Reina and Team D4P4 Fall One Push Short in Nijisanji Overwatch Tournament

NIJISANJI — Reina and her Nijisanji teammates came up one push short in the third-place match of the #にじEX_OW Overwatch tournament on Sunday, ending their run about five hours into her broadcast. Competing as D4P4, read as “Dapa,” the team fielded Inami Rai on tank, Tsukahara Daichi and Kanae on damage, and Shiina Yuika and Reina on support, with coach Hoshimi preparing them between maps.

In interviews before the first match, Inami said the team tended to win when it was loud and that the goal for the day was to call out as much as possible. Tsukahara, appearing in the event for the first time, said he did not feel like losing, and Kanae, the Hanzo player the host described as having a unique pick, said much the same. Reina said it was her first tournament and that she had been very nervous, but that the team’s warmth had carried it through practice. “Today we win,” she said.

“It stings that we didn’t win, but I have no regrets.” — Reina, after the others had signed off

The first match ended in a near miss. The coach told the players afterward that one more stop of the opposing push would have forced a final fight. As the afternoon wore on, the group worked out how round totals would sort the standings and settled on the simplest answer: win.

That set up the third-place series against Team White, which the players had nicknamed “hakusai,” or napa cabbage. In a joint interview beforehand, Inami said he planned to cut the cabbage into quarters or fifths and put it in a pot. The series ran more than an hour past that interview and ended in the push mode, with the team a single push short at the robot. Within minutes the players were asking one another for a rematch in a week. The coach said he was impressed that they had polished a core hero pairing in only a few days.

With the bracket behind them, the group turned to custom games. Between matches they had passed the time with a dodgeball mode; now they moved to a stair-climbing game one player had been promoting since the afternoon, and scores climbed past 300 as other players filled the lobby. The team said its goodbyes around the seven-hour, 47-minute mark.

Reina stayed on to thank viewers and said the event had been more fun than she expected after an anxious start. She credited the coach for breaking advice down one piece at a time when she struggled.