This was a historic weekend for the fighting game community at Evo 2024 with multiple records broken for individual tournament bracket entrants and for becoming the largest open-bracket eSports event of all time though there was more than the competition.
With another Evo officially in the books, we’re here to recap all of the announcements you may have missed over the past three days across the genre.
Outside of the ridiculous show PGW|Hayao put on for Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, there was a lot more new stuff put on display for fans and some unexpected surprises.
We of course had news from Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, Guilty Gear Strive and many more that we’re about to get into.
We unfortunately didn’t get anything for the Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection like a release date, but the Street Fighter 6 developers did reveal they really want to make a new crossover fighting game.
Let’s jump right in and go through them all in somewhat chronological order.
Kicking things off early on Friday, Bushiroad games finally revealed Meruem for Hunter x Hunter: Nen Impact in a new trailer, but that’s not all.
They also revealed the rest of the starting roster as well in the game’s opening cinematic including Kite, Genthru, Morel and Razor to add up to 16 characters.
We’re still waiting on that release date though.
Also on Friday, Cygames officially unveiled Versusia as the next DLC character for Granblue Versus and had her playable on the Evo floor for attendees.
That wasn’t all of course since they also released Versusia’s trailer and release date as well as revealing Vikala as the last member of the season 1 additions.
Finally, Sandalphon was teased alongside confirmation about a second season of content likely starting in 2025.
SNK had seemingly the most to show out of any developer this past weekend, and that of course includes Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves.
Kevin Rian is the latest character to be revealed for the Garou sequel, and he’s looking to hit you really, really hard — though hopefully not as hard as he did in the original game.
On top of that, SNK also revealed the new Fatal Fury is going to release on PlayStation 4 as well as the previously announced PlayStation 5, Xbox and PC.
We knew going in that the new King of Fighters 15 special DLC characters would be revealed, and they turned out to be a couple of classic crowd pleasers.
Vice and Mature are set to return in December as presumptively the final fighters added to the game.
They didn’t really show more than just their new designs, so we’re going to need to wait a while longer to see their gameplay trailers and get more details.
SNK also had probably the biggest surprise of the whole event by dropping the rerelease of SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos that originally came out in 2003.
The last official crossover fighter from the companies now features rollback netcode, lobbies, a new gallery and more features.
SVC Chaos was released right then and there for Steam, but now it’s also available on PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC.
MultiVersus made the surprise announcement that they’d have something special to show at Evo shortly before the event, but it unfortunately wasn’t Scorpion.
Instead, we got to see the reveal of Samurai Jack and Beetlejuice coming to MVS Season 2.
And Jack will arrive alongside the new update very shortly.
Although it unfortunately leaked a bit early, Arc System Works unveiled their complete DLC lineup for Season 4 of Guilty Gear Strive with some interesting surprises.
Fan favorites like Dizzy and Venom are finally set to return alongside newcomer Unika from the upcoming Guilty Gear anime, but the most interesting pick of them all was Lucy from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.
They’re also releasing a special open beta for Strive’s new 3v3 mode later this week as well.
So it turns out Katsuhiro Harada lied to us all when he told us that Heihachi Mishima was completely dead after the events of the last game.
Although he sat out the main story of Tekken 8, Heihachi is alive and returning as the third DLC character after Lidia later this year.
It seems he’ll also be heavily featured in the upcoming Story Mode expansion as well.
Capcom didn’t have as much to show at Evo this year compared to 2023, but that doesn’t mean they came empty-handed.
They released the official teaser trailer for Terry Bogard in Street Fighter 6, which let us see the wild wolf in the RE Engine with his classic Fatal Fury look.
It gives fans a look at Terry’s World Tour mode introduction, but we’ll have to wait a while longer for actual gameplay and details.
Although Uzuki was originally planned for an August release, French Bread revealed Under Night In-Birth II’s first DLC character is coming this week.
Uzuki release on July 25th next week! pic.twitter.com/CuFod2zyu7
— Anime FGC News (@AFGCNews) July 20, 2024
Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age revealed Damkina as a new playable character and featured her at their Evo booth.
Damkina steps onto the scene!
Damkina’s glamourous diva moveset will pummel, slap and stomp anyone who dares oppose her.
Beware though! She holds a nefarious, dark secret.
Damkina will be playable at the #DieselLegacy booth at #EVO2024 in Las Vegas from July 19th to 21st! pic.twitter.com/zHL98jsGR9
— Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age (@DieselLegacy) July 18, 2024
Rivals of Aether 2 announced Orcane as a new fighter, and the developers revealed all future characters for the game will be free.
Missed our announcements at Evo this weekend? Read the roundup on all the updates here: https://t.co/6TkwODYpVM
— Rivals of Aether // Rivals 2 (@RivalsOfAether) July 22, 2024
With how crazy this weekend was, there’s a good chance Evo had more to reveal that we ended up missing, so if there’s anything we left out let us know in the comments.
And tell us what your favorite part of Evo was this year too.