Well EVO Japan 2019 has just wrapped, the event, in its second year since its conception, was a massive fight fest with many fighting games, the likes of Street Fighter V, Tekken 7, and Of course KOFXIV.
Now before we go ahead and recap the important SNK related moments that took place this weekend, let’s first address that giant elephant in the room: there was no new Samurai Shodown info, announcement, nor trailer! So there is that. But hold on I take that back a bit back, there WAS a slightly touched up version of the first Trailer we got back in October. It’s the same footage but just with more blood. This was very strange as everyone thought EVOjapan would be a great venue to advertise a game like samurai shodown. But i am sure SNK had their reason for not showing the game. The game producer yasuyuki Oda took it to twitter to as the fans to juts a little bit longer for new Samurai shodown info.
During the first two days, SNK held the biggest booth of the event, where they were selling different SNK related merchandise, as well as having Samurai Spirits standees as a reminder that Samurai Shodown is indeed coming in 2019, with the gory version of the trailer playing. There was also a standee of Galford and Poppy that allows visitors to put their faces in it and pretend to be one of the two fan favorite characters.
There was also an SNK heroines announcement trailer for steam, That is correct, SNK Heroines Tag Team frenzy is indeed coming to PC via Steam, and that is this week on the 21st of February.
Steam版 #SNKヒロインズ、2019年2月22日配信開始!#SNKHeroines Steam Version will be released on Feb 21, 2019 (PST)
Stay Tuned for more info! pic.twitter.com/eUAlK9UWAx— Gatoray (@gatoray_kof) February 15, 2019
The giant SNK related event within EVOJapan2019 is of course The KOFXIV tournament. Over 100 players from around the world battled each other for the title of EVOJapan champion. This was also the first major event using the Version 3 of the game. First thing to mention, is how diverse the characters used in the tournaments were compared to previous tournaments where every payer was using Najd and Heidern, or shunei. Thanks to the latest balance update we had all sorts of characters, we had Choi, we had Roberts, we had Kims, Iori’s and Blue Mary’s. This was really refreshing and really showed how a game can get better with each season or iteration, unlike some other famous games, which I love, but has been gotten worse with each version, ahem street fighter V ahem.
The KOFXIV tournament was fileld with twists and turns, Both previous KOf champions, Xiaohaia and ET were sent to Losers brackets leaving an all japan winners side, which is something we have not seen in a while. With Xiaohai been elimated after losing to SR’s beast team Of Kim, Leona and Gang -il. ET on the other hand made it to the finals against M’ but ultimately lost 3-0 to the M’s offensive strategy. You can check the entire top 8 KOFXIV tournament in the video below:
On the side tournaments front, which are tournaments not part of the main EVO Japan 2019 lineup, we had some for for Samurai Shodown V Special, Samurai shodown VI, and Buriki one? Anyway, the streams for these side tournaments were either non-existent in the case of Buriki One, or of very bad quality, in the case of the Samurai shodown games. So unfortunately we do not have results, on who won what. But you can watch the Samurai shodown V Specila tournament below:
Watch ジーカム和白サムライスピリッツ対戦会 from gcomwajiro on www.twitch.tv
Well that about wraps it up for this very quick EVOJAPAN2019 Recam SNK edition, hope you enjoyed it!
