Online Fight Club? European Online Series? European Team League? All this series have one thing in common. Or more likely – one person: MPhantasm. A man who carries European online scene on his shoulders.
Nickname: MPhantasm
Twitter: @MPhantasmF
OFC server: discord.gg/QtyN4AA
Birth Year: 1994
Country: Russia
If you had to introduce yourself in three sentences to some SoulCalibur player who didn’t know you, what would you say?
I’m a friendly Russian that decided to show my passion for the game by organizing online events for players of European region.
Probably best known for creating European Online Series (alongside with Baddy and skeiider), Online Fight Club and European Team League.
Sometimes you can also find me pulling off upset wins against good players with my wild Seong Mi-Na!
What is the origin or meaning of your nickname?
When I was trying to sign up for some MMO I decided to look for a new nickname since previous one turned out to be the name of some Japanese game publisher. I was playing Soulcalibur IV a lot, so the first thing that came to mind was theme of Phantom Pavillion stage called “Phantasmagoria”. It appeared to be too long for a nickname and as expected just “Phantasm” was already taken, so I added “M” in the beginning of it to get my initials as first two letters. I expected to pass all uniqueness checks in the world, but who could have thought there was already some firefighter from USA with the same nickname on Twitter and YouTube!
Decided to stick to it anyway.
How did it happen that you ended up playing fighting games?
Since childhood, I had tons of fun playing fighting games with friends. I enjoyed single player content of those games too, but Soulcalibur III was a truly special experience. It definitely helped my affection for the genre to reach a new level and I consider it the best game I’ve ever played up to this day.
Funnily enough, despite clearing story modes for most of fighting games since those times, I decided to get involved with the community for the first time only in Soulcalibur VI.
Who do you main in SC6 and why?
It’s Seong Mi-Na. When I have just joined the community and started learning mechanics of the game, I found out that I have been playing fighting games wrongly my whole life. I was mostly playing only Siegfried in all previous games and I thought I had to drop him to start from scratch while getting rid of bad habits.
Picking someone else was not too hard as there was a Korean waifu with a weapon I liked waiting for me. It has been a long time since then and I keep promising to try picking someone else, but unfortunately, I am too short on time to do it properly.
What is your opinion regarding SC6?
Soulcalibur series was brought back after hiatus for some reason.
I believe this reason was the same for all fighting games released around 2018-19 as everyone at the time was trying to achieve levels of success games like T7, SSBU and SFV had.
A lot of things happened since then and I think it’s okay to admit that we didn’t manage to make a breakthrough this time. It is unfortunate to not have the same popularity as some previous games of the series had, but still Soulcalibur VI is the best fighting game around. This run had two great seasons and achieved more than I personally expected.
Now I just hope we will get a final update with some “See you soon!” message.
If you could change one single thing about SC6 what would that be?
Just imagine having better graphics, more game modes and parts for CaS, improved versions of Story Mode and Libra of Souls. SCVI would have had so much more appeal for public with just a bigger budget. Sure, it may be changed for future games of the series, but I believe SCVI was the perfect spot to try spending more resources as it was a soft reboot of the series.
If we are looking at more realistic things though, an improved netcode is probably the most anticipated feature at the moment.
What do you consider to be your greatest SC6 achievement and why?
Since I have started my TO activities on June 1st of 2019 there was an event streamed roughly each 3 days (237 streams in 690 days so 34%). At the moment of release of this article my dedication and ideas helped pulling off 72 tournaments, 14 one-off/special events, 597 streamed FT5/FT10 sets and 210 more of them non-streamed.
This much would have been impossible without seeing so many people expressing their passion and appreciation while genuinely enjoying the game to the fullest. That is why my greatest achievement is bringing people from across all of Europe to work together on all of projects that are making our community a lively place.
Special thanks to all of them whether we are still working together or not.
Please answer a single question that you were not asked but you would like to answer!
FT5 sets are great. They give the best presentation of abilities, allow a much deeper mind games and are very helpful in studying the game. My first format with FT5s only was ruSCVI League. It was a massive round robin bracket that took 21 weeks to complete. With this huge event I wanted to help people to stay active and try making them more curious about the game and I believe it was pretty successful. While still doing Russian league I was getting more involved in doing EU events, so I started wondering is there a way to make to introduce more FT5 action for players outside of CIS region.
I also liked team games a lot, so I tried combining the ideas and that is how I got European Team League (ETL). The initial idea had top European players creating and managing own teams, but that surprisingly didn’t work out as they didn’t show any interest. I didn’t give up and changed the approach by reaching out to streamers of EU region instead and this turned out to be a big success.
As for Online Fight Club (OFC), I was looking for a way to create an alternative way for people to enjoy playing and watching FT5s. OFC was designed to be a very flexible event allowing players to freely sign up for days they are available on while also not having a cap on max participants, a known issue of ETL. I did a few test events, shared the idea with the others and that is how we started it.
It will surely return after ETL Season 3, so stay tuned for announcements!
Thank you for the interview!