Another year, another Evo. While there were no stories quite like Hayao and "Evo Moment 38" this year, there were still plenty of great tournaments to be had. I'm quite partial to Guilty Gear Strive, and top 8, as usual, was full of inventive uses of the game's systems and characters to come up with clever plays that surprise even the likes of me, with hundreds of hours in the game. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 had its largest tournament to date, and Capcom vs. SNK 2 was in the extended lineup. It's great to see those passionate communities still playing those games 25 years later, even with plenty of new blood, though I will admit that both games fall into a situation where the top tier characters are so dominant that you don't get a lot of variety in character selection in top 8, which can dampen the excitement a bit. I also had a great time watching Killer Instinct top 8 in the extended lineup, and at least until Invincible Vs comes out, there's no other game out there with the kind of mind games it employs around combo breakers.
In Mortal Kombat 1, SonicFox won to become an 8-time Evo champion (across 6 different games), just 1 win behind the record held by Justin Wong. Somehow, even though every hit in Mortal Kombat does chip damage, lots of those final matches came down to a "magic pixel" of health left, and that's very rare for that game. I'm not much of a Tekken fan, but even I know that Arslan Ash is a force to be reckoned with, and including his Evo Japan wins, he now holds 6 Evo wins. GO1 got his second Evo win, this time in Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, and his opponent sure had some feelings about it. I don't know how much of this was a bit and how much was genuine, but it was funny regardless.
I wasn't in attendance myself, but some of the better photo ops trickled through social media, like this man who (speaks softly and?) brought a big stick. Also, here's Daigo Umehara, famous for "the Daigo parry" and "Evo Moment 37", sitting down at the Moment 37 Experience.
Plus, we got plenty of reveals. Here's a list courtesy of Jason Fanelli at GameSpot. Highlights include the first showing of Virtua Fighter 6 gameplay in a training room, a teaser for C. Viper, and the character trailer for Lucy in Guilty Gear Strive. They also teased a Guilty Gear Strive 2.0 patch for next year. I'm a big Strive fan, and I have no idea what this means; even my guesses aren't very convincing. Marvel Tokon got a closed beta announcement for September on PlayStation 5, and a lot of new gameplay came out for it. Most of my concerns (hitstun decay, incentives to tag characters, etc.) were alleviated from watching it, and now I'm quite excited for this one! Except it will still probably require PSN, so I doubt I'll be able to play online. Hopefully I'm wrong though! Even more exciting for me is the upcoming Invincible Vs, made by the team that originally made Killer Instinct 2013 for Xbox One. It will have similar combo breaking mechanics, and it looks much faster paced than the likes of Marvel Tokon or 2XKO. They announced that they're adding motion inputs to it, to accommodate people who felt like 8 buttons was too many, but hopefully they don't add some sort of drawback to using the standard inputs, like so many other games do; I want a motionless game that I'm excited about to not functionally make the motions mandatory by way of making them more optimal. Anyway, Omni-Man was announced as a playable character for the game; I know nothing about Invincible's source material, but even I knew that he was required to make the core roster, so no real surprise there.
Anything you'd like to add? Put it in the comments! I might have to go to Evo next year; I haven't been since 2022. We could have somewhere between 3 and 5 tag fighters on the official roster next year, which would be wild, and between those and Guilty Gear, I'll have plenty of games to sign up for and compete in.
