Summary of what happened at EVO Japan 2025

Is the FGC under fire lately?

I don't play fighting games but all I've seen on my feed has been bad news after bad news so can we have this thread to summarize all the shit that's been happening lately?

From what I've seen this happened at EVO Japan 2025:

Guilty Gear Strive had a massive leak, source code, future dlc characters are now playable and characters from future seasons got leaked

Tekken 8 nee dlc character someone that no one wanted

Street Fighter 6 collaboration with Overwatch is yet again more avatar outfits

a Smash Melee player drove another Melee player into suicide and people are cancelling him

Playstation 5s overheated and fucked up top 8 finals

Empty VIP areas for almost every event, free standing areas were extremely crowded

Did I miss anything else?
The only two things that people are happy with are the big titty mommy character in Grandblue and that guy from Virtual Fighter

a guy shit his pants midgame in the melee semis. it's not a big deal

>a Smash Melee player drove another Melee player into suicide and people are cancelling him

QRD?

Well the finals of Strive had someone's controller disconnect constantly and someone who has been trying to win since 2016 got their win without the round ending because they assumed their opponents controller disconnected when they were walking backwards. So that was pretty funny

a guy shit his pants midgame in the melee semis. it's not a big deal

goddamn I hope this is true

We're talking about fighting games, not pokemon tournaments

a Smash Melee player drove another Melee player into suicide and people are cancelling him

nigga that was months ago and the man suffered zero repercussions. he was not canceled.

we can't stop winning granbros
and yet nobody will play our game

Again. I don't play fighting games so I'm not that caught up with the recent news
I only saw a shitton of replies shitting on this guy on Twitter

It's just so boring

I have glue eating friend that I occasionally play it with its okay game if you like never played anything else in your life

FGC

Speaking of them, no idea why the SNK thought appealing to them was a good idea.

Snk

lol I forgot about them
Why are people pissed that they put Ronaldo and a irl dj in the game?

Appealing to casuals is how you get SF6 and Strive.

Man, Nintendo fans are truly monstrous

I play fighting games and don't really give two shits about the FGC. The events haven't been that enjoying to watch ever since maybe 2015 when it became all about ad breaks and shilling the main sponsor. When it takes 3 hours to get through a top 8, you've lost the plot.

Why are people pissed that they put Ronaldo and a irl dj in the game?

Because it's the Saudis overplaying their hand for a dumb publicity stunt(or vidyawashing, as it were) with celebrities that work in the country. It's like if in Mortal Kombat instead of Peacemaker you just straight up had John Cena.

Fuck Evo

It's like if in Mortal Kombat instead of Peacemaker you just straight up had John Cena.

do you have any idea how fucking cool that sounds

evo went to shit when snoi bought it, it's only gonna get worse.

Teeken 8 dlc character is someone no one wanted

That's just the tip of the Tekken 8 trainwreck of the last couple months. Another thing bandai namco did was put out a public statement that they will no longer hire fan favorite commentators. All while the game is getting disliked bombed into hell for a patch everyone hated. There is some other shit going on as well

EVO when to shit when they banned booth ladies to be in the event

qrd of all the trainwreck?

Tie-in yurishit anime

Ronaldo and some literal who? as playable characters

The developer's self-insert no one likes being the great reveal

The big three shooting themselves in the foot in similar ways is just too funny to watch, unlike the actual tournaments.

I agree with you. SNK agrees with you. But the reaction I'm seeing from people is that Ronaldo made them avoid the game in a way that Peacemaker, Negan, Megan Fox etc never did and I don't know why the difference in public reaction

Part of it is SNK not really having live celebrities prior, always having erstatz knockoffs of them at best, so a real person suddenly being one of the main roster characters over actual SNK legacy cast that even get hinted at in the game itself (to the point that this guest dude doesn't even have a story mode of his own) gives people a very iffy feeling. The other part of it is Ronaldo having unresolved rape allegations with his own controversial statements about how the woman knew who he was and clearly wanted it before he "realized" she was actually not into it at all, which you know how the internet gets about that, so some people were quick to fling shit around.

Did I miss anything else?

Tekken and karate kid collab

All of the fighting games except ultimate had something bad happen to them

based

same shit, same faggot audience

it would be more newsworthy if a smash player didn't shit his pants desu

Fans of Mortal Kombat are fans of trashy (I hope you get what I mean) physical entertainment like wrestling or superhero movies.
Sports fans and videogame fans not only have no overlap but they're complete opposites. For example Steam is unusable in Spain right now because collusion between the Football federation and the Spanish legal system forced the ISPs to assign all their bandwidth to La Liga (the big soccer tournament) streamings and block everything else.

Evo went to shit long before Sony ever became a factor. The bridge that lead to SFV is what’s to blame

Leffen

fuck man, there was nothing this poor guy could do

the only important thing that happened

GANONDORF?

a Smash Melee player drove another Melee player into suicide and people are cancelling him

Didn't happen during EVO + Old news + I thought you were too good for Smash games? Why mention this here?

Current state of fighting games:
SF6

Game receives 1 balance patch per year and extremely slow DLC rollout other than battlehub avatarslop. Pros and casuals alike hate the casino style gameplay but since the game is massively successful you can expect no real changes. We know they're gonna buff the modern casualshit control scheme in the next patch. Also, Chipotle in-game advertisements.

Tekken 8

Devs turn the game into a casual mashfest where movement sucks and you just mash buttons pointblank. Devs then promise a patch to buff defensive play but instead buff close range aggression with several pages of changes. Instead of rolling back to the previous patch, they keep trying to fix the mess with band-aids in the wrong places that show they don't even understand the problem in the first place. Then they added one of the most hated characters as DLC while also announcing a Karate Kid collab. Also, Chipotle in-game advertisements.

ArcSys

Still supporting the old as fuck super casualized Strive with no new game on the horizon. Had their source code leaked which means the game could be hacked, which in turn means you're in danger by even trying to play online. Still has no ranked mode, they promised one soon though.

SNK

Spent God knows how much Saudi money on advertising Fatal Fury and did what everyone else is doing by adding guests. Unfortunately people have to virtue signal about the sanctity of the Fatal Fury IP being sullied by this evil rapist being added by his evil Saudi friends which makes it instantly dead in America. Rest of the world complains about no regional pricing on top of SNK's stupid decision of only selling the special edition with DLC included for $60. Overall people don't think the game justifies the price they're asking for since it doesn't look AAA.

Cont.

Look up fox rule 34

please continue, this is fun to read as an outsider to the genre

cont.

Cygames

Granblue is not doing anything wrong, but it's a simplified game with 1 button specials that gets boring fast

French Bread

UNI2 launched with bad online and that killed all their momentum

NRS

Too many things to list, but there is zero competitive interest in MK right now while casuals hate assists

Sega

Still supporting VF5, but the game has almost no players, a lot of it due to a bad launch with broken online

Riot

2xko is still vaporware and it's clear they're not even close to finishing and are rushing the game for a launch this year

Eighting

HxH looks like shit and is selling for $60 with no crossplay

Nice try

Just know that Tekken 8's season 2 patch is one of the most monumental failures in the fighting game genre ever that wasn't just a bad sequel launch. It made people go back to older Tekken games, which hasn't happened in over 20 years. It made pros quit the game en masse. No one paid for a single VIP seat at the EVO Tekken 8 showing. People are jumping off the train like it's about to crash and no one wants to get back on.

be a gigantic pimpled piece of shit your entire fighting game career

get away with everything

nothing happens

How does he do it?

Literally who

you get paid 120k/year to fix SF6, how do you do it?

I guess I can elaborate a bit about the Tekken thing. One of the complaints that the game had for example is that aggression is too powerful compared to defense. As in, people close the distance really fast, you can't sidestep away from attacks because a lot of them track, when they get close they put you into looping guess situations, things like that. And people complain about combos being too long and having way too much corner carry. As in, you get hit once in the middle of the screen then you spend then next 20 seconds watching your character get juggled into the corner, that is before even considering the cinematic supers. So the devs hear these complaints and basically say:

We hear you loud and clear and apologize! We're gonna buff defense like you asked for. Every character now has more health and attacks deal less damage!

Which results in even longer matches while solving nothing. Because people want high damage dealt by shorter combos.

Remove it from existence

>Empty VIP areas for almost every event, free standing areas were extremely crowded

Source?

Then they added one of the most hated characters as DLC while also announcing a Karate Kid collab

Please give names, who is that character?

I dunno about the rest, but Tekken 8 it's true.

Fahkumram.

Guilty Gear Strive had a massive leak, source code, future dlc characters are now playable and characters from future seasons got leaked

The next character, which releases in two weeks is already playable
Lucy, the final S4 character, is also in, but I'm not sure how complete she is (frame data is most likely gonna change if it exists)

The S5 leak isn't 100% confirmed, there is one piece of leaked concept art featuring a redesign for Jam, who's Xrd kit is playable in leaked builds iirc?
People are also saying Kum might be in S5 as she's in the game, but ArcSys has been using Xrd character to prototype other character's kits and Xrd Kum was used to prototype Strive ABA (webm related)

The leak also involves beta builds of Strive and sparse info on some projects

Daru still played like a madman, winners finals against Summit was also really fun to watch
Besides I'm calling it karma for playing a character as cheap as S4 Ramlethal

Still has no ranked mode, they promised one soon though.

They talked about it at AWT, I think it's happening in summer?
They're also updating the training mode

>Guilty Gear Strive had a massive leak, source code, future dlc characters are now playable and characters from future seasons got leaked

Who are the DLC characters

im a dumb motherfucker, that was the wrong webm, here's Kum as ABA

Answer was used to prototype Slayer

Fahkumram. Tekken was always a bit more grounded than other fighting games with few exceptions like the bears, Jack or Ogre. The series already had 2 Muay Thai characters with Bruce and his replacement Josie. The thing is that Bruce is a bit too bland, and Josie his replacement is an annoying crybaby. They're not bad or anything and have their fans, but the Tekken dev team decided to try again with a 3rd Muay Thai character for Tekken 7 as DLC. He looks completely out of place in the game, feels like they tried too hard to be edgy, his gameplay was complete cancer as if it was a preview of what Tekken 8 would become, and he was overpowered which means you saw a bunch of him at tournaments. People associate this character with cringe and bad memories. Tekken 8 has no Muay Thai characters currently, and it has a bunch of fan favorite characters or at least bland inoffensive pics they could have announced instead like Miguel, Julia, Armor King or Ogre, but at the worst possible moment they announced Fahkyourmom instead.

Last I've got is Raven who was used for Dizzy

I've always wondered: if the fighting game genre was perfected between the arcade era and the sixth console era (or at least got its definitive games), why bother making and playing new games?
Why trying to fix something that not only wasn't broken but was already perfect?
Me and most people rejected modern gaming due to being worthless so I don't understand why fighting game fans reject the idea and keep complaining about how terrible modern fighting games are.

t. Not a fighting game player but I don't think the fighting genre is any different from the rest.

2D fighters

I can't. I tried to like it so many times, but the slow movement and the constant jumping around like a retard filters me. I miss soul calibur bros...

lucy looks like a twitter oc wtf is this

HxH also has awful pricing, some countries like Mexico are paying more in their currency than actual 60usd but the game is so dead there is no fuss about it.

The way they act like players should be excited over shit like this and their Nike collaborations is pathetic.

FOMO. Everyone wants to play what everyone else is playing. People also need instant matchmaking with people at their level. Many times I've seen people reject this or that fighting game because you have to ask discord for games or because you have to wait a few minutes to get matched with someone who is already better than you. There is also the balance aspect. Old fighting games might have better gameplay according to boomers but fact of the matter is that all old fighting games I can think of are completely broken compared to the average modern game.

How would you know if the fighting game genre was perfected if you don't play fightan? Listening to bitter oldfags?

fuck thats not lucy i'm retarded

That's Unika, who is Ky and Dizzy's daughter in an alternate future timeline if I got it right

slow movement

Anime fighting games have fast movement though. I'd say 3D games have slower movement in general, though Soulcalibur's movement does feel better than other 3D games.

"it doesn`t matter i will live on, to live ... that is my redemption"
soul kinobur is so good i miss it everyday

bitch stole my gureedo seba

ask discord for games

Being forced to interact with, to beg to literal pedophiles and deviants so you can play the game you paid money for is a very good reason to not want to touch it.

A mix of veterans sticking to old games, new fighting games getting nothing but hatred and criticism, and my own experience with the genres and games I play.
That's how I know.

I’ve got the fighting game bug and was going to pick up T8 on sale, but they’ve apparently ruined the game with the latest patch and nerfed my main Lee hard

Wolf Hawkfield, the greatest wrestler in vidya

fighting game netcode hasn't been good until the last 3-4 years, before that games with good netcode tended to be either very old or very indie

PS5s overheated and fucked up top 8 finals

Is there video of this? That sounds hilarious. How often does that happen?

Multiple times across the entirety of this EVO, over and over. No joke, there were several overheat failures that disrupted several events besides just that finals. PS5 overheats are a notorious problem, their fan and structure are absolutely fucking abysmal, but people let that slip out of their minds because only EVO does big public events where it might become a notable problem.

Is there video of this?

I didn't watch Strive but people say it was the worst grand final in that aspect

gamerant.com/evo-japan-grand-final-tournament-overheating-ps5-problem/

Playstation 5s overheated and fucked up top 8 finals

I feel like we hear this story every year since the PS5 became the default way to play fighting games.
I get that air conditioning large venues with shitloads of fatasses might not be feasible, especially in Japan where air conditioning in a lot of places constitutes a hate crime, but you figure they'd get some cooling pads or more fans or something.

Sorry buddy. People play online games in communities like fighting games, smash, smogon/pokemon singles, etc. for one of two reasons: hang out with their friends, or gawk at the shit that gets stirred. No one has friends that play gbfvs, and there's never any controversy worth sticking around to rubberneck at.