Hanabusa Lisa and Yakumo Beni Squad Up for a Near-Eight-Hour Apex Legends Session

VSPO — Hanabusa Lisa played Apex Legends for nearly eight hours on Wednesday, running ranked squads with Yakumo Beni and dexyuku in the first hours after the game’s new-season update. A guest took Beni’s place when Beni left, and the group played on through long matchmaking queues into the early hours.

Lisa began solo and said she had started the new ranked season in Silver 2. After a fifth-place finish about half an hour in, Beni joined, with the session also running on Beni’s own channel. Beni said the reset had dropped Beni from Platinum last season to Bronze, and the group put the fall down to the game’s hidden rating. The early matches doubled as a tour of the update: the Wingman pistol, which they said can now be fired from both hands and sends out two shots per click; Crypto’s drone, which now takes six seconds to recall; and the return of Lifeline’s revive shield.

“Past the four-hour mark, there’s no concentration left.” — Hanabusa Lisa, as the session wound down

The talk wandered as the hours passed. Around the two-hour mark the squad fell into a guessing game over anime theme songs, and chat filled with song titles, Gintama’s among them. About an hour later the squad came across a huge structure that three players enter to fill a gauge, and gold weapons turned up around them. Chat answered with ‘gold weapons everywhere.’

Beni signed off a little after the three-and-a-half-hour mark, saying there was a job the next morning that Beni could not be late for and that Beni would bathe and go to bed early. Chat filled with farewells. A direct message arrived at that moment from a player who had been hoping to play with other people instead of alone, and he joined the squad. He said he had not played since around Season 4 and usually practiced alone against bots in the practice range, and squadmates joked that he would be an ‘Urashima Taro,’ the Japanese Rip Van Winkle.

Queues became a running theme. At one point the on-screen counter showed more than 1,800 players waiting for a match, and the squad backed out to the lobby several times to retry. Someone quipped that Apex is really a game for talking. The counter settled in the closing hours, once the Broken Moon map was in play.

Deep into the night, one of the participants celebrated winning a fight with two guns used at once for the first time, saying they were so pleased they forgot to heal. In the closing stretch the squad finished fourth after a trade of knockouts, then third. The group had agreed to call it a night if a match ended with everyone on zero kills, and kept going. After one player left when called away and the rest traded goodbyes, Lisa wrapped up and said streams may be less frequent starting that day.