Evo 2022 Announcement Thoughts

I’ve missed every discourse cycle for the past few months and god damn it I will not miss this one when there is #content to be created.

Anyway, here are my scattered thoughts on some of the bigger announcements that were made at the 2022 edition of Evo, everyone’s favourite fighting game trade show masquerading as a tournament.¹

Capcom

Capcom revealed two new characters for the upcoming Street Fighter 6 – Juri Han and Kimberly. I’ve already been fairly impressed by what Capcom is doing with the game itself, so for the first time in a long time I’ve been looking forward to seeing what a new Street Fighter game has in store.

Juri is a very expected addition – she’s a very popular character, especially among the significant coomer subset of the FGC, and doubly so now that she’s been given a brand new e-girl visual touch-up. Gameplay-wise, I’m glad that she seems to be a little bit closer to her Street Fighter IV incarnation, though presumably with enough of her Street Fighter V design elements to make her a fusion of the two. I’ve heard reports that she doesn’t require Fuhajin charges in order to perform the requisite attacks, and that Fuhajin charges only power up the attacks, which sounds like a really fun change for the character.

I already really like Kimberly. Granted, I’ve got a bias towards the series’ Bushinryu practitioners – Guy is still one of my favourite characters in the series. That said, even with her sneaker ninja pedigree, Kimberly looks like a really fun take on the character style that really leans into the street art kind of aesthetic that Street Fighter 6 as a whole is representing. I love the use of the spray paint cans as her version of a “torinoko” smoke bomb, and her trailer shows off a lot of the fun things you can do with the game’s juggle system.

Overall, I’m pretty excited to see what Street Fighter 6 has in store for us!

Arc System Works

Here Comes Daredevil! Bridget enters Guilty Gear Strive

Y’know, for once, I can’t bring myself to be a grump about new Guilty Gear Strive content.

If you’re anywhere near the internet, you’ll know that Bridget was announced as the game’s newest playable character – a fan favourite, to be sure, so her return was a very welcome one. And as the pronoun I just used would imply, Bridget – now in series canon a trans woman – has brought about basically an entire week of widespread gender euphoria, especially with her presence in the game alongside Testament, who is now firmly established to be non-binary.²

Guilty Gear Strive is a game whose design goals offend almost every sensibility I have as a fan of the franchise, but the gameplay is as far as my disdain for it goes. As more and more characters have been added to the game, I’ve come to appreciate just how much thought and care is put into the visuals, the character designs, the narrative and how the characters are portrayed within that narrative. I adore the game’s primary theme: “the most difficult thing is to be yourself, but ultimately you will find more joy in that honesty with yourself than in anything else”, and the last couple of character additions have really allowed that theme to resonate with so many people so much more explicitly than it may have before.

Will I miss Roger Rush? Sure. But for once, I’m hardly convinced that it matters. I hope everyone who loves Guilty Gear Strive continues to find more to love about it.

Dragon Ball FighterZ acquires netplay

…eventually. There’s no date on it yet, but Dragon Ball FighterZ will be getting an update sometime in the (hopefully) near future that will upgrade the game’s online infrastructure to use rollback netcode. I don’t really have a horse in the DBFZ race, but man – after everything those guys have been through, the least they deserve is playable online.

A new online tournament circuit for Granblue Fantasy Versus

Bandai Namco

Get ready for more Tekken

Bandai Namco concluded the Tekken 7 grand finals with a trailer announcing the return of the Tekken World Tour, and with it, a new balance update. This update, like others before it, seems intent on bringing the game’s current focus on strong counter-hit tools and explosive offense to the forefront, with a handful of characters gaining new launchers and situations for guaranteed hits and the like, as well as the addition of a brand new wall stagger mechanic, which appears to create a situation where the opponent has to deal with a pure mid/low 50-50 mixup. My outsider’s perspective initially took ire with the addition of even more counter hit launchers as Tekken 7’s only apparent means of making characters stronger, but a friend of mine (and actual Tekken player) Valerie made a pretty convincing argument for the egregiousness of the new wall stagger mechanic – after all, Tekken 7 is a game that already has a crazy number of situations where your options are either “guess” or “die”, and it’s hard to feel excited at the prospect of the game adding one more of them. But I suppose we’ll have to see how it pans out.

But before you get much time to think about the implications of this new mechanic, you hear the song that plays in all of Tekken: The First One’s endings. Suddenly, you’re watching Kazuya’s ending, as his stiff, low-poly model tosses Heihachi’s equally low-poly model off a cliff. And as the camera zooms in on Kazuya’s face, ready for the most beautiful smile in all of fighting games, a hard cut – it’s contemporary Kazuya, seemingly rendered in Unreal Engine 5. A disembodied voice simply says: “Get Ready.”

So I guess Tekken 8 is somewhere in the production pipeline. Presumably we’ll get more details later, but man. What a trailer that was. I mean, I’m mostly just biased because I think that Kazuya’s Tekken ending FMV is an extremely important piece of FGC history, but I dunno, it worked on me. Let’s see what Bandai Namco have to say after TWT finals in February.

SNK

Samurai Shodown acquires netplay

I’ve told this story a million times before; I really tried with 2019’s Samurai Shodown. And not for nothing – the game had pretty broad appeal in my local fighting game scene. Easy to pick up with a friendly learning curve, fun characters and a tense, visceral match pace that always kept things interesting. Unfortunately, the game was held back by the lack of a PC port (most players in my scene play on PC at home) and even worse, god-awful online play.

So SNK is teaming up with Code Mystics to bring rollback netcode to Samurai Shodown by 2023. And more than the fact that people still want to play the game, and that I might get the chance to support the game as a commentator and tournament organiser once more, the thing that makes me happiest is that SNK didn’t leave the game to die after all.

The King of Fighters XV gets its next roadmap

The King of Fighters XV has been doing pretty well for itself, matchmaking issues notwithstanding. The game has already gotten a decent amount of support, with Team South Town (Geese, Billy, Yamazaki) and Team Garou (Rock, Gato, B.Jenet) already being released, and EVO gave us a little bit more. First, a trailer that more or less celebrates the release of Team Awakened Orochi (the Orochi versions of Chris, Yashiro and Shermie)³, and then reveals the next DLC team – Team Samurai, a guest team consisting of Samurai Shodown characters Haohmaru, Nakoruru and Darli Dagger. On top of all this, we also got confirmation of a second season of DLC teams, with two character confirmations – fan favourite series veterans Shingo Yabuki and Kim Kaphwan. Both of these additions are notable, since Shingo hasn’t been in a KOF game since The King of Fighters XI in 2005, while KOFXV marked the first time that Kim wasn’t in the base roster of a KOF game at all.

Also, they confirmed that all versions of the game will be able to crossplay with each other by 2023. So that kicks ass! It’s good to be a KOF fan.

The legend of the hungry wolf continues

A new Fatal Fury (or Garou) game has been greenlit. So far, all we know is that it exists, as well as its key art and new rendition of Terry’s theme “Sunrise on the Train” suggesting that the game will be a narrative sequel to 1999’s Garou: Mark of the Wolves. That’s cool! I really hope it isn’t a gameplay sequel, though.

Fatal Fury is a series that has done a lot of really weird stuff by 2D fighting game standards, focusing on using 2D graphics to recreate an almost 3D fighting game dynamic thanks to its “line sway” system with two to three layers on the screen characters can occupy, and in the case of the Real Bout Fatal Fury games, a surprisingly extensive set of character-specific target combos and chain routes which allowed for very flexible offense and combo conversions. While I don’t think that Garou’s mechanical contributions should be left out entirely – I think that the T.O.P. system and Just Defend mechanics in particular are really interesting and fun – I think making the game play like a slightly expanded Mark of the Wolves would be doing the game a disservice, since it wouldn’t really be doing a whole lot to differentiate itself from The King of Fighters. And to be completely honest, I think the FGC needs more weird fighting games anyway, so a new Fatal Fury game would be perfectly positioned to be just that by embracing the history of its predecessors.

Conclusion

Fighting games are cool. I hope you had a good time.