After CEO and NCR people were almost panicking during podcasts and many were saying how the international players (read : Japan) would clean up house at EVO.
Now obviously not every top player is playing in Vegas this weekend but US is looking strong. It feels like the level of competition has risen drastically, especially in Marvel.
If Daigo/etc doesn’t take AE (can’t see that happening though), the japanese players will fly back without a single title from the most prestigious fighting game tournament. Now that would be surprising.
if daigo doesn’t take it, other jp player will take it. Japan only really send players for AE and mvc3. The other games are just tokido. You can ask tokido if he can beat the top Japan players on tekken and blazblue or not.
usa players are definitely upping their game…why is that u say???
Online play!!! thats right…online play…now the people that cant make it out to every gathering/tourney can still keep up by playing online…we can play the game more daily and still go to weekly meet ups and monthly/bimonthly tournaments
The further they get into the tournament, the higher the chance they have to challenge each other. Brackets weren’t rigged at all unless you want to complain about Americans challenging each other (hmm that happened a lot I think). :rolleyes:
Nah not really. Justin Wong is not the force he once was in SF. Ricky Ortiz was nowhere to be seen this evo. Same thing with Gootecks anbd Mike Ross, sadly. The only U.s player that noticibly stepped up his game is Wolfkrone.
International players stepped up their game though. Latif finishing second. Poongko third, with that beastly performance against Daigo. A few europeans in top 32. Dr Ray, Xian and so on. Internationals improved a lot this year, with Poongko and Latif closing the gap on Japan considerably.
isn’t latif american? he was representing usa at sbo before he forfeited his spot to 2 players that didn’t even make top 8 at this evo. and was stated as representing arizona, as well as saudia arebria (thought that was a play on arizona climate being similar to the middle east, but wasn’t sure)
I don’t understand, how can Latif be classed as American when he’s a student from Saudi Arabia studying in the US (So I believe, I may be wrong, probably am) but if that is the case, he can’t really be classed as American. There are plenty of Japanese, Korean and Chinese students studying at the University in my city and have been for 3-4 years but that doesn’t make them British? I might be wrong, maybe Latif actually is American but just of Saudi Arabian descent.
I was really happy to see FlashMetroid up there, I still believe he is the best Viper (I’ll get 100 comments saying why he isn’t, my opinion won’t change) but yeah, I don’t think the US players stepped up their game, they just got lucky I guess. Latif and Wolfkrone were certain to make Top 8 in my books and there were no other American players that stood out IMO. I think USA was also helped by the fact Mago had such a tough number of games against some giants and Daigo and Poongko met early but yeah. And this is from a neutral perspective by the way, I’m from the UK. I couldn’t care less which nationality wins, I just want to see high level play.