Juan “Hungrybox” DeBiedma has called out fellow Melee legend William “Leffen” Hjelte after he insisted that there should be additional rules that don’t allow Hungrybox to stall games with Jigglypuff.
At the Ludwig Smash Invitational, Leffen sat down with Ludwig after losing to Hungrybox to demand the rules be fixed. He said that players shouldn’t be allowed to “not interact for five minutes straight.” He compared it to banning other stall tactics, like Peach’s bomber stall.
But Hungrybox pointed out in a recent video that Peach’s bomber stall was banned since she was doing it underneath the stage where no other character could safely reach her. On the other hand, Hungrybox is often jumping around on the side of the stage, which is “reachable by every character.”
Hungrybox is notorious for his unpopular stalling technique, where he uses Jigglypuff to remain at a safe distance from opponents for long periods of time. It’s his way of controlling the stage until he feels he has set the opponent up to be rested or comboed. This is very obviously not popular with most competitors or viewers, who want to see two fighters really going at it.
Leffen has called out Hungrybox for this behavior in the past. He has even gone so far as to call for Jigglypuff to be banned completely.
But Hungrybox decided to stand up for himself in a YouTube video on the subject matter, titled “My response to Leffen.”
To the confusion of Hungrybox, Ludwig compared his playstyle to Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa’s Twitch strategy. He explained that you can keep drawing lines on what Hungrybox does but he will always find a new way. Hungrybox agreed, jokingly asking Leffen if he didn’t want Jigglypuff to jump at all.
In the past, official tournaments added a ledge grab limit aimed at Hungrybox specifically. This limited the amount of time that Hungrybox could mess around on the edge to force him into having interactions. But this is apparently not enough for Leffen, which had Hungrybox questioning: “Am I crazy or is this real-time goal post pushing?”
Hungrybox pointed out that all of the matches against Leffen were under four minutes, meaning he wasn’t stalling aggressively.
But in the interview, Leffen told Ludwig: “There’s no character in the game that can time out Puff.”
Hungrybox pointed out in his response that he’s been timed out by Yoshi main Masaya “aMSa” Chikamoto, proving that other characters can use his same techniques in some circumstances. His fans jokingly called on Yoshi to be banned from competitive Melee.
In the end, Hungrybox had this message to Leffen: “This was the first time I beat Leffen in two years. Every time he’s beaten me, laser camped me, have I said the system is wrong and I want to change the ruleset? No, I say he’s better and I’m worse. And that I’ll get better. Then the one time I finally beat him… He comes here and says the reason I won is the ruleset. It’s been 16 years. We’re all great at the game. We’re both old enough and mature enough at this point to appreciate that we’re both very skilled. It’s not about abusing a rule set. It’s about getting outplayed.”
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