Getting My Butt Kicked At EVO Was Some Of the Best Fun I’ve Had This Year

Now, let’s be honest- the pandemic has been, pretty much, a net negative for the world at large. While some people discovered sourdough or crochetting, you can’t deny that things have been pretty much garbage since meeting people face to face started to carry a potential death sentence.

Despite that, there was one bonus- EVO, the largest fighting game tournament in the world, opened its doors to the world with an online tournament, no longer bound by your ability to book a hotel room in Vegas. With the release of Guilty Gear Strive and Arc System Works’ embracing of good netcode, it was the perfect year for someone to actually have the audacity to march into essentially the SuperBowl of fighting games with nothing more than a strong sense of audacity.

And that I did. It’s a fun story to tell your cats when you’re older after all, and exemplifies what EVO’s supposed to be about- a tournament anyone can join, and anyone can win.

The Sign-Up Process

Sign-ups were pretty simple, just using the Smash.GG website to input my username, as well as making sure I was signed up for the right region. This was the first warning that maybe not everyone was feeling the hype for EVO this year, since at first I remembered remarking that South East Asia and Japan had their own separate tournaments. Since all participants had to join the EVO discord, which had its own channels by region, it was pretty easy to see who else was joining the SEA tournament.

After sign-ups closed though, it looked as though the Asia region had merged with the Japan tournament. No official reason was given, but considering I’d never seen another SEA participant, I can only speculate that not many people had signed up for the SEA tournament, so those who did were simply moved into the greater Asia tournament.

As the date grew closer, the group chat became a lot of fun- there were general channels for EVO overall, as well as a global Guilty Gear channel, and it was nice to talk to all the other first-timers and otherwise non-SonicFox participants, all equally nervous about joining such a big tournament.

Everyone was really nice too, as we shared stories about bad losing streaks, whined about our gripes with our characters, and even pulled each other up whenever someone was feeling down (I’ve personally whinged about my own bad losing streaks there, only to meet some encouraging people who said it’s ok to take a break from climbing ranks).

The Brackets, And Managing Expectations.

The Brackets were announced ahead of the tournament, and that’s where EVO really started to feel real. Despite my own love for Guilty Gear, I’ve never been too big into esports- outside of a few big names like SonicFox and Daigo I couldn’t really name any big fighting game players. Imagine my surprise when my friend texts me saying he’s been looking at my bracket, and that I’d be facing off against a big player if I survived my first round.

I mean, let’s be real- entering EVO was like asking the hottest girl to dinner: it’s about having the guts to do it, even if you don’t get very far you can say you tried. If I got sent to losers bracket on my first match I wouldn’t have minded it as much, so knowing that the second round (which is where higher level players were automatically seeded to) would have been a massacre suddenly gave me some solace. That being said, losing’s never fun, and I suddenly got hit by fantasies of being laughed at on stream about getting perfected by a top-tier Anji player and someone saying something mean like “did he even bother to plug in his controller?”

Duel 1: Low-Self Esteem Vs The Eternal Fear Of Being Made Fun Of By A Streamer

I should point out at this time, I was using the free time I had after work to practice where I could- I suck at labbing (using practice mode to study), so I was learning new game plans by just hitting the ranked towers and praying I would get matched with opponents playing characters I was bad at like May, Chipp and Millia so that I could get more matchup knowledge in.

The desire to not potentially be made fun of on stream also developed a new nervous habit, in which I started sweating more. As a result I started wearing gloves while I play, first using a pair of winter gloves from my time in the UK while waiting for my fingerless gloves to arrive online.

Of course, both of these lead to one major blow against my self-esteem- in my attempts to learn-by-failing, I’d gotten my online tower rank in Guilty Gear bumped all the way down to floor 5 (the game starts you at 6) because I was just hanging out on floor 8 getting my teeth kicked in by all the players who already knew the matchup better than I did.

Admittedly, at some points I felt like I was going to burn out here- I could go entire evenings never winning a single game, and even when I tried moving down a floor to 7 or so I was so psyched out that I was still losing more than half my matches. The lessons from here are worth their own article, but basically at one point I wanted to play a musou game instead just so I could hit buttons and become a harbringer of death without worrying about being hit by wake-up Mortobato.

Even all the advice videos weren’t an instant cure like I’d hoped, and I realized that one way or another, I was going to need to study. Even if I can’t lab something properly, I could at least read on it in theory first. I started watching a lot of tournament footage of players like SonicFox (who would place 2nd in the NA division), noting down every solution they had for every problem they faced.

When I did get around to labbing, I also played around with Roman Cancels more- Leo is a mixup-heavy character, so I needed to have more than two tricks up my sleeve if I really wanted to catch people off-guard. The most tricky thing I wanted to do was a combo which required hitting the roman cancel right after Leo’s Eisensturm reversal, before using the slowdown to have time to activate Turbulenz, letting Leo juggle the enemy and carry them into the corner if they weren’t careful.

The First Week of EVO

Now, EVO Online 2021 had a pretty unique situation in that the event was split up over two weekends. Rather than do one game, one weekend (for example all the Street Fighter tournaments being held on the same weekend), it was pretty confusingly spread out, with some regions having their tournaments on the first weekend while other regions had theirs on the second. The result was having an almost peek into the future, seeing the reaction to the first weekend ahead of my own.

Unfortunately, it didn’t bring too much good news- for one, we’d learned that Pools wouldn’t be streamed, which was a big bummer for anyone hoping to get their name mentioned for a quick shot of 30 seconds of fame (like me). On the other hand, it was also a huge relief for anyone worried about being casually ribbed by Jiyuna at a time when their self-esteem might be in danger (like me).

The other takeaway from weekend one was that people were, largely, unhappy with how EVO was being run this year. Marketing wasn’t great, with many people not even realizing the same event that brought us The Daigo Parry was being held this year at all, and a lot of players just not showing up to their matches, instead being disqualified.

Somehow, this manifested in the form of even more nerves. The night before the big tournament I found myself desperately scrolling through Dustloop, echoing my high school days of suddenly being inspired to cram hours before being let into the exam hall.

Editor’s note: EVO is a double-elimination tournament, meaning losing your first match gets you sent to Loser’s bracket, where you still have a chance to fight your way back to grand finals. Losing the second time gets you out for good.

Duel 2: Actually Playing Your Matches

When it came to game day itself, the tournament was really well organized (thanks, admins). We had to check-in half an hour ahead of our pools, and admins on Discord would announce when we could start our next matches, with the early Pools matches being a best of 3. Admittedly, there was some confusion due to the international nature of the event- my first match was against a Japanese player, and basically all our messages had to be done via DeepL.

That being said, the matches themselves were stunning. Thanks to the nature of working netcode, all of my matches went off without a hitch, with no lag spikes causing any drama.

Of course, I was nervous- in my head, everyone who joins EVO is basically practicing all day every day, and here I was skipping days because of flimsy excuses like “I’m too tired from having a full-time job” or “If I don’t use this time to do my laundry I won’t have shirts to wear for tomorrow”.  In my head, I was going to somehow get Instant-Killed so badly I wouldn’t even be sent to loser’s- and the thought of getting blown up that spectacularly was definitely at risk of getting in my head.

Funnily enough, once the round starts, you don’t really think about it as much. Worrying about failure is only a distraction from properly timing your DP, and at the end of the day the only thing you can do is your best.

A player who didn’t show up became my free ride all the way to winners Round 3, where I faced off against a Celestial-tier Leo player. At this point I pretty much accepted I wasn’t getting any further, but did my best and managed to walk away with a single round to my name. Mirror matches are like, one of the most embarrassing ways to go, because sometimes you really do just accidentally mistake your character for someone else’s, meaning the room for mistakes is that much higher.

As naturally as rain falls, I got knocked into Loser’s bracket from here. Suffice to say I did my best, and I think taking a round at all probably saved me a little bit of face (again, in my head imaginary commentators were constantly talking about how I should have just put down my controller and brewed some tea). Plus, thanks to Double Elimination rules I still had a shot of advancing at least one more round, until a certain Mr Badguy showed up, anyways.

My next match in loser’s was against a Sol player, who played an absolutely top-notch game. Sol is one of my worst matchups ever- I don’t fight very many of them, and the ones I do either let me get away with things that shouldn’t practically work or complete masters of the character who can counter everything I try. Thankfully I avoided being perfected and even got a round in, but sadly I was eliminated just in time to think about lunch for myself.

Hanging Out With The Community

Honestly, I expected to sulk a lot more about EVO. Instead, getting as far as I did felt more like a validation of the amount of time I’d spent playing the game- I’ve literally been playing since before the game came out (thanks, early review copy), and being able to say I joined a big tournament like EVO felt like I finally had some bigger justification outside of “I like it when the combo gets done” (not that I needed one). By 3pm that day I was already back in the tower playing more matches, no longer worrying about things like my tower rank.

A few days after EVO, the group chat was also still pretty bustling, with lots of people venting similar feelings of relief. Some of them were taking the opportunity to blame the game, of course, arguing some characters were broken, some underpowered, but  for a lot of the chat I think we were just casuals who decided to take a leap and finally have the answer of “how far could we go?”.

Of course, there were criticisms of the event itself to be had- like I said before, a lot of people were unhappy about Pools not being streamed, some were unhappy about the format- changing to best-of-5 later in the tournament felt strange, with some players, like NA Guilty Gear Strive champion Hotashi, hoping for a best-of-5 tournament instead:

“An online 2/3 Strive tournament was painful and anxious, and made things very intense in an unpleasant way. Watching my friends who are as strong as me perish in bracket so quickly was sad to see. I’d love if large tournaments stuck to a 3/5 format the whole way”, he says.

Feeling Good About Losing, At The End Of It All

Considering I waltzed into an event with no hope of winning and walked away placing 129th/359, I’d say EVO was a lot of fun. Sure, some may argue having half your wins be by disqualification and getting violently ejected by losing two sets in a row could be discouraging, but in the road to EVO I’d lost so many games it became way easier to look at the games objectively- I went up against a mirror match with a player objectively leagues ahead of me, and found that we were using a lot of the same solutions to our problems. Sure, he used them better than me, but it means I wasn’t just mashing buttons for nothing.

It’s sort of validating in a way- sure, I wasn’t good enough to win, but I was good enough to not be washed out entirely. The core tenet of most Shonen anime was true, sometimes it really is just about trying your best. The best bit is after that I just had friendly games with my friend online, so it really does just feel like Guilty Gear is a fun hobby that I just so happened to take mega seriously for one weekend.

That reflection aspect is definitely the key to enjoying your hobbies even after a blowout- I knew I was never going to be Asia Regional Champion, so I found value in other things aside from winning, in this case walking away with at least one round proved I knew what I was doing long enough to sneak in one win.

Actually hanging out with the other people in the EVO group chat definitely helped too- each region only having one winner means there’s an awful lot of people getting knocked out too, and just talking with each other about how we never expected a bunch of people with fairly mundane lives to even go to EVO, let alone advance past our first round, gives you the kind of warm fuzzies you’d only see at the end of a Disney movie.

Would I enter again next year? Depends if I can get the PTO to fly to Vegas.

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