Naniwa's Gameplay - A Celebration

This was originally posted in the Naniwa fanclub, page 500. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=208834&currentpage=500

Introduction

This is not an objective piece of writing. It’s not made to be featured as an article measuring pro’s and con’s. However, it is also not just an entirely subjective affair. This article is written by a fan of Naniwa and is produced to celebrate the 500th page of his fan club on TL.

Naniwa is a special creature. We debate his temper and his mindset, his BM and his skill in every LR thread in which he is featured (and in more than a few he has nothing to do with). He always conjures up an army of antifans and fans, destined to battle out with veiled or not so veiled insults and barbs. Interviews with Naniwa similarly feature discussions of things outside the game. What do you think of this player? Why didn’t you shake his hand? Typically, it appears, in the hopes of getting one of those juicy answers that Naniwa always manages to produce.

This post is not about that. This is about Naniwa’s games. This is about one of the greatest stars the foreigner scene – and Starcraft 2 as a whole – has ever produced. With that said, I am not an absolute expert on SC2 so while the post is inspired by the style of the TLFE articles on various legends of BW it is not intended to be a comprehensible or even necessarily objective view of Naniwa. I doubt that he himself would see what I have seen in his games. But by openly stating subjectivity and positioning I hope to be able to approach statements that are not merely my personal beliefs but can approach some sort of objectivity (yes, I am an epistemology nerd).

The post is divided into parts which I think Naniwa’s gameplay is centred around and which he should be lauded for.

Timing

Naniwa’s games revolve around hitting sharp timings. It could be argued that Protoss as a whole is a timing-oriented race where it’s focus on high-tech units and ability to instantly create a powerful army across the map gives it an advantage over other races. However that may be, Naniwa stands out when it comes to timing. It is what makes him look unstoppable in some situations and also what makes him look like a blundering idiot in others.

Naniwa is occasionally accused of being greedy. However, ‘greed’ is a concept which lacks explanation for the other part of Nani’s play – the early game assaults and aggression which are a prevalent style of his. Both of these, the ‘greed’ and the ‘cheese’ are both rooted in timings. Whether his build is a 10-gate into 3-gate in PvP or to expand to three bases on one gate while teching in PvT both plays are focused on producing extremely sharp timings. This puts Naniwa in an entirely other category than players like Ret or like HasuObs who are famed for their rigid macro approach.

Naniwa’s ten-gate into three-gate hits almost a minute before San’s Warp Gate is finished.

Naniwa goes for all the greed with three bases and teching on one gate vs Hack.

A trait of Nani’s is that he comes to a tournament with a small amount of builds and he does them over and over and over. These builds are just ahead of the metagame, fine-tuned to perfection to smash current styles. With only a small number of builds, however, it is a matter of time until his push through the brackets is figured out and his opponents begin to blind-counter Nani’s current repertoire. This is not to say that it is an easy matter of figuring out that the three-hatch before pool is the end-all, be-all of fighting Nani’s current style. Both Jaedong and Hyun have died to this assumption. In Starcraft, any good build has a number of forks in the road and that is particularly true of Naniwa’s builds which can start in one end and end up in a very different place depending on what he scouts or decides to do.

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Jaedong is tricked by a 4-gate aggression that never comes, making him stay on two bases and producing over 20 Zerglings.

However, it is this format of builds and style that has made him so susceptible to blind counters in the past. Naniwa wouldn’t be Naniwa without his particular focus on timings and meta-game knowledge. His high finishes and his victories are often testament to his success with this style.

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MVP cheeses Nani out of the GSL thanks to a good knowledge of Nani’s hatred of scouting and love of macro greed PvT. Thanks to 9gag where I took it from.

Let us for a moment remain at Naniwa’s blunders. It is not merely being figured out stylistically but in his poorer moments he has often appeared to be shaken. The many debates over JYP touching him, Gumiho’s retard walk, ESL computers and so on probably do have some merit to them. Naniwa is often thrown off his game by being disturbed and lacking a quiet and smoothly working playing area. Similarly there are a multiple issues relating to being tilted by his opponents. Yet, beyond all of these whatever we might think of them Naniwa’s painful blunders appear to be when he is just enough out of practice for his mechanics not to pull through. Naniwa stated in his ‘Grilled’ interview that his mechanics weren’t the most outstanding of his features. Later, on stream he makes the mention that Protoss in comparison to Zerg is a strategy/mind-game heavy race in comparison to mechanic-heavy. So when his mechanics drop, slight supply-blocks can begin to plague his build and cause havoc for timings.

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Naniwa Blinks into Monchi’s base, 30 seconds too late, right as a second Immortal pops out and his Stalkers are blown to bits.

Positioning

What strikes me when I watch Naniwa play as the most outstanding feature of his gameplay is his positioning and posturing before battle.

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Sup Zerg.

Others have argued that Starcraft 2 is a game where excitement is built up on the moments before the great engagements rather than during the battles themselves. Though we will disprove this theory in the case of Naniwa further on it does have some merit for this argument. A common sight of Naniwa’s games is a huge army, moving back and forth right before enemy bases and attempting to find a way inside. The army clumps and is spread out again. Stalkers rush forward and Blink back. Colossi move up cliffs and Archons move to intercept flocks of enemy fliers. Contrary to what one might think when we have just discussed timings it is not necessarily the case that Naniwa waits for an upgrade to finish and then just moves ASAP into an enemy base.

Naniwa’s carefulness in finding opportunities is a breath-taking, dramatic sequence of movements as his timing window threatens to close and the enemy builds up an army or tries to get out a few crucial tech units. However, more often than not Naniwa perseveres where a lesser player would soon be out-gunned. This is due to his impeccable sense of positioning and choosing the battlefield.

One of the characteristics of Nani’s play is an insane amount of stubbornness. It is an utter refusal to build an expansion in case he doesn’t need it. Naniwa rather runs out the clock than sacrifice 400 minerals that he could put into his army during these crucial battles of positioning and posturing on the map. It has caused me more than a few times to scream at the screen as Naniwa’s main base is mined out, his second is almost out and the enemy slowly becomes impossible to stop. The classical example of this is his games vs DRG in the GSL.

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After posturing on the map Naniwa snipes DRG’s third on Antiga.

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Naniwa is almost mined out by now, stubbornly having tried to finish the game prematurely.

Micro

Posturing brings us to the logical conclusion of the journey from timing to posturing to micro. Naniwa might be the best microer in the world (you don’t have to read that in the Tasteless voice). More than once Naniwa’s army has been many times smaller than an opponents and has yet found victory.

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Stephano sets up his signature Roach surround against the invading Protoss.

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Roaches swing around in three groups.

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Naniwa’s Stalkers Blink into the northernmost group and devastate them.

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The rest of the Roaches attack but the Protoss army sections it off. In moments what looked like a set-up for a full surround of Nani’s army has turned into a full rout for Stephano.

Naniwa’s games vs Life in the finals of the IEM New York 2013 is one of many examples of this. A far smaller Protoss army down in 30-50 supply faces a Zerg force. While some might now argue that this victory is about composition and positioning the fact of the matter is that these things cannot be separated in Naniwa’s gameplay. Timing, positioning and micro are perfectly entwined to maximise Naniwa’s strengths and to create compositions of armies that can beat his opponent. It cannot be separated from who he is as a player, it is what makes him get beaten by lessers and it is what makes him crush the finest of the Korean cadres.

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Naniwa’s career summed up in a picture.

From styLesdavis in my original post in the fanclub:

I enjoyed the reading a lot but i have to admit that your screenshots
of the Stephano vs Nani fight are totally misleading. Stephanos typical
max-roach Attack came near the 12 minute mark and the toss usually
had way less supply.

I just want to say that you have to be near silver level to lose a max-out
toss army against a 200-supply-roach-"force"....

Nanis micro is great but this is a total wrong example for it.

My reply:

Thank you for the critique. I think you are overall correct. However, there are multiple reasons for me choosing those screenshots:

1) This is not really about Stephano's max Roach attack. The game is from 2011 (MLG) and I wanted a broad range of games, from the early career to the later, to be in the post.

2) Sure, a Protoss composition of what Nani had is powerful vs a maxed out Roach force. But the thing that made it stand out is how easily Naniwa smashes it. In the VOD it is quite apparent, it's incredibly fast and without losing barely anything Naniwa destroys the entire army. That is what is impressive about it.

If I throw up a blog I'll include your post however, and probably my answer, because I think it's overall valid.

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