The games that headlined the stages were Ultra Street Fighter IV, Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, Mortal Kombat X, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, Killer Instinct, Tekken 7, Guilty Gear Xrd, and Persona 4 Arena Ultimax.
Though I was there to watch the fighting games, I found myself most enjoying the side tournament of Catherine, the puzzle game from Atlus. Catherine had a bit of a competitive scene some years ago mainly in northern California, but due to some recent interest it managed to get a side tournament at Evo this year. I always had a massive interest in this game when I tried a demo of it near its release back in 2011. The tower climbing gameplay really caught me and I was very interested to see competitive play of it since my main exposure to competitive scenes are primarily fighting games. The tournament started off a bit slowly but quickly gained some traction when some experienced players got on the pads. Marvel and Skullgirls player Dacidbro was a surprise entry and he played excellently. The glitched crumples were insane and the constantly fighting between players when they should've been climbing. I didn't catch all of the tournament, but it was a fun watch.
I wasn't interested in Marvel, Melee, or Guilty Gear, watched a little bit of Persona 4, Mortal Kombat X, Killer Instinct, and about half of the Skullgirls tournament. The majority of my attention were on Smash 4, Catherine, Tekken 7, and Ultra Street Fighter IV.
Smash 4 had some all around ok gameplay. Dabuz's Rosalina held it down like usual. I'm mad I missed the Pacman hydrant KO on Pikachu. The strict rules on stages and items still bugs me. I wonder if it will ever go away. It was refreshing to watch Killer Instinct as I have watched very little of it after the game's release and apparently the game got a lot of DLC characters. Riptor, Maya, Cinder, Fulgore, Spinal, and a mummy character were the new ones I saw.
Tekken 7 was the game I was looking forward to most. Tekken is my number one fighting game and with this being 7's first appearance at Evo, I made sure to watch. Instantly I started to long for the days when I used to spend countless hours playing Tekkens 5 and 6. I had even competed competitively in 6 for a couple years and took third place in a state tournament. Back to the tournament at hand, the competition was good. There were some fierce players and I was more critical to the players actions in this game and no match-ups were unappealing to me. The grand finals had came down to two Japanese players. I can't recall the names of the players, but one was a Dragunov player and the other was an Alisa player, who was my secondary in Tekken 6. The Alisa demonstrated great footsies and maximum damage output for the most part, but his downfall came to using the rage arts. Alisa's rage art appears to hit high and at an odd angle and his opponent was a Dragunov player and Dragunov's tend to duck a lot. Every time he activated Dragunov would crouch allowing for a free combo. He should've just not used the rage art period and he might have taken the trophy home. It also seemed a little embarrassing when he was on stage and it looked like he was crying. Overall, that was a fantastic tournament.
Ultra Street Fighter IV the main event, had some great players as well. Filipino Champ, NuckleDu, Tokido, and Infiltration all put in work, but the grand finals came down to Momochi and Gamerbee. While I like the game, I decided not to watch the grand finals as Momochi plays Ken and Gamerbee mains Adon. I don't have a particular interest in either character and despite Gamerbee also using Elena, I didn't deem it worth it to stay up even longer to watch it. Before the finals Capcom presented the trailer for the newest addition to Street Fighter V named Necalli. He appears to be Aztec influenced and a rushdown character. I found nothing appealing in his visual design or in what we saw of his moveset. There will be three more original characters to look forward to, so I'm not all that disappointed.
This Evo all in all was a great experience and I look forward to next years and my eventual attendance to the event.
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