The Coolest Evo 2023 Announcements, According to Me

Evo 2023 was expected to deliver solid tournament play for the main stage fighting games chosen, and it delivered on that promise… mostly. Several final bouts were limper than I hoped for going in. Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3’s Winners Finals showed how the top players knew precisely which characters were best, while Tekken 7’s Kunimutsu mirror qualified for the title of “Mid-Ass Tekken.” Guilty Gear Strive’s finals, however, were too one-sided. All respect to the players, though, who trained and fought hard to be in the positions they’re in.

The event fortunately ended on a high note with Street Fighter 6, which had several sets that were better than the entire finals for the other games in its top 6, in a fantastic showing for its first major tournament.

It also delivered on another front: The announcements. My original plan was to post about all of them here, but I then started being honest with myself and looked inward. “Is anyone going to read a post about all the announcements days after they happened?” The hell they aren’t. There is no point to doing that, so my plan this year is to talk about the announcements that stuck out to me, Geoffrey “DioSenrab” Barnes, the most. I think that’s an acceptable compromise.

(There’s no guarantee that anyone will read this post, either, but I might as well have fun with it.)

It would have been a surprise if Capcom didn’t show new character A.K.I. during Evo, and they did… kind of. The teaser provided a glimpse at the personality of the second character coming as part of the Fighter Pass, who will compete with Juri in terms of her deranged and literally toxic personality. They might get along well, and Juri’s fans might approve of her if they can put up with not seeing her bare feet, though it would also make sense if the two characters were rivals considering Juri’s slight anti-villain bend in the last two Street Fighter games. But there was nothing beyond that. Rashid only released a couple of weeks ago, so chances are the development team hasn’t finished implementing her move set. A.K.I. is still due for a fall release, so it shouldn’t be long before she’s shown.

Meanwhile, skins for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, of all characters, are available in SF6’s World Tour mode as part of a collaboration. The skins themselves, however, go for the equivalent of a ridiculous $15 each. You could buy another game and play the actual Turtles for the price of all those skins, like Nickeloden All-Star Brawl 2.

The character reveals continue to come rapidly for Mortal Kombat 1, through the new “Banished” trailer that confirmed Reptile, Ashrah, and Havik. Reptile returns to his humanoid form, and I’m crossing my fingers that he won’t be a jobber like he was in the previous Mortal Kombat universe. A certain crop of Twitter users also finally got their wish through the return of Ashrah, who returns with her giant hat as an option. Now that they have her and Li Mei, they’ve now moved to wishing for Nitara. Perhaps that one will be granted to.

Geras was also confirmed to return prior to Evo. I just wanted to note that.

The apprentice Raven returned for Tekken 8, because the franchise was unlikely to keep not-Blade (and, thus, not-Wesley Snipes) away for long. He could be reprised by one of his earlier voice actors, but… nah, there’s no way Bandai Namco has their fingers so far away from the pulse that they’d have a while guy voicing a black character in 2023 (and 2024, since this game is unlikely to arrive this year), right? Considering the netplay quality in the last closed beta, they might. Granted, Ryu and Juri are still played by non-Asian actors in SF6, so it’s clear more work needs to be done in this area.

They also finally revealed a new character through Azucena, a Peruvian coffee fiend. She looks great, and I like how her move set is focused on speed and dodging, but I’ll never stop wishing she had a mid-battle coffee-drinking mechanic to power up. I’m crossing my fingers that she indeed has that, and they simply haven’t shown it yet.

Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves 2 received the much-better name of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. Both Rock Howard and Terry Bogard were shown in character model form, in a game that looks very much like Street Fighter V with the anime filter cranked up (in a good way). But in addition to those previously confirmed, like Andy Bogard and Joe Higashi, others like Kushnood Butt/Marco Rodriguez and even Mai Shiranui were hinted at through their voices in the trailer. Mai’s return could be taken as the fullest compensation for her being absent from The King of Fighters XII, which left fans raging. There’s still no release timeframe for the game, but I have hope that it will arrive within the next year, before Evo 2024.

Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes was also announced, to little surprised considering the previously-leaked rating. Now that developer French-Bread is slowly drawing more fans through this series and Melty Blood: Type Lumina, this game could be a surprise hit for them and publisher Arc System Works. Returning characters like Hyde, Linne, and Orie were confirmed, all looking nearly identical to their sprites from the first game, while new characters will be revealed soon. You could have guessed all this information if you hadn’t already seen it, but I had to feature it here because of the ridiculous name. It’s not on par with Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[cl-r], a game with a name I still have to look up to get right, but it’s close enough.

Johnny is the first character confirmed for Guilty Gear Strive’s third season. I’ve tried to use the character in prior Guilty Gear games, but couldn’t fully wrap my head around him. I couldn’t begin to tell you if the character is implemented faithfully into Strive or not, something already difficult to determine from these short previews. But he could be fun to use. More notable is how this season will involve the first significant update to the game system, with each character receiving balance upgrades and new techniques. Among these will be a move where May can leap off the dolphin, which made fans yelp at Evo.

We’ll see what this update does with Happy Chaos, long the game’s most dominant character and who the winning Evo player, Leffen, used. Given Arc System Works’ history, he’ll either be nerfed to the point of uselessness or, gasp, buffed. There’s no in-between with them.

Considering all of this, there likely won’t be any fighting game news for a while outside of continued Mortal Kombat 1 announcements, a game set for release on September 19th. A certain someone should plan for that throughout August for their posts, assuming Ed Boon doesn’t already have me covered.