those people there, and I just remember running through the whole bracket. There was this Link player named Knife who always knocked me out of tournaments, and this was the first tournament I beat Knife. I went all the way through everybody and into the Grand Finals where I met Karna, and he ended up destroying me.  

I got really frustrated with the situation of constantly losing to Karna. After I won a breakout tournament, people were like, “who’s this Yoshi guy? I’ve never heard of him.” Every tournament that I went to from then on was like second place, third place, first place -- depending on who showed up. 

I guess from there it was taking a set off of Trela at TGC 4. People were like, “what the heck? This guy can beat Trella? Dude, he beat his Ryu!” I also beat Karna at that tournament. That was the first time I ever beat Karna, and because of that, I was able to go onto the next couple matches and I lost to MegaFox. All of a sudden, people were saying I was up-and-coming in the scene.

The next time I played Trela at Battlegrounds, I beat him again. Then I double-eliminated Karna. I beat Denti, and I beat all these people and they were like, “what the heck? This dude is way better than I thought. This guy's good.” They voted me No. 2 in the scene, right behind Trela. I’m still hugely positive over everybody in our scene. People just started to recognize me for beating Trela, cause Karna’s not known. 

Moving forward to MLG Louisiana… MLG was silly because my work schedule was kind of silly. I sometimes work four times a week or five days a week, but I only work graveyard shifts. I was on that same schedule whenever MLG came around. I took two days off work. I worked the night prior, and we drove to New Orleans after that. I showed up to the tournament, and did well in doubles. We knocked out M2K and Wizzrobe. I was with KJ who’s our No. 10 player in the scene. If you saw PAX Arena, he’s a Cloud player that beat MVD in Loser’s. He’s really good. We did decently in Doubles and make like 17th or something. 

The Wall nearly defeated Ryo at MLG Louisiana

Singles came around, and everybody was talking to Chibo about pools. There were the Louisiana players, a lot of Texas players and then there were the really big out-of-staters like ESAM, MVD, Nairo, Zero and all them. So each big pro player got their own pool. Some of the pools that we got placed into... like my pool had Megafox and me and it also had Ryo. Now Ryo is probably at equal skill with Megafox, which is what people have said at that time. 

Our pool was insanely stacked. I played Ryo in winners and he beat me 0-2. I was like, “holy crap, this Ike is good! I’ve never played an Ike this good.” I faced him again in Loser’s and it was really close. Game one he beat me, game two I had a really good comeback and took him out, and game three was last-stock, last hit. I had one little flub and he got the dash attack to take me out. That’s just how the ball rolls. I got eliminated from Loser’s bracket semifinals. Ryo ended up making it out, and Megafox won winner’s.

I wasn’t a big fan of the tournament setup. It had 120-150 people show up, yet it had almost every really top end pro-player there. You know they’re gonna get out of pools, and then you have a lucky chance to make it out of Loser’s. You were already coming into a losing situation. It was not that enjoyable for me, because of that.

The tournament itself was great. I loved the lights, the showmanship, and all the stores you could buy junk from-- that was great! Me playing in the tournament, I didn’t really enjoy myself. I hate two-stock, and I didn’t like the pool setup. It happens, though.

Where do you see yourself going from there?  I’m constantly improving. These last two Sunday tournaments I’ve won were against our best Diddy in the state, and Diddy is Yoshi’s worst matchup. We’re always going back and forth. He took out one of the big ROB players and placed really well at APEX. I’m taking out Karna and Grimturtle constantly. 

Trela just stopped showing up to our Houston tournaments. He’s probably our best player. He went to San Antonio and beat Megafox, and he went to Austin and won against those guys. He just stopped going to our tournaments because I’m the only person who seems to have a positive record versus him that he struggles with. I would equate that to Yoshi winning the Ryu matchup, because there’s a lot of silly things that I can do about it. I’m progressing through in that way...

Hopefully, I should be going to Xanadu as their player of the week, getting sponsored up. I’m gonna go up there and try to body the MD/VA area. We had the crew battle at G3. I beat Remzi pretty solidly. I lost to Pink fresh on Lucas. He got a good gimp and managed to take me out. I came out positive, and Remzi’s their No. 1, so I was happy with how it went. 

I’m hoping moving up! I’m doing all the big tournaments we have in Texas, and I’m already signed up for EVO. 

The Wall signed up to attend EVO 2016

Any expectations for EVO? I’m really wishing to fight for a Top-16 finish. That’d be awesome if I could make it up there. I just want to show that Yoshi has the potential, cause I’m so tired of everyone downgrading Yoshi in the tier-list because of, “No Results or standout players.” We do have standout players, but nobody wants to acknowledge them. You have me, you have Poltergust, Raptor, Nikes. You have all these people around the world that have results, but no one wants to mention it. 

In his most recent tier list, Zero rated Yoshi at the very bottom of “High Tier” He also challenged Yoshi mains to step up their results, as he believes the character has more potential than the character has shown. What are your thoughts on his evaluation of Yoshi, and do you think we’ll finally see big results from Yoshi in 2016?

If you look purely at top tournament results, sure, Yoshi’s crap. G3, the best we had was Raptor and I tied at 49th. Below that, I mean, you’re talking in the 60’s or the 100’s. But if you look at other tournaments-- Smashcon, Raptor made ninth. That’s a solid placement. At the beginning of the Wii U in Japan, you had Yoshidora. Back when characters were really broke -- you had Diddy’s upair empire, Sheik that could just trump backair kill you at 70, all these broken characters -- Yoshidora was destroying people over there. That’s why Japan had Yoshi at No. 3. 

There are results that are out there. Nikes at the Australian National made second as Yoshi. He lost to Ghost. These are solid placings and results, but just because our Yoshi’s can’t travel to some of these bigger tournaments, we don’t show up. So they say, “oh, there’s no Yoshi that placed!” Well yeah. The Yoshi’s weren’t there. 

We’re not able to make it out to all these tournaments. I live out in Texas. Raptor is in the New York area. Some of our other ones are out in Germany, Sweden and Australia, so where are you gonna find a Yoshi at?

ZeRo's Tier list had Yoshi ranked No. 27 due to a lack of results.

Do you think that’s going to change in the coming year? The only way that would change is if someone produces results so that they bump him in the tier-lists and gain popularity so that people decide to pick him up. I think that’s the only way. 

As of now, the only top-tier player you can see playing Yoshi is ESAM-- and even then, he doesn’t bust it out that much. He knows it’s not as good as his Pikachu, which is how it should be. Pikachu is his main that he practices, so he knows that’s going to be better than his Yoshi.

Do you ever feel you’re playing for your character's sake?

It’s honestly weird how I go about playing Yoshi. I do stuff purely for style points. I don’t go into something like, “I need to frame perfect this and do a perfect pivot that…” Usually I’m like, “I’m gonna egg this fool, egg him out of the egg, and imma spike him and upair him and it’s gonna look fuckin baddass.” That’s what I want to do. I want to make sure that whatever I do is gonna get the crowd goin’, “OH DANG!” You know, goin’ crazy. I love doing stuff like that; I love appealing to the crowd and making people go, “Holy Crap! That was nuts!” That’s why I have all these stupid combos that get posted on Reddit. It makes the front page and people are like, “Dude! The Wall’s nuts!” Yeah. I like to do “nuts” stuff. It’s fun to play that way. 

I’m not leaving Yoshi. I will never leave Yoshi. I will keep playing this character until I’m placing in all the big tournaments. I’m telling you, it’s gonna happen. I don’t plan on doing anything else. I get mad when I lose. I don’t like to be mad...

Do you have any bold predictions heading out of the patch?  I have some interesting information about the patch that I’ve said to some people -- I haven’t really proved it on a stream, yet. I made a video showing me doing it-- It’s a small combo video-- But I’m almost positive Yoshi downthrow got a knockback reduction, meaning at higher percents I can actually true-combo from a downthrow into upair and get kills.

I’ve done it to people online, but i’ve never done it on a stream or in public. Some people think I’m lying. They say it’s placebo. Well, it’s rage-dependent, DI dependant, it’s character-weight dependent. There’s a whole bunch of bull that goes into it, but it’s there and it’s possible.

I can link you a video. The very second kill of the video is me doing the combo on a Dark Pit and killing him. It was a true-combo. He couldn’t get out of it in any way. I’ve done it. I told people; I told everyone in the Yoshi discord. I was like, “Hey, this is a thing. Test it out!” 

Everyone was like, “This feels different man.” Then other people came back and thought I was lying. If you don’t want to add that to your kit, then that’s your problem. 

As for the patch notes, I’ve talked to the guys that do them. Yoshi’s the last character that they look at. You’re gonna see all the characters lineup with everything, and then FINALLY, they’ll do something with Yoshi. The other thing is that they don’t always catch everything. A lot of things that they’re reporting right now happened last patch. The weight changes with Sheik, ZSS and Rosa, I think, happened last patch.

They’re not looking at characters that are mid-tier. They’re looking for changes that are controversial.

Any final thoughts?

If you want to learn Yoshi, feel free to hop into the discord. You can find me on Smash Boards. I’m /u/Zefwano on Reddit. I’m always willing to help people out. I’ll play friendlies. You can give me video footage and I’ll tell you what you need to change. I’d be totally excited for more Yoshi players! We need to increase the Yoshi tribe, and the empire needs to rise! I'm sponsored by Smash United. You can find their stream at Twitch.tv/SmashUnited. We'll be hosting Melee, PM and WII U Battleground 2. CLG Nakat is flying out, and you'll be able to see Megafox and other great Texas smashers on-stream.

You can check out my stream at Twitch.tv/TheWallYoshi. I'll be streaming Smash 4 WED-SAT from 5-8 pm. I'm also streaming Pokken because the game is awesome. I play Sceptile, of course. Gotta rep the green dragon empire! My Twitter is @TheWallYoshi.

The Wall also answered questions from the Yoshi mains Subreddit. You can hear what he had to say here. 

If you enjoyed this piece, connect with the author at @ESHSmitty.