In the last couple of spring and fall seasons, Fantasy Anime League has taken place on MAL. While some people out there take this deadly seriously or devote entire pages of coverage to how they are doing in that particular edition, I haven’t much talked about my own entries into the competition. That’s because I enter each time without any sort of clue what the hell I’m doing.
Back in the spring of last year, I decided to enter with the goal of finish last by as much as possible. Mission accomplished. Actually it was probably less an accomplishment as much as no one would ever think of picking shows watched by less than 10 MAL users and targeted at small children. Now, no one can do that.
The rules changes between seasons make it quite a competition. Shows that are deemed too hyped are excluded from selection. That led to Oreimo‘s 2nd season being excluded from this past spring season. It turned out that ultimately that would not have been one of the top shows. As far as what I did that season, I put in a bunch of research to pick a team only to find that I’m quite crap at researching on the topic, so I gave up after 1 week. No need to try when the results have already been decided.
Then there is this season. I knew I was going to be tactically outclassed by…well anyone I know who would enter, I decided to take it completely out of my own hands. My entire team was selected by random number generator. My swaps and use of tactical maneuvers would be decided by random number generators. And the result is I’m set for my best finish yet.
I think from playing FAL these three times I’ve come to realize that I’m quite bad at anything competitive and I’m not very resilient to failure. You should all realize by now that’s absolutely true. Those are the ingredients that are essential to not succeeding. Anyway, I’ll try to be back tomorrow with a post that isn’t quite as depressing as that. Though no doubt it will be much more controversial than failing at a contrived game.
