Category: Entertainment & Lifestyle

And now he and Leshar are going to Capcom Cup

Although he’s been a force to be reckoned with in the fighting game community for decades now, Rohto|Tokido had only managed to score only a few wins in Street Fighter 6 thus far, but he just scored his biggest victory in the game yet.

Tokido managed to top the absolutely stacked Capcom Pro Tour 2024 Super Premier Japan event this past weekend with his Ken, and the runner up is the guy who he trains against every single day.

After only dropping a total of three total games across the entirety of top 128, Tokido was looking to be in peak form throughout the tournament.

He defeated the likes of TM|NoahTheProdigy, G8S|Pugera, Mouz|Problem X, BST|Fuudo, Victrix|Momochi, and DFM|Machabo before reaching his final opponent, DRX|Leshar.

In the grand finals, it might have looked as though Tokido had very specific countermeasures for Ed like using Tatsumaki to get through flicker jab pressure in neutral, and that’s because he did.

Tokido had some interesting things to say after his win on the big stage, and thanks to HiFight, we have the translations.

“Well, I’m practicing with my friends every day,” he said laughing while gesturing towards Leshar. “It’s really every day. Not like five times a week, but seven times per week in an office.

“But I’m happy to face him in the finals as we’ve been pushing each other through friendly rivalry. This time, the result favored me, but he hates losing, so we’ll both become even stronger in the future.”

Tokido: “We practice together at the office every day, not 5 but 7 days a week. I’m happy to face him in the finals as we’ve been pushing each other through friendly rivalry. This time, the result favored me, but he hates losing, so we’ll both become even stronger in the future.” pic.twitter.com/buiU9Py3oF

— HiFight(ハイファイト) (@HiFightTH) November 4, 2024

Tokido and Leshar are already teammates on Yogibo REJECT for the Street Fighter League Pro-JP this season where they sit in first place in their division, but it seems their friendship extends outside of the show too.

There’s obviously the old proverb of “iron sharpens iron,” which certainly seems to apply here and other times for fighting games in the past like SonicFox and Dekillsage, especially when training partners take the top two spots in one of the most stacked SF6 events of the year.

And since this was a Super Premier, it means they both earned a spot at Capcom Cup 11.

It will be the first time since 2019 that Tokido has competed in Capcom Cup proper, as he didn’t qualify the past two times and couldn’t win the Last Chance Qualifier brackets to advance either.

Although he started out in King of Fighters and Dragon Ball FighterZ, Leshar quickly made a name for himself in Street Fighter 6 handily qualifying for Capcom Cup X out of South Korea where he’d finish with an impressive top 8 placement.

Tokido with the Ed counterplay#CPT2024JAPAN pic.twitter.com/Xbc3fwoLKY

— HiFight(ハイファイト) (@HiFightTH) November 3, 2024

After that, Leshar apparently moved out to Japan to help level up his game further with that scene, and it seems to be working.

This also goes to show the level of dedication and competition present in SF6 now with players dedicating likely multiple hours out of every day just to have a shot at the $1 million USD prize.

BST|Daigo Umehara did recently tell us that Japan would dominate Street Fighter 6 just like the past games if they traveled more again, and his compatriots may be proving him right.

Now, the past three CPT Premier winners have been Japanese players between Tokido, CR|Shuto and DFM|Itabashi Zangief when only three total competitors from the country made it to Capcom Cup last year.

There’s currently 16 players qualified for Capcom Cup 11 where Americans are holding on to the most at 4, but with 48 making it to the finals, plenty more action is still to come.

勝った！
I made it !!

ご視聴ありがとうございました！
これからも全力で走ります pic.twitter.com/ywHu3Nzczd

— Tokido / ときど (@tokidoki77) November 3, 2024

We’ll have another spot up for grabs this weekend at Blink Respawn 2024 followed by King of the World in December as the last offline Premiers with the rest of the spots coming from World Warrior regions.

And those races are now more interesting with Tokido and Leshar officially out of them.

We recommend checking out what two world-level training partners look like when squaring off in a grand finals below if you haven’t already.

Although the fighting game community has millions of players and followers all around the world, we’re still a fairly niche hobby like a lake in a vast ocean.

There are times, however, where fighting games capture the attention of much larger eyes like coming across the desk of Kai Cenat, one of the largest Twitch streamers in the world.

That’s what happened last night when the largest fighting game content creator Maximilian Dood debated the top 10 fighting games of all time with fellow YoVideogames members Kenny “Unrooolie” and Steve “Infinite_SGE.”

As they’re arguing over whether to include Tekken 3 or Tekken 5, 100 gifted subs suddenly rained down on Max’s stream with Kai Cenat’s name attached.

The fighting game crew doesn’t believe it was really the previous number-one streamer in the world behind the big donation at first with Unroolie wondering out loud, “What is he doing watching us?”

As they continue to think the subs came from an impersonator, Max checks Kai’s stream and sees him watching all of them, which makes all the guys pop off more, as the streamer has been smiling and laughing from this whole interaction.

Max personally thanks Cenat and saying he wished they could have met each other at the Streamer Awards earlier this year where Kai received Streamer of the Year and the Dood earned his Legacy Award.

Steve also notes that he’s personally a fan of Cenat too.

A huge shout out to @KaiCenat for the 100 gift subs to @maximilian_ channel last night with @unrooolie ! Appreciate your streams & keep doing what you do! Big ups from unc pic.twitter.com/CSmgEqfPlZ

— Esteeban (@INFINITE_SGE) November 4, 2024

Max gives a salute to Kai, who offers one back in respect shouting, “W’s, that was an amazing reaction.”

With the 100 Twitch gift subs, that means Cenat dropped at least $500 for a group of dudes yelling about the best video games ever.

From Kai’s perspective, he’s been running a 24-hour stream subathon where more time is added to a countdown clock every time he receives a new subscription.

During this time, Cenat was seemingly checking through the most popular Just Chatting channels on Twitch where Max was number two.

Cenat appeared almost instantly captivated by the giant list of games and the guys being passionate about them. His Twitch chat was actually excited to see Max pop up with some suggesting that he offer up some gifts to the guys.

After looking through Max’s other pages, Kai quickly agreed and sent out the 100 gift subs.

He stayed around a little while longer to listen to them and noted afterwards that they’re such good friends.

At that time, Kai was sitting over 164,000 subscribers on Twitch where he’s now reached over 177,000 with almost 83 hours still on the subathon clock.

Cenat previously became the most-subscribed streamer with over 306,000, but he was recently surpassed by the VTuber Ironmouse, who also had her own cameo role in Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising with Vikala’s release.

While he is no stranger to having the likes of John Cena and Kevin Hart on his videos, we haven’t really seen much in the way of actual fighting games from Kai.

This wouldn’t be a crossover most would have expected, but perhaps this encounter can get the ball rolling to show Cenat the joys of what fighters can have to offer.

The multiple universes of Dragon Ball offer more than a few races of characters that are naturally about 1,000 times stronger than the average human, but with over 180 characters on its launch roster, Bandai Namco’s new Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero allows players to take control of seemingly every type of character in the DB universe.

In a new video venture Globku aims to rank all nine of Sparking Zero’s human characters on a tier list from strongest to weakest. He challenges himself in doing so, however, by requiring he wins at least one online, ranked bout with each character before placing them.

As a result of this approach, we get to see exactly where and how some of these characters struggle. Mr. Satan, for example, suffers from attacks that aren’t strong enough to cause any hit stun, and thus every opponent he faces feels like a beefed up and armored Broly.

While most all of these characters were intended to be relatively low tier compared to the likes of Ultra Instinct Goku and Lord Beerus, one of them crept up into an echelon he was never supposed to be in.

Yajirobe is famously more interested in food than fighting, but thanks to some unforeseen combinations wound up being one of the most broken characters in Sparking Zero after launch.

Bandai Namco was quick to patch Yajirobe in an effort to make him play a little nicer with others, but how effective were these adjustments?

Globku places Yajirobe high up, to be sure, but there might be one human in Sparking Zero who is more effective than the hungry swordsman. You can view the full list by clicking the thumbnail below, but to see Globku’s matches and hear his reasonings behind each pick, you’ll want to watch the full video.

Click images for larger versions

Out of all the modern mobile games based on popular fighting game properties, The King of Fighters Allstar was perhaps the most well-regarded by fans, but now it’s gone.

Instead, Netmarble is now trying to get fans excited for their next KOF venture with a new game, but they don’t really seem to be biting at the pre-registration that recently opened.

The company recently put out a new trailer showing off much more of what King of Fighters AFK is actually going to look like in action, and it seems… pretty mundane.

KOF AFK is going to be a team-building mobile RPG featuring characters from across the franchise and from different entries like Kyo from King of Fighters ’98 vs. Kyo from King of Fighters 2002.

And of course gacha mechanics to pull and level up the fighters you want.

The change to small sprites based on the NeoGeo Pocket Color SNK games does help give AFK a little bit of charm, but just about everything else about actually playing it looks pretty generic in an already overcrowded space.

Click images for larger versions

From the screenshots released on the store, it looks like the martial artists are going to be taking on the likes of armored gorillas and dragons too because why not.

While there is no release date, Netmarble has opened up pre-registration on Android and iOS where players can pick up 3,000 free draws, Vice, Iori and Leona though we’re curious how many people are actually doing so.

Fun Fast Flashback RPG! – KOF AFK!

Pre-registration is now open!
Sign up now to grab awesome rewards and get the latest updates instantly!

Join the pre-registration!
https://t.co/FX9sy19rbN#TheKingOfFightersAFK #KOFAFK #KingOfFighters pic.twitter.com/nrV9pS5Xsx

— KOFAFK_Global (@kof_afk) October 30, 2024

As was previously reported, KOF Allstar officially shut down on October 30, and the game can no longer be accessed at all.

It even appears the official website is gone too.

KOF Allstar originally released in 2018 and then 2019 in the West as a free-to-play beat ’em up that also featured different versions of characters across the main series.

The game also got a lot of attention for its many crossover events Street Fighter 6 less than a year ago, Guilty Gear, Soul Calibur, Dead or Alive, Samurai Shodown, Tekken, Gintama and even the WWE.

Allstar certainly still had its own issues with gacha drops and power creep, but quite a few players grew quite attached to it for years — and don’t seem enthusiastic about moving on to AFK.

The official KOF AFK YouTube page is currently up to just 710 subscribers, and they turned comments off for the pre-registration video after the first was slammed with mostly negative responses about Allstar.

Similarly, the Netmarble’s X / Twitter page for KOF AFK only has 73 followers, and the video only has around 550 views after five days as of the time of reporting where half of the comments are also about Allstar there too.

お前たちはゴミで臆病者だ。
You are trash and cowards. pic.twitter.com/WX9J6vXI5n

— Vitor Muniz (@Vitor_Muniz) October 31, 2024

It’s obviously not the most fair comparison since KOF Allstar had five years to build up, but their YouTube page reached a sizable 65.5k subscribers by the end with many videos averaging around 30,000 views or more.

Things could of course change as AFK gets closer to launching, however, right now, it appears the KOF audience is looking elsewhere and not really engaging with the RPG.

This also wasn’t the only mobile title connected to fighting games to shut down last month either, as Mortal Kombat: Onslaught was shuttered after NetherRealm Studios laid off its mobile team just a year out from its initial release.

Unlike Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and Mega Man X Dive, KOF Allstar doesn’t look like it’s going to be receiving an official offline version, so all those years of progress (and money spent) may just be gone forever.

But that’s ultimately going to be the fate of a majority of these free-to-play mobile games at some point.

If you are interested in KOF AFK, more information can be found on the official site.

Though Street Fighter X Tekken was expected take Street Fighter 4’s place as the top fighting game back when it was released, it ended up being a massive flop for Capcom. However, Capcom eventually decided to take some of the characters that were in Street Fighter X Tekken and essentially import them into Street Fighter 4 (along with newcomer Decapre) to create Ultra Street Fighter 4.

Of course, only the Street Fighter combatants joined the roster of Ultra Street Fighter 4. The idea of a third party guest character playable in a mainline Street Fighter is something that only just happened earlier this year with the announcement of Terry and Mai coming to Street Fighter 6.

Regardless, it seems that one modder has been playing with the idea that Tekken’s Kazuya Mishima could be playable in Ultra Street Fighter 4. As expected, Kazuya is mostly based on how he plays in Street Fighter X Tekken.

Typical of a Tekken rep in Street Fighter X Tekken, Kazuya has retained his many target combos. In general, he also has access to an above average number of command normals.

Kazuya also gets to use many of his most iconic attacks, such as the Wind God Fist. It would appear that the Electric Wind Godfist still requires precise execution in order to access without spending meter.

Overall, the mod showcased by racel RYX master is clearly unfinished, but has made a significant amount of progress. Perhaps someday, Kazuya will officially appear as a guest character in a mainline Street Fighter entry, similar to how Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui recently did in Street Fighter 6.

Check it all out below:

looking good so far

credits to jingojungle for the animation pic.twitter.com/6y0pRQdBKa

— racel RYX master (@RacelRyx) November 3, 2024

part 2 pic.twitter.com/sgmQszUKCu

— racel RYX master (@RacelRyx) November 4, 2024

Terry Bogard is the latest character to join the Street Fighter 6 roster via the Year 2 Character Pass. The patch that made him compatible for all players also applied a number of relevant balance adjustments to the cast.

By this point, many players have already concluded that Terry Bogard ranks on the lower end of the tier list. In a recent video upload, BST|Daigo Umehara recently discussed some interesting topics such as modern controls, character balancing in Street Fighter 6, and even Terry Bogard.

“The overall skill level right now has far exceeded the developers’ expectations, I guess,” begun Daigo. “Which makes it seem like, at this point, balancing the game is just a dice roll. Because they just have no idea how skilled the players will prove to be. It’s beyond the control of the creators.”

Ultimately though, the strongest characters in a game like Street Fighter 6 tend to be the most popular. As such, Daigo notes that the game developers can make a character popular by making them really strong.

“If they want a certain character to be popular, they have to make the character so obviously strong, or players will betray their expectations,” continued Daigo.

However, Daigo then applies some amusing logic about the design philosophy behind Terry in Street Fighter 6. Since he’s the first guest character in Street Fighter 6, perhaps the developers didn’t want him to be stronger than Capcom characters.

“Terry? I’m not sure what their intention was with him,” declared Daigo. “I wonder what they were thinking with Terry. I guess maybe they couldn’t justify having him outclass Capcom’s own characters. They tried hard to be careful about that, and look how he ended up.”

In the end, Daigo concludes that more frequent updates could potentially solve these sort of balance issues, but he also notes that this could prove to be expensive for Capcom.

Earlier this year, Street Fighter 6 Director Takayuki Nakayama mentioned plans for smaller balance patches rather than just a big yearly update. To an extent, Capcom has been fulfilling that promise, but perhaps they’re still happening too infrequently for players’ tastes.

As noted by Daigo, it’s not really possible for developers to anticipate exactly how strong or how weak each character will be upon their release. This is why balance updates can be so important.

Check it all out in the video below:

Dan Hibiki is perhaps the most prominent and well-known joke character across all of fighting games. His unique origin story has been well-told as developers from the very first Street Fighter branched away to create fighting games for SNK, many of which had characters that were clearly Street Fighter-inspired.

Dan was Capcom’s eventual retort as they wanted to design an intentionally poor-performing fighter who was unmistakably derivative from Art of Fighting figures. Unlike most other joke characters, however, Dan has both survived and thrived over the last three decades in a way that the term “joke character” simply doesn’t fully satisfy. Looking back through developer statements from Polygon’s Street Fighter Alpha Oral History, it seems Dan was more than a quick SNK ribbing from the very start.

At one level of analysis, developers design joke characters differently than others as they’re not meant to be good, but they are meant to be interesting. Dan has a relatively impressive attendance record as he’s appeared in three of the seven mainline Street Fighter entries as well as in a number of spinoffs and crossovers. Why? Because he’s always been interesting.

Would fans fork over extra cash to play as a character that exists fundamentally as a now thirty year old joke between companies who have reached good standing?

They did for Mr. Hibiki’s most recent appearance as one of the final DLC characters in Street Fighter 5. He was clearly worse than the majority (though perhaps not all) of his roster mates, but people were still actively interested in playing Dan.

Noritaka Funamizu, Capcom Japan’s planner for Street Fighter Alpha, acknowledges Dan’s beginnings as a shot at SNK, but always saw him as more.

“That might have been the case for the person who designed the character and brought him to me. But I didn’t think of Dan as a mockery of SNK’s characters,” starts Funamizu. “I think the person who came up with Dan wanted to put in a character who wasn’t so strong, physically speaking,” he continues.

“The whole idea was you could use this character, and even though he wasn’t very strong, you could use him and win battles — I remember noticing that about the character… I thought it would feel satisfying for more skilled players to win fights with a weaker character like Dan,” finishes Funamizu to Polygon.

This “win with weighted training clothes” concept actually goes a long way in the world of fighting games. There’s a special place you enter when you use a character whom everyone knows is disadvantageous, where you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. On the other side of the coin, your opponent has everything to lose by falling to someone playing Dan, and gets almost nothing from winning since the expectation is already there.

Dan always has conspicuously worse versions of attacks than the likes of Ryu, Ken, or Akuma, but you’re a fool to count him out. He was enticing enough, even to the seasoned competitors of late stage SF5, for pro players to use Dan in tournaments.

By that same “weighted training clothes” token, Dan has been a powerful reason for audiences to tune in to Street Fighter. It’s not entirely unlike when a conspicuously unlikely challenger faces off with an established player, such as when 801Strider faced off with a child on stage at Evo 2015. Strider won the bout handily, (spoilers) but was actually booed from the stage by playful audience members who would have rather seen a dramatic underdog victory take place.

Playing Dan doesn’t immediately make you an 8 year old facing off against a seasoned pro, but it does place you in that same ballpark.

If developers successfully walk the line between designing the joke character to be obviously bad, but still viable given a little luck and extra creativity, they stand to make a character with enough depth to stick around for 3+ decades, which seems to imply more depth than a mere punchline.

The pressure is off (of you, at least) when you play with Dan, and just like the Fatalities of Mortal Kombat, winning with him adds a tinge of playful insult to injury. What happens if you spend all your resources performing a ridiculous taunt that leaves you open to attack, AND you wind up winning?

Dan is both a low stakes character for lower level players to use and simultaneously a handicap that masterful players can use to show off just how skilled they are. What he isn’t is the equivalent of a delicate vase with SNK’s picture crudely taped to it, and the fact that Capcom was able to create the former (especially amid what was likely an emotionally fueled feud with a legitimate competitor) is a laudable accomplishment, to say the least.

It’s a bit odd to think that Terry Bogard has already been in Street Fighter 6 as the game’s first guest character for over a month now where many players have been trying to make the Fatal Fury star work at the highest level.

We just dug through all of the character data in SF6 to see how many players have taken Terry and the rest of the fighters to Legend-ranked status now that the first month has passed from his arrival and the balance update — and the results were not quite what we were expecting.

Since the new ranking phase just began at the start of November, we’re pulling all of our data from the end of the previous phase that lasted through the end of October to see where everyone ended up now that they can’t go back and get more points for said period.

As such we looked through the entire Legend pool of characters that is comprised of the top 500 players with the highest Master Rate points as well as those who made the top 100 and top 10.

Going into this, we were expecting to see the likes of Ken, Akuma and M. Bison dominate the charts overall like what’s been going on with character usage at SF6 major tournaments lately (including the Japan Super Premier), though that’s not quite what happened.

They all certainly performed well but didn’t quite top either main category besides the top 10, which was comprised of two Akumas, three Bisons, Cammy, Ed, Manon, Terry, and A.K.I. at the end of the phase.

For the top 100, Ed actually came out on top with 10 players grinding the boxer up that high, which means he made up a whole 10% of the combatants himself, though was the only one to crack double digits here.

He was followed up by Ken and M. Bison, unsurprisingly, but Cammy outpaced Akuma and then Chun-Li, JP, Juri, Luke and Zangief as the fighters who had at least five representatives make it to the peak of the mountain.

All 24 characters did have at least one player in the top 100, but Jamie, E. Honda, and shockingly, Dee Jay only had one each.

Terry didn’t fare much better either at two, however, as mentioned above, Mr. Bogard did have one player reach the top 10, who also previously made a match up chart for the SNK crossover character too.

As for the complete top 500, we had a different character take up the top slot with Cammy as the only one to have over 40 players up that high at 43, which makes the Killer Bee take up 8.6% of Legend.

Another surprise to us was seeing JP right behind her in second place at 38 when he hasn’t been doing nearly as much on the competitive front as the villain did last year — so it seems he can still do a lot of damange in the game’s online setting at least.

M. Bison, Akuma and Ken do round out the top 5 as the only other fighters to get higher than 30 players each, so combined, said top 5 made up over 35% of the entirety of Legend ranks.

Some other things of note we saw was Rashid only having 2 players in the top 100 even though he’s been showing up in a lot of tournament top 8s lately though he did fare a bit better overall with 20 in Legend rank all together.

The likes of Zangief, Juri and Blanka shot up quite a bit too with the full results though Luke was still surprisingly low around the middle of the pack.

There were only two fighters who didn’t reach double digits in Legend ranked reps being Marisa and Lily.

Terry himself was still just 5th from the bottom with 12 though he still beat out Dee Jay interestingly.

While it appears things are a bit top-heavy with the rankings, there was a mostly decent spread of characters showing up among the top players overall considering there’s been a few times we’ve done this where some were totally excluded.

It’s certainly going to be quite interesting to see how Capcom is going to rebalance SF6 whenever the next massive update drops (probably sometime after Capcom Cup 11), but we do already know they don’t just look at the data at the very top to make those decisions.

You can check out the full Legend character breakdown at the end of the latest phase below, and we’ve also included a graph up above containing both figures to better visualize the makeup of the highest rankings.

No matter how iconic a video game or series is, there’s going to be plenty of characters, ideas, and content that never gets to see the light of day in the final releases — though there may still be traces left behind to uncover.

Marvel vs. Capcom is certainly no exception with its 30-year history and plenty of cut content across the franchise that most fans have never seen or heard about before.

Khanage just released a new video taking a look at said the cut content in said Marvel fighting games as a follow-up to his Street Fighter 3 scrapped ideas we previously looked at.

Things of course go all the way back to the very beginning with X-Men: Children of the Atom where there appears to be some leftovers of an unused idea where the player could choose to join Magneto or reject him at the end of the Arcade Mode run.

Colossus has a sprite painting a portrait of the X-Men if he stays with Professor X, but there’s also unused dialogue appearing to show what happens if he abandons them.

Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter has a lot more changes that have been uncovered including the initial test footage of joke character Norimaro playing a good bit different than the final Japanese release — though he is in the Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection too.

That includes an apparent “kancho” throw where Norimaro would shove his fingers into the opponent’s rear end like the Japanese prank, but Marvel may not have been a big fan of that one.

What’s perhaps most interesting is Capcom may have been working on a prototype of Karin since a sprite can be found in the files showcasing what looks to be Kanzuki’s head on Sakura’s body before her debut in Street Fighter Alpha 3.

As for the first actual Marvel vs. Capcom, they apparently worked on a cartoon version of the game’s planner Atsushi “Tomichin” Tomita, who looks almost like a Muppet and could punch with his nose.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 doesn’t have a ton that’s been discovered aside from some alternate design ideas for Amingo, changes to how the unlocks worked and a note on how air combos were originally aerial raves in Japan — which is a term that would carry over to Devil May Cry.

And then there’s of course Marvel vs. Capcom 3 where Doctor Octopus was famously cut from the roster, and modders were able to recover some of his files including his character portrait just last year..

Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 had its own slew of characters that never made it in though not all of them were actively worked on either past the idea phase.

We highly recommend checking out Khanage’s new video below to learn and see a lot more about Marvel vs. Capcom that normally goes unseen to players.

Guilty Gear Strive just received its massive Season 4 update this past week that reworked how quite a few characters work with different abilities on top of balance changes and of course the arrival of Queen Dizzy.

Although the good doctor’s adjustments didn’t sound the craziest of the bunch on paper, one of the best and most dedicated Faust players in the world is showing how his additions could make him more of a nightmare to fight against.

The longtime Faust specialist JIG|Nage recently shared an absolutely wild round of Strive that put on display how dangerous the goofball can be with his new additions — combined with a bit of luck.

We get our first good luck at the mechanical buffs in action quickly around the five-second mark showcasing how Faust can now use his golf club swing independently to whack his items, which can really help him with their activations and applications instead of relying on him or the opponent to touch them.

The hit banana forces the unfortunate Nagoriyuki to slip and be put on the backfoot he’d never be able to fully recover from.

As for some more interesting uses, Nage is able to perfectly time hitting the afro onto Nago as the meteors fall to light it on fire instantly without ever needing to get close to the vampire.

We also get to see this in action some more with the bombs, more afros and the mini Fausts too, and in the hands of Nage, it’s difficult to see many openings to get out of the corner once Faust gets the ball rolling.

That’s not to say this pushes Faust instantly into top tier status, but these item changes plus the ability to adjust where stored items land makes him more of a threat than probably ever before in Strive.

ちなみにこっちは”ヨグ=サロン”のプロトタイプ。
ここに物食べ要素入れて遊び始めたらエアポーカーみたいになった。 pic.twitter.com/pKKzBianOs

— JIG | ナゲ (@nage_pink) November 1, 2024

And any match up that Faust was winning or around even with is also likely a good chunk more in his favor.

The player reaction to the Season 4 update has been quite split, especially when it comes to certain characters like Ramlethal and Potemkin, and previous Evo champion TSM|Leffen is among those not really liking the new direction.

We should probably thank our stars that Faust isn’t a very popular character because it looks like things can go off the rails very quickly as long as he gets one or two good items in play early.