Smasher:Masashi

Masashi is a Japanese Melee, Brawl , Smash 4 and Ultimate Cloud player, once considered the best Melee player in Japan per 's description. Masashi was widely considered to be the second best Brawl Pit player in Japan, after, and is considered to be one of the best Cloud players in Japan for Smash 4 and Ultimate.

He was formerly ranked 1st in the 2010 Kansai Ranking Battles and 27th on the Japan Player Rankings for Ultimate in the first half of 2019. In Smash 4, he is ranked 15th on the most recent JAPAN Power Rankings.

Melee
Masashi is an outlier in terms of Melee playstyle, and proved that one did not need to be extremely proficient at technical skill to be successful at the highest level. He did not wavedash as much as other top players (although he still knew how to use it), and mostly used simpler techniques such as dash dancing and L-canceling when needed, relying mostly on his strong fundamentals to succeed. He played a defensive neutral game that relied on Fox's excellent full hop, often doing empty ones to bait out bad approaches from his opponents before committing to any attack, or spacing out opponents with spaced back aerials. Similar to other top Japanese players at the time, he had excellent DI, to the point where even had significant trouble executing the Final Destination chaingrab on him. On the other hand, he could still string together potent punishes if given the opportunity, and his patience and uncanny ability to read his opponent's attempted tech and getup options more than made up for his lack of labbed-out punishes.

However, Masashi's inconsistency with tech skill meant he could not get as much out of certain moves compared to other Fox players in his time, such as. CaptainJack has stated that he had trouble consistently executing waveshines, which prevented him from effectively following up on the neutral aerial-shines that he would often get in a match. Masashi occasionally had trouble with these punish-heavy players himself, such as, who could exploit his slow playstyle by simply overwhelming him with tech skill.

Trivia

 * Masashi is the younger brother of, an old-school Melee player, and the older brother of , a top  and  player from Japan. They are often regarded as "The Best Smash Brothers In Japan".

Super Smash Bros. Brawl

 * Pit VOD Playlist