One of the most impressive moments to come out of this year’s (or any) Evo is being widely deemed by fighting game fans as Evo Moment 38 as Third Strike player PGW|Hayao put an amazing sequence of prediction, execution, and overall skill on display.
The 41 year old Hugo user is not only a top tier Third Striker competitor, but also an extremely flexible contortionist. In a video on his YouTube channel Hayao continues to impress by striking nigh impossible (at least for us laypeople) yoga and break dance poses while pulling off one of fighting games’ most difficult inputs: the standing 720.
There are layers to Hayao’s impressiveness here, and we’ll start with the fact that he uses one of Third Strike’s worst characters. Hugo has a lot of potential, to be sure, but the massive-body character can easily be thwarted by many of his roster mates due to his being a large target and having relatively slow movements.
One of the Hugo’s most important tools is his Gigas Buster Super Art 1, which requires users to spin the joystick 720 degrees (that’s two full circles) before inputting a punch to activate the half-health damaging command grab.
Spinning the stick around naturally makes your character jump as you hit the up inputs, so many users will buffer this motion while their character is already airborne or while they’re otherwise locked into an animation that won’t cause them to leap into the air.
It is possible, however, to perform the “standing 720” wherein a user inputs the two full rotations so quickly that they perform the Super before Hugo leaves the ground. This requires you do the 720 and press punch in about 4-5 frames (that’s sixtieths of a second) and is one of the most difficult maneuvers to perform in all of fighting games.
We can’t really do consistent standing 720s or stand on our heads, but as he shows off in the video embedded below, Hayao can do both… simultaneously.
The fourth place Third Strike finisher for Evo 2024 pulls off this tricky maneuver while holding his arcade stick behind his back, wall sitting, supporting himself with just one hand, and more in the quick showcase below:
One can only imagine how many hours the impressive competitor has devoted to learning these crafts.
It’s clear that Hayao is a man of determination as his training led him to a fourth place finish at Evo with Hugo (no one else was able to crack even the top 32 with the character) on top of executing one of the most impressive sequences the event has ever seen while the pressure was on.
Want more Hayao? His top six Evo run was actually filled with theatrics that you’ll definitely want to watch (and re-watch) multiple times.