The Final Fantasy

What do you value the most?

Honor before money. Even if there was no money, I’d still want to be Champion. - Fantasy (link to interview)

Today Fantasy announced his retirement, making him the fourth big-name player to retire in the same number of weeks. Just like Flash, Rain and MMA, Fantasy will leave his own unique mark on Brood War and StarCraft 2.

For the last few years of competitive Brood War, Fantasy was consistently one of the best Terran players in the world. He never reached the dizzying heights of Flash or Jaedong but proved that he could beat them head-to-head, so long as it wasn’t in a finals. Despite all his skill, Fantasy never dispelled the Kong curse: his only victory was against Stork in the 2010-2011 Bacchus OSL, another Kong. Still he was an incredible player. At the end of BW he was the best Terran and arguably the second best player after Jangbi.

Fantasy never stood in the spotlight for long though. When he rose through the ranks, the fans and media talked about his relationship with iloveoov and how the legend had singled him out as his successor. But when he made it to finals, he choked and watched as Jangbi, Stork, Flash or Jaedong kissed the trophy in his place. In the last Proleague finals he defeated Flash in an incredible TvT, only to get upstaged by Bisu in the ace match. When people talk about the greatest Terrans of all time Flash, iloveoov, Boxer and Nada inevitably come up before his. Fantasy was certainly respected but when compared to his contemporaries, he was always overshadowed.



His SC2 career was much less glamorous. Like all BW transitions, his move was initially greeted with exuberance and expectation from the community. Fantasy was never venerated yet he ended BW at the top of his game, and supporters anticipated a debut comparable to Jaedong or Innovation. It was a wish left unfulfilled. By the time Fantasy got used to SC2, his peak had passed. Compared to Flash, MMA and Rain, his career looks mediocre. His gameplay was too riddled with flaws to ever be championship material: Fantasy’s macro was sloppy and only got worse whenever he was forced to multitask.

Oddly enough, that flaw was what made Fantasy so compelling to watch. The reason was because Fantasy seemed to understand his own weaknesses. He could never be as clean or as sharp as even the weaker INnoVation Terran Kespa clones. Instead Fantasy went all-in on his harassment, his tactics, his grit. When you watched Fantasy play, you watched desperation incarnate. He fought for every inch, every second, to the last tooth and last nail, for every worker, every mineral. The most prominent example of this were his series against TRUE but he did it against others, most notably Rain, Shine, HyuN and soO.

Fantasy admits it even in his own interview. Even back in BW he was unwilling to give up a lost game, where he had become infamous for his “Fantasy GG” timings. His remarkable stubbornness persisted in the hope that he could pull off that one miracle, that one incredible once-in-a-lifetime moment that will remain long after his retirement. For Fantasy, that game came against soO.



Strangely, Fantasy’s best SC2 year came after he had left SKT. It is widely known and accepted that the KeSPA regime is the best for training players because of its coaches, infrastructure and dedicated practice partners. After years of playing on the team with meager results in SC2, Fantasy decided to huff it with Dead Pixels to see what he could do alone.

That last year of Fantasy’s career was something else. In many ways it resembled the exact way Fantasy played games. It was tense, scrappy, ugly and bitterly fought till the end. He had no big tournament runs during this time, just a constant stream of Ro8s and Ro16s. Despite such unremarkable success he kept grinding over and over against better players, and got just enough upset wins that he landed a tiebreaker match against HyuN where he just barely won 3-2. Once he got to Blizzcon he was clearly outmatched by the competition, but still gave herO a scare before he was sent out. Fantasy’s last year of SC2 was fought with every ounce of grit and effort he had left in his body. He expected this to possibly be his last year, but was unwilling to go out without trying his hardest. Every game seemed like an attempt to grasp that miracle win, that once-in-a-lifetime incredible game.

Glance over Fantasy’s entire career and two stories emerge. The first was of a prodigy who rose to become one of the best of his generation; the other describes his descent into mediocrity and ultimately disappointment. However when you look at his games and his attitude, they coalesce into one.

I once wrote that the story of the GSL was not about the greatest players, the greatest rivalries or the greatest teams (though they are all there). It was about the insane pursuit to be the best, no matter the cost, no matter how hard the challenges. It is about players like MMA who rise and fall, only to rise again. It is about miscreants like YugiOh who utterly fail to reach Code S time and time again. Yet when Koreans were leaving Korea for easier money abroad, YugiOh refused to join the exodus. Playing in a scene without the best surrounding him was inconceivable. Honor before money, glory before reason: very few players exemplify those words, but Fantasy was certainly one of them.



That is the original Crown Prince's legacy. A player who refused to let the Gods of BW crush him, a player who tried to conquer his own weakness with pure obstinacy. Fantasy who fought tooth and nail in every game he was in, and refused to give up and roll over as long as he still had more to give. He may never be beloved like the other greats of BW, and he was nowhere close to one of the great players in SC2. Yet he had that undeniable spark of competition, that madness to pour everything into his games no matter how ridiculous it looked or how hopeless the outcome seemed. For that he will always be one of the most respected players to have ever graced our scene.