The results of a recent Final Fantasy popularity poll, held in honor of the franchise's 35th anniversary, were being passed around the Internet recently, with most discussion homing in on FFX's Wakka ranking as voters' second-favorite character. The poll, conducted by Japanese streaming service NicoNico, with a small sample size and clearly influenced by memes of the moment, was no more authoritative than any of the numerous other surveys routinely run by gaming publications and fan forums. But it did remind me that my personal rankings have not been updated in over 12 years, during which time I have played a few newer entries, while some of my feelings on older ones may have changed or evolved. I've also decided to do away with separate lists for "story" vs. "systems," acknowledging that one cannot practically separate the experience of the one from the other. Which brings us now to my 2022 edition of "Omega Warzard's Definitive Ranking of Numbered Final Fantasy Games":
IV
Final Fantasy IV is always the one I hold up as the ideal entry point into the series. This is because it exemplifies the qualities I personally have most enjoyed in any Final Fantasy: a well-paced narrative, a dramatic story, and battles that challenge me just enough to give me pride in my victory. The last time I did a ranking, I considered IV's story dated. It is not deep, but neither do more recent Final Fantasy games feel written for adult audiences, and the layers of convoluted nonsense they have added instead have actually helped IV age better by comparison. The gameplay, at first glance, might also seem the simplest in the series—it's the only Final Fantasy with almost no party customization options—but the satisfaction comes not in augmenting your units into godlike killing machines, but in puzzling out how best to play the hand you've been dealt to overcome the most thoughtfully designed boss battles.
IX
While earlier games tried to push things forward, IX's combat deliberately regressed to a simpler form of the ATB system, and in that aspect felt more dated than all the older games. The frequency of the fighting made the journey a bit of a slog, so if you play one of the more modern ports that offers boosters to trivialize or even bypass battles, don't feel too proud to take advantage. Because the rest of the experience is essential—from beginning to end, one of the cleverest and most consistently compelling stories and most lovable casts of characters in any video game. Perhaps the only other negative about the experience is that, because the quality of the writing is so high, you'll feel obligated to play with a guide at all times, for fear of missing out on anything.
VII
VII is a lot closer to the earliest games in the series, both by release date now and in the feel of its gameplay loop, than it is to XIV or XV, or to other modern RPGs. In its own time, both convention and comfort abounded in exploring its dungeons, flying across its overworld, and cutting down foes via its menu-based combat. Yet its world felt like something truly new and original, boldly ambitious in its art direction and subject matter. The story was not merely escapist fantasy, but treated games as a legitimate medium for its creators to earnestly express philosophy and spirituality, albeit it also opened the door to, and itself set one foot in, the pseudophilosophical nonsense that would later pervade and all but sink the JRPG genre.
VIII
It's less an opinion than a matter of historical fact now that VIII's torpid narrative was the biggest stumble in the series up to that point. In contrast, its fast-flowing combat, accentuating almost every onscreen action with a timed button press, was the ultimate expression of the ATB system (at least perhaps until FFX-2, which I've never played and which doesn't count). And the journey did wrap up a lot stronger than it began, with the most exhilarating final boss theme and then the most satisfying ending cinematic in the series.
VI
In hindsight, this was 2D Final Fantasy "Endgame"—the culmination of all that had come before. After IV, the series was the recognized leader in video games as a storytelling medium, and expectations were at a fever pitch for the next step forward. VI more than lived up, with a story that was bigger and writing by far more mature than its predecessors. At least, that's how I would have described the first half. The back half took a huge swing, quite literally wiping out everything that had worked so well up to that point, and it remains, to my mind, one of the great unfulfilled promises in gaming.
XIV
This is a hard one to rank, since it continues to grow and evolve, with each major expansion almost but not quite a full story unto itself. The current base game, A Realm Reborn, is tedious and uneventful, and would probably rank closer to the bottom of this list. Heavensward (which is as far as I've played) is what earns XIV its place here. It offers possibly the weightiest climax of any Final Fantasy, though it cannot be properly appreciated in a vacuum apart from A Realm Reborn.
I
Dated, certainly, but still elegant in its simplicity, largely because the original classes were so well and purely defined. No subsequent tank or DPS classes or characters have so wholly embodied their roles as the original warrior and monk respectively. It's fun even just to theorycraft about how different party compositions can be made to work in this game. And if it is perhaps a tad grindy, well, it probably still takes less time to get through than every other entry on this list.
V
The job system was certainly more robust than ever, and there was great satisfaction to be found in mixing abilities from different classes to yield lethal combinations. But quite a lot of jobs were quite frankly redundant—too much the same as or worse than other jobs. The bloat makes it less accessible than I, and the story, while passable, is fairly generic JRPG, lightyears behind its immediate predecessor's diverse cast of heroes and antiheroes.
X
The introduction of voice-acted and motion-captured cutscenes was both thrilling and jarring, as Tidus and friends presented as more starkly cartoonish than, ironically, the super-deformed characters I had grown up with. But the story still delivered some signature emotional highs, bolstered by composer Nobuo Uematsu's last major contributions to the series. The battle system was immaculately tuned and strategic, to the point of being exhausting.
XV
Grand and effectively moody but nonsensical in its plot. The systems and mechanics were too numerous and complex for how unrewarding it felt to ever stray from the main road.
II
Some later remakes/remasters made the notoriously unbalanced leveling system a lot less grindy. Freed of its punishing aspects, it becomes a serviceable JRPG of its age, with a just compelling enough story, though nothing to warrant a detour but for series completionists.
III
I played about 20 percent of the 3D remake before hitting a wall. It had some charm, but ultimately felt like a bitter intermediate stage between I and V—less elegant than the former, less flexible than the latter.
XII
I only sampled a small portion and found it grueling. I do know the characters and story, though not with fondness.
XIII
I have not played this yet, nor am I very familiar with the characters or story. What I gleaned of it via Final Fantasy Record Keeper seemed senseless and convoluted.
As the world burns, I am playing Final Fantasy XIV.
Indeed, for the better part of the year 2020, I played the Square Enix MMORPG—my first MMORPG ever!—almost to the exclusion of all other leisure, the unplanned consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic shutting everything down. My adventure actually began a little before that, however, with a more earnest interest.
When my online Final Fantasy game of choice, Final Fantasy Record Keeper, started including characters from FFXIV, they were strangers to me and most of my fellow nostalgia-baited FFRK players. But the handful of Redditors that existed in the overlap between the two games’ audiences were more than happy to explain at length what Y’shtola and Thancred’s stories were, and invariably they would expound further into full-on impassioned discourses arguing why FFXIV, supposedly every bit as engrossing a story-driven adventure as the favored classics represented in FFRK, was a must-play entry for all longtime series fans. Best of all, most of it could be experienced single-player!
Having now completed A Realm Reborn (essentially, “Book 1” of FFXIV, not including an earlier version of the game that failed and was shut down) I can say that this MMORPG has so far indeed been a story-driven experience, in the sense that there is a single linear “main scenario” that makes up the bulk of activity in the game (at least until you start shooting for the endgame, which would likely take a non-hardcore player years to reach and also would not be of interest to them anyway). The A Realm Reborn portion of the story is roughly the length of a standard Final Fantasy: about 50 hours for me, though that included a few hours of side quests (most of which I undertook accidentally while figuring out how to differentiate side quests from main quests), some errant wandering, and some “away from keyboard” time (when I would take a mid-session break but leave the game running in the background). And as with any good Final Fantasy of the last three decades, you can proceed almost straight through without any grinding (though you may have to do 2-3 non-story dungeons, along with one set of class and job quests, which are worth doing anyway).
The active experience of the main scenario, however, bears only superficial resemblance to the single-player Final Fantasy classics. Series veterans longing for a return to the 16-bit glory days may welcome the high fantasy trappings and crystal motifs, but otherwise FFXIV satisfies no better than anything else post-FFXIII in bringing us home. Pitting it against FFXV specifically (since that was the last Final Fantasy I played), the two differ widely but ultimately trade blows about evenly. A Realm Reborn’s plot is far more comprehensible, which is not to say that it’s straightforward—there are myriad nations and deities to keep track of—but if it ever becomes hard to grasp, it is from the game saying too much rather than too little. The former means I sometimes get names mixed up (e.g. which member of the imperial royal family is which, when none of them have yet appeared on camera). The latter results in me not having any idea how or why Noctis in FFXV arrived at any given moment, nor what the meaning of his next plan is, such as there is one. So FFXIV looks and sounds more like my traditional conception of what a Final Fantasy should be.
Where A Realm Reborn falls short of expectations for the series is in the drama of the narrative. There is almost no rising action through the entire main scenario. This is why it was so hard initially for me to distinguish the side quests from the main quests: the actions of both felt similarly humdrum and inconsequential. More often than not, even the main quests would simply entail trekking back and forth between the same couple civilized zones within a bland overworld to fetch and/or deliver some MacGuffin. Sometimes the characters sending me on these errands would even acknowledge the tediousness of the tasks, which only aggravated me more. If you know your system is badly designed, then don’t just shrug and perpetuate it. Do better!
I kept waiting for my heroic journey to begin in earnest, and there were many false starts—a new character making a grand entrance, or a lengthy cutscene containing some bold speechifying—when I would get excited that events were about to be set in motion, only to be treated to yet another fetch quest. The characters and their speeches almost never amount to anything. To those Redditors who tried to sell me on how awesome Y’shtola and Thancred are, I say it would have been more accurate to sum them up thusly: “These are nobodies.” They barely rate as supporting characters, as their appearances are so brief and sporadic, their contributions to any action or dialogue so trivial. The only consistently significant narrative agents are Minfilia and Alphinaud, supervisory characters who exist to tell you what to do, since the player character does not have a voice to call their own shots. The choice to feature a silent and solitary protagonist is typical of MMORPGs, though fans of the SNES and PS1-era Final Fantasy games may find it a harsh break from the developed leads and party dynamics traditionally associated with the series.
Potentially more interesting than the main scenario are the class quests, depending on what class you select when creating your character. Technically optional, but required if you want to unlock core skills and abilities for your class, these are short stories that you can intermittently progress through alongside the main scenario. Perhaps because they are smaller in scope, they feel a little more intimate. By the time I completed the class quests for my gladiator character, I knew the supporting characters in that story a lot better than I ever got to know Y’shtola and Thancred through all of A Realm Reborn.
I think the narrative is further constrained by the persistent nature of the MMORPG world. Since it must be shared among many players who are at different stages of the story, nothing ever seems to change in it, which further undermines any sense of stakes beyond your immediate skirmish. By contrast, one aspect in which FFXV lived up to the Final Fantasy standard was in the grandeur of its set pieces. Looming threats turned to cataclysmic clashes that sometimes permanently altered the landscape. You could feel the end approaching through the darkening of the world, both figurative and literal. The only moments in A Realm Reborn that come close to that epic quality are the very final battles, which also happen to be among the worst moments, because the requirement that you experience them alongside other players creates a situation where randos end up photobombing all over your climax.
Yes, most of A Realm Reborn can be experienced single-player. Since quests are assigned to individuals and not groups, there is in fact almost no way to even try to work with others to clear the fetch quests together. For most of the main scenario, the other players are just passing through the background of your story, running their own errands or waging their own battles on the overworld. It does break the spell a bit when you’re trying to get through a quest dialogue, and then some dude playing weaver class decides to set down their spinning wheel right behind you to crank out a couple robes. But the fantasy was not that immersive to begin with. The real bubble-burster, for those weaned on the antisocial adventures of Cloud and Squall, and already leery of Final Fantasy going multiplayer, is when it comes time to tackle the dungeons, where players are required to party up with one another.
Most dungeons in A Realm Reborn are just long caves full of monsters, with a big boss monster at the end. There is no in-game explanation for why you must join forces with other players, only contrived reasons for why Y’shtola and Thancred can’t back you up instead. If your own mute hero is a practical nonentity, the other player characters might as well not exist at all, as far as the story is concerned. Only the most passing mentions are ever made to “your allies,” but nothing is ever said of where they come from or why they are as strong as you, despite your being a supposedly uniquely powerful warrior touched by the gods. So as a baseline, the narrative in most dungeons is thin. From there, points can only be deducted from the experience according to the degree to which the other players disrupt it.
Truly malicious behavior (e.g. bullying, offensive talk, deliberately sabotaging the group effort, etc.) is not something I have ever personally encountered in FFXIV. The more innocent kind of disruption is when some members of the party simply don’t perform well. They struggle to keep up with a boss, resulting in the entire group dying and having to restart. Sometimes it happens repeatedly, until the flailing player or another member so loses faith in the effort that they quit out, leaving the rest of the group in the lurch. I can’t entirely blame them.
The main scenario is generally well balanced for a more casual level of player, meaning that most battles can be successfully completed on the first try without ever having to grind for levels or even buy any items or equipment. Losses are almost never due to being underpowered, but rather from being underinformed about the mechanics of a boss’s gimmicks. Even in routine dungeon battles, the amount of briskly updating information to keep track of is absurd to me: health, positions, buffs and debuffs of all allies and enemies; timers telling me when each of my abilities is ready to reuse; who or where enemies are targeting (as marked by glowy shapes on the ground). Bosses add further mechanics that you might be seeing for the first time up to that point. There might be objects you have to interact with. Enemy attacks might be telegraphed through obscure text or subtle animations instead of the usual glowy shapes. When glowy shapes do appear, they might mean something different from what you’re used to them meaning. In one fight, a circle signified refuge. In the very next fight, a similar-looking circle was something to steer clear of—unless you were a tank, that is. And these things can change in the middle of a boss fight, so you have to be ready to adjust and adapt.
This can all quickly become overwhelming if it’s your first time attempting a given dungeon. Some gimmicks I’m convinced are impossible to grasp without having already experienced them once before, and I think that’s intentional to contrive comradeship through knowledge-sharing. The first players to figure out these dungeons can perhaps be thought of as pioneers, and then when they repeat them, they can share their wisdom with any newcomers in the group, and maybe the knowledge continues to get passed down that way. That’s fine in theory, but the strangers I group up with almost never give me any warning about what to expect.
When playing with strangers, I find that almost nobody ever talks, period. I get it, because I don’t talk either. It’s not what I play Final Fantasy for. But sometimes the failure to communicate is not a matter of being asocial. The worst players I’ve grouped with have been the veterans playing a dungeon for the umpteenth time, who would gladly disregard your presence, as they try to rush through as quickly as they can. The final dungeons of A Realm Reborn have been fairly ruined by the mentality of these players speeding through without giving first-timers the chance to really savor the climactic battles. (The battles probably also need to be rebalanced at some point, as the bosses are too weak now even for casual playthroughs.) But this is a problem that the designers created, and it shouldn’t be the players’ responsibility to sort it out on their own. This is also a problem, mind you, that simply doesn’t exist in the single-player Final Fantasy games I favor.
The multiplayer experience I’ve described is of playing in “pick-up groups” with strangers, since that’s nearly the only option when on the free trial. If you can manage to group with friends or family members, then the experience is certainly different. The pressure to keep pace with strangers’ unspoken expectations falls away, as does the diplomatic cautiousness of whether to give advice to someone who hasn’t asked for help but needs it. What’s left is a decent cooperative game that reminds me a little of the joys of questing with my siblings back in the day in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Dragon Quest IX, albeit without the full immersive context of being able to do anything together other than fight. At least the complexities of the combat actually become a boon, as they make for a less monotonous experience than those games.
At its best then, what FFXIV offers is something completely different from what I would traditionally seek from a Final Fantasy game, but it can be fun, if treated as a cooperative experience with friends. The fetch quest material in between each dungeon, at least in A Realm Reborn, is kind of a drag, but I have heard that the story picks up quite a bit in the next installment, Heavensward. I’m not sure all of my issues—silent protagonist, thin supporting cast, rando photobombers—can ever be resolved within FFXIV's MMORPG framework, but I’ll stick with the free trial for a while longer, and perhaps report back in a year on my Heavensward experience.
After a decade spent in development, Final Fantasy XV is due for release finally in just over a month. Another new console Final Fantasy, World of Final Fantasy, will be arriving even sooner at the end of October. A little further off, the long-demanded Final Fantasy VII remake is at last going to be a thing too (maybe?). After some pretty fraught years when the series was clearly relegated to B-tier status, we may be coming upon a Final Fantasy renaissance. Or if Final Fantasy XV underperforms, this may be a last gasp for the series, the developer, and the JRPG genre.
Personally, I already know I won’t be playing Final Fantasy XV. I’ve watched the trailers with the Japanese male model protagonists, and the image they’re pushing with this game just has zero relevance to me.
By no means am I implying that I've outgrown the series. The truth is, I’ve been playing a ton of Final Fantasy lately. It just so happens that all of that gaming has been on mobile platforms, where I would say Final Fantasy truly is experiencing a renaissance.
Final Fantasy Record Keeper
I recently updated my blog post about Final Fantasy Record Keeper to better reflect how awesome the game has become. Read my full review or check out some of my videos for a better sense of how it works, but, in short, imagine one of those JRPG coliseums—one where you can team up all of your favorite Final Fantasy characters to take on classic battles from throughout the series. From the gameplay to the visuals to the music, it’s a veritable best-of edition of Final Fantasy, and, more than anything else bearing the name in the last decade, it has helped to remind me that, once upon a time, I loved this series. No, there isn’t much of a plot to Record Keeper, but, through the battles, longtime fans get to relive some of the best moments of past stories, which is probably better than having to slog through a new, terrible story.
I’ll add that right now is also a great time for newcomers to jump in. A recent update to the game made the gacha lottery mechanic far more generous. Now, any time you spend 50 mythril (or, alternatively, about $30) to enter the 11-item drawing, you are guaranteed to pull at least one 5-star relic. Furthermore, there is currently a beginner-themed banner offering enhanced odds to pull the most useful weapons in the game, and, on top of that, you get to select an extra 5-star armor to go with your 11 other items. This means that, for the price of 50 mythril (which can be earned in about a week or less), you’re guaranteed to receive at least two 5-star items, with a pretty good chance that one of them will be among the best in the game. The game now even starts you off with one 5-star item completely free. When I started playing, it took me about a month to obtain my first 5-star, a Danjuro dagger from FFXII, which carried me a long while after. If you were to start now, you could pretty quickly have an entire party armed with 5-star gear and be able to tear through the early-game content.
Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius
Pretty much everything Final Fantasy Record Keeper gets right, Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius gets wrong. My understanding is that Brave Exvius is essentially a Final Fantasy-themed re-skin of developer A-Lim’s hit free-to-play mobile RPG, Brave Frontier, and its origins in that unrelated franchise may explain why it doesn’t feel very much like Final Fantasy.
Like Record Keeper, the big draw of Brave Exvius is its inclusion of a ton of Final Fantasy characters to collect and rotate into your party. The difference is that, in Brave Exvius, you can only obtain these characters via the gacha lottery, and the odds of pulling your favorite are slim. Brave Exvius further dilutes the pool by including a bunch of characters that would not be on anyone’s radar. Maybe some fans will be mildly pleased to finally play as Giott from FFIV or Lani from FFIX (though probably not after you’ve pulled your third useless Giott). But the lower ranks are populated primarily by generic “original” characters created just for this game. Unless you have a ton of real money to burn to bypass the odds, chances are you’ll be spending weeks, if not months, playing with a garbage party of no-name commoners before you finally win any of the famed heroes of Final Fantasy lore. Before long, you’ll wonder why this game even bears the Final Fantasy name, except to tease you.
Even once you acquire some name characters, the actual experience of playing with them is disappointing. In Brave Exvius, the weak characters (which includes most of the name characters) are hopeless and interchangeably so, because what they all have in common is that they can’t use the few key abilities that make the strong characters good. And the strong characters still are not fun to use, because these good abilities are merely better versions of the numerous crap abilities in the game. Basically, you just hope you get a strong character (which may not be a character you otherwise like), and then you use the same ability over and over again. Everything else is a waste of space. The battle system itself is turn-based, not taken from any previous Final Fantasy, but simplistic enough to feel familiar to any JRPG veteran. It’s not inherently flawed, but the game balance so far has not been conducive to tactical depth or tension.
In its favor, one could point out that, unlike Record Keeper, Brave Exvius actually includes most of the elements of a full-fledged standalone RPG. There are dungeons and towns to explore, and there is a story and lots of dialogue. I personally find that these things bog down the mobile experience. I don’t have time to go on fetch quests, and I don’t enjoy wandering around using clumsy touchscreen controls and getting caught in random encounters en route to a dead end in a dungeon. As for the story, it’s laughably poor and nowhere near worthy of the Final Fantasy name. A mix of dull cliches and asinine banter between the two dimwitted male leads, it feels like any random uninspired C-tier JRPG from the 32-bit or even 16-bit era.
The only bright spots to Brave Exvius are the music and the hi-res graphics, which are all brand new. The art style is colorful and cartoony. It doesn't do much for me personally. It doesn’t offer the nostalgic appeal of Record Keeper’s SNES-style sprites, and it also bears no resemblance to the art of Yoshitaka Amano or Tetsuya Nomura. Basically, Edgar and Sabin in this game don’t really look like Edgar and Sabin to me, which further contributes to the perception of Brave Exvius as an “impostor” Final Fantasy.
Mobius Final Fantasy
Unlike Record Keeper and Brave Exvius, Mobius Final Fantasy is developed internally by Square Enix, and immediately it comes off quite a bit more ambitious than the other free-to-play mobile games. The 3-D visuals, evocative of Final Fantasy X, are perhaps of the caliber of last-gen console graphics, though lacking the variety of a full-budget release. There are also fully voiced cutscenes. Perhaps what really sets it apart, though, is that, unlike Final Fantasy Record Keeper, Mobius Final Fantasy actually has a story and, unlike Brave Exvius, that story actually feels like a real Final Fantasy, albeit stripped down.
The plot could be considered a very loose reimagining of the first Final Fantasy. The amnesiac player character in Mobius Final Fantasy is referred to as the “Warrior of Light,” and there is also a Garland, a Princess Sarah, and a Chaos. There are also numerous references to other Final Fantasy titles, but the game doesn’t lean on nostalgia. Mobius Final Fantasy feels like a new addition to the Final Fantasy canon, and that is something I can respect. Mind you, I’m not saying it’s an especially interesting tale, but the telling, in keeping with the rest of writer Kazushige Nojima’s oeuvre, is gloomy and introspective, and there are elements of mystery and intrigue that are at least more compelling than anything in Brave Exvius.
The battle engine is also mostly original, and, as with the story, I respect the ambition, though I don’t love the actual experience. The combat is quasi-card-based. You can equip up to four ability cards to take with you into battle, and these will cover your spells, healing, special techniques, basically anything other than regular attacks. Once in battle, these abilities in turn are powered by elemental orbs that are randomly drawn each time you perform a regular attack. When it works, it can feel quite strategic, and you’ll pat yourself on the back for knowing when to play which card to win a round in the minimum number of moves. At other times, it will seem like the game just refuses to deal you the right orbs, and you’ll curse the randomness of it all.
Currently, the game’s undoing is that the battles take too long and occur too frequently. The pacing, in terms of both the plot and the leveling system, is plodding. Your gameplay progression can be measured in the number of job classes you’ve mastered. To even unlock most jobs, you have to pull from the gacha system. One positive is that there are no “doubles"; the gacha will never deal you a job you already own, so you’re guaranteed to eventually get the job you want. Honestly though, unlocking a new job class just isn’t as exciting as unlocking a new character, so this isn’t all that enticing to begin with. Then, even once you get a new job, in order to level it up, you have to grind through thousands of tedious battles to gather the right materials.
I’m still keeping one eye on Mobius Final Fantasy, understanding that it just came out and might take another month or two to get going, but right now the story is too limited and the gameplay far too repetitive for me to actively invest my time in it.
Evolving Together
Three free-to-play mobile games may not seem like much of a renaissance, especially when only one of them comes recommended. But, like I said, Final Fantasy Record Keeper has helped to remind me that I really do love this series. Some of that is nostalgia, true. But a large part of what makes Record Keeper work has to do with how it departs from the Final Fantasy games of my youth. I have outgrown the series as represented by Final Fantasy XV, but it isn't because it has become overrun with sullen pretty boys. At least, that isn't the only reason. At my age now, I can't see myself ever having the time to invest in another console Final Fantasy. And that's why I'm so pleased to find the game evolving, in its better mobile incarnations, into something more considerate of my circumstances—something I have on hand at all times but can play in short bursts without it taking up all my time. Even just five years ago, the idea of one of my favorite video game series going mobile is something I would have fought. Now, I find that Final Fantasy on mobile is the Final Fantasy comeback I'd been waiting for, and I'm excited to see more.
It’s that time of year again. This weekend, July 15-17, thousands of fighting game players from around the world will gather in Las Vegas to compete at Evo. This year, however, we will have a brand new game as the main event. After a good seven-year run, Street Fighter IV has been retired, with Street Fighter V taking its place.
With the game only just having been released in February, the competitive scene is yet in its infancy, many of the Street Fighter IV veterans still struggling to find their way with new characters and new mechanics. On the one hand, this means we may not see the same high level of polished play and depth of competition that we saw the last two years with Ultra Street Fighter IV at Evo. On the other hand, a new game is more exciting to watch for the simple reason that the competitors themselves are more excited. There’s much more room to grow as a player at the beginning of a game’s life than at its end, so it’s more fun and not as much of a grind.
But Evo is especially exciting this year because 2016’s season so far has provided a real narrative heading into the tournament. For the first time since—well, since Street Fighter IV’s worldwide debut in 2009—we’ve had a serious rivalry brewing, with two players, Japan’s Tokido and South Korea’s Infiltration, clearly ahead of the rest of the field. Four times these two players met in grand finals this year: three times in Premier events (next to Evo, the highest tier of tournament on the Capcom Pro Tour) and once in the prestigious Red Bull Kumite invitational.
The Road to Evo 2016
I’ve said before that, nine times out of ten, the fittest player is the one who wins. Pretty much from the moment he made his Street Fighter V tournament debut at Final Round in March, Tokido has looked like that guy. Immediately you could see that he was playing much more cleanly than anyone else. With his immaculate Ryu, he was the only guy who seemed to arrive at Final Round with a complete game, as meanwhile other players were still kind of just mashing their way through with Ken. And, just like Momochi in 2015, like Bonchan in 2014, he had that gift of seemingly being able to make his opponents move in slow motion. Usually, this is the effect you get when one player has been playing the game a crap-ton more than his opponents. He has become so familiar with myriad scenarios and has honed his perfect responses to be instinctive, such that he can basically play the game without having to think. That’s why his opponents, who are thinking hard, look like they’re moving so much slower. Alternatively, you could say it looks like this player can see into the future—a phenomenon that players back in the day used to describe with the term “psychic DP (Dragon Punch).” In my experience, the only way to beat someone like that is to show them something they haven’t seen before, something they can’t just process automatically.
Infiltration did exactly that. Repeatedly. As far ahead of the rest of the field as Tokido was, Infiltration seemed just that much farther ahead of Tokido. If Tokido was playing as though he could see one second ahead, then Infiltration looked as though he was playing from two seconds into the future. Playing Nash in a way that the game’s designers never conceived of, and that opponents and spectators alike were at a loss to follow—patternless back-and-forth dashing, random standing jab checks, springing forth with the offense unexpectedly but always at the perfect moment—Infiltration blew Tokido away at Final Round to claim the first ticket to the year-end Capcom Cup. A week later, at NorCal Regionals, he was not eligible to win a second ticket, but he decided anyway to once more deny Tokido that Capcom Cup spot (it will instead, at season’s end, go to the ninth highest-ranked player without a Premier championship).
At that point, there had been two Premier events so far on the Capcom Pro Tour, and the same guy, Infiltration, had won them both, both times beating Tokido in the grand final. When the two met again a month later at the Red Bull Kumite exhibition, first in the winners final and then in the grand final, it looked like we had ourselves a story. If only the rivalry weren’t so one-sided.
As the season progressed, Infiltration, having secured his Capcom Cup spot, cut back on most of his traveling. Tokido, meanwhile, seemed to finally be losing ground to the rest of the field. At the next two Premier events, Stunfest in May and Dreamhack Summer in June, with no Infiltration to stand in his way, Tokido was instead foiled by his fellow Tokyo players Momochi and Fuudo.
Finally, at CEO, traditionally the biggest tournament before Evo, Tokido and Infiltration were both in attendance, as was Momochi, who, in addition to beating Tokido in multiple tournaments, had managed a stunning perfect record against Infiltration over the course of the Street Fighter 5 Crash team competition.
Sure enough, the tournament would come down to these three duking it out for supremacy.
First, Tokido battled Infiltration in the winners semifinal.
(If you don’t have time for the whole video, just skip to 12:27 for the highlight.)
It looked like Tokido had studied hard for this match, as he confidently won the first game. The scary thing about Infiltration, however, is that not only is he hard to read in the first place, but the moment you think you’ve figured something out, he adjusts very quickly to make sure the same trick doesn’t work on him a second time. Once again, Tokido looked lost, as Infiltration won the next three straight, including one ridiculous sequence of four throws in a row. Was Tokido’s mind completely shattered at this point?
Next, in the winners final, Infiltration got his chance to redeem himself against Momochi.
(You don’t really need to watch this one. The two videos after this, however, are the two best matches of the year so far.)
Maybe people got a little carried away crowning Momochi the new No. 1-man after he won a few games against Infiltration in a three-on-three off-tour weekly event held for Korean television. Or maybe this was another case of Infiltration learning and adapting with a vengeance, because he convincingly 3-0’d Momochi this time.
In the losers final, it was then Tokido and Momochi in an all-Japan Ryu vs. Ken classic.
With that amazing comeback in the third game (6:00), Momochi certainly appeared the mentally tougher, more confident player. Yet somehow Tokido managed to compose himself after that dispiriting collapse to stage an even more remarkable recovery from down 0-2 to winning three straight.
Once more, it was Tokido vs. Infiltration in a grand final.
Coming from the losers bracket, Tokido needed to win two sets in a row against the guy who had had his number all year—indeed, the guy who had just a few matches ago beaten him here. How did Tokido do it? With style, for one thing.
It’s hard to account for how Tokido adapted so dramatically to turn things around. Partly, that’s because I could never account for anything Infiltration was doing in the first place. I’ll say that those parries, besides being incredibly hype to witness, may actually provide key insight.
The parry, when it was introduced in Street Fighter III, altered competitive Street Fighter in a fundamental way. It was a tool that could literally beat every attack in the game, which meant attacking suddenly became the riskiest play at all times. If you could just anticipate your opponent’s next move, the parry gave you the power to turn the tide in an instant. That’s what Evo Moment #37 was all about. In Street Fighter II and Street Fighter Alpha—almost any other 2D fighting game up to that point—Daigo would have been a dead man for sure. But because of the parry, all it took was one godlike read (and some tremendous execution) to turn what once would have been assured defeat into the greatest comeback in Street Fighter history.
As amazing as that moment was, the parry itself remained a divisive mechanic, and it did not return in Street Fighter IV. In Street Fighter V, however, Ryu has a parry, yet it has not affected the game in any fundamental way. It hasn’t even really been a factor. Everybody seems to forget it exists and just plays the game as though it were Street Fighter II. At least, that was the case up until this grand final.
Analysts have been reluctant to directly tie the outcome of the match to the parries, cool as they were. Each of Tokido’s three moments (2:06, 9:31, 12:26) did lead into victorious rounds, but they didn’t really come at tide-turning junctures. But remember that, at high levels (not for scrubs like me, who occasionally just guess right), parrying is principally about anticipating your opponent’s moves. It’s about reading the other player and the situation. It’s about being psychic, in other words. And here Tokido was pulling it off against an opponent who, for so long, had seemed unreadable. There could be no more emphatic way for Tokido to assert that, at long last, he had well and truly ascended and figured Infiltration out. As I watched the turnaround in that grand final, returning to that idea of Infiltration playing from two seconds into the future, I now visualized Tokido catching and outrunning him mid-race.
The Path to Victory
So what does this mean for Evo? Well, it would certainly suck for me to have written all that only for both Infiltration and Tokido to crash out early. I mean, it could happen. This is Evo, after all. But is Evo really so different from all the other tournaments these guys have dominated?
The difference between Evo and every other tournament is the scale. No other fighting game event draws multiple thousands of entrants to compete in a single game. Before this year, even a thousand competitors at any other tournament was unheard of. Street Fighter V at Evo has over 5,000 people registered—more than double Ultra Street Fighter IV’s record-breaking number from last year.
That doesn’t mean, however, that Infiltration has to beat 5,000 other players. The minimum number of matches for any player to win Evo this year is fourteen. That’s if they can stay in the winners bracket all the way through. Fourteen matches sounds easily doable for a player of Infiltration's caliber, right? But that’s not all.
Compared to a regional major, the larger number of entrants at Evo traditionally means that it’s longer in the beginning (because of all the extra no-names to wade through in pools), tighter in the middle (because ALL the name players are present, including people who don’t usually travel), and pretty much the same once in the top 8 (i.e. mostly Japanese guys, plus a few other East Asians and maybe one or two lucky Westerners who drew easy brackets).
With 5,000 entrants this year, that beginning stage will be longer than ever, but I have my doubts about the tightness of the pack in that middle stage. Street Fighter V being still such a young game, I don’t think, frankly, that there are even thirty-two elite-level players in the world yet. (Unless there are a bunch of super-good Japanese guys we’ve just never heard of. There are a bunch of random Japanese players registered....)
When you look at it from that perspective—Infiltration only has to win fourteen matches, and the opponents don’t start getting serious until maybe eight matches in (when he might potentially have to face Sako)—then it doesn’t seem like such a mountain for a clearly superior player to climb.
Thus, I’d say Infiltration and Tokido are pretty much locks for the top 8, and I’ll throw Momochi’s name in there too. (I mean, just check that guy’s expression when he plays. He’s not in this to lose, and you can bet he’ll have done his homework since CEO.) I would consider these three to be the co-favorites. Between the three of them, it’s much harder to call, but I’ll say that, after CEO, the ball is in Infiltration’s court.
Standing in the Way
Assuming the current brackets hold (and it sounds like they’re pretty much final, as of this writing), Infiltration and Tokido are actually in the same half of the draw, which means they would likely meet at the start of the top 8 on winners side. Momochi, meanwhile, is in the other half, with Fuudo being his likeliest opponent in top 8 winners.
I’d consider Fuudo to be right behind the three co-favorites. His character, R. Mika, is not as steady, and he hasn’t won a major tournament yet this season. But he has definitely shown himself capable of beating Tokido and Momochi. These guys play each other all the time in Tokyo, so they’ll all know what to do against one another.
For that same reason, I’d consider the other big Tokyo players, Mago and Kazunoko in particular, as threats, not to win Evo, but to potentially spoil Tokido’s run. They’d have to get pretty deep into the bracket before that can happen, but Tokido could be running into random Japanese players as early as his second pool (his fifth match, supposing he doesn’t lose beforehand), and he could potentially face Daigo in the second round of the quarterfinals (ninth match).
Besides Infiltration, Momochi, and Tokido, there are actually two other guys who have won Premier events on the Capcom Pro Tour this year. Phenom of Norway, the highest-ranked player in Europe, won Dreamhack Summer. There’s not enough data to say with certainty where he stands in relation to the rest of the world, but that tournament was attended by pretty much all of the Japanese name players, none of whom seemed prepared for his Necalli. Necalli is not at all a rare character, and Phenom’s did not have any special tricks. It was almost the opposite; he just dispensed with the mind games and kept nailing the Japanese with wakeup uppercuts (the most obvious option, which at high levels is among the least expected). We’ll see if that will hold at Evo.
China’s top player, Xiao Hai, won G-League, his home Premier, which was actually the most recent Premier event, taking place just this past weekend. For some reason, those Asian tournaments almost always have crazy results, so I wouldn’t read too much into Tokido and Momochi’s shockingly low placings at G-League. I don’t know how it went down, because the garbage Chinese stream was garbled or worse for most of the event. All I heard is that, at the end, Xian brought out Ibuki, which is crazier than all the rest of it. Xiao Hai still took it 3-0, though, which is not a huge surprise. As was the case in Street Fighter IV, Xiao Hai can beat anyone in the world but will just as likely fold to second-tier players. Either could happen at Evo.
About that Ibuki from Xian, it’s crazy because that character was only added to Street Fighter V a little over a week ago. One of the exciting things about the Capcom Pro Tour this year was that the game was expected to continuously evolve, not only because players would be learning a new game, but because downloadable characters would be added every month. Capcom couldn’t quite maintain that monthly schedule, and, so far, the downloadable characters have been designed more conservatively to be fairly mid-tier. Still, when it was announced that Ibuki and Balrog (boxer) would be legal for use at Evo—a decision met with cheers from spectators, grumbling from competitors—the fear was that, with the community not having had time to adequately vet or practice against these characters, some mountain man might show up to Evo and bust out some totally broken secret Ibuki tech to score a major upset.
Xian, a former Evo champion, has been fairly quiet in Street Fighter V, and most blame that on his character of choice, F.A.N.G., being among the worst in the game. But if he’s discovered something with Ibuki (and he is exactly the sort of player to find and exploit these things), that could be a game-changer. Sako, the Capcom Cup 2013 champion, is another player that comes to mind. He lives in Osaka, which is more on the fringes of the Japanese scene, so he hasn’t been seen much in tournaments. He has an affinity with the character of Ibuki, having used her in Super Street Fighter IV: AE 2012. And he’s known to be one of the most technically skilled and innovative players in the world.
As for the US players, there was some optimism before the season began that this might be the Americans’ year. There would be no arcade release for Street Fighter V, which cut out a significant chunk of the Japanese competitive scene. Evening the playing field, everybody got their first looks at the game at pretty much the same time via the worldwide beta test. A handful of California players even managed to get their hands on the final version of the game before anyone else. And the game itself was simpler and more streamlined than Street Fighter IV. It was closer to Street Fighter II, which the US used to occasionally win at Evo. All that optimism faded quickly, however, after the top four spots at the first US Premier event ended up going to foreign players.
And yet it probably is true that the chances of a US champion at Evo are higher than they’ve been in years. That is, one specific player has an outside chance to win. Through a string of victories in second-tier Ranking events, Justin Wong has actually risen to the top of the Capcom Pro Tour leaderboard, ahead of Tokido and Infiltration. Outside of Premier events, which have all been gobbled up by foreign invaders, he has been clearly the best player in North America, almost as untouchable as Tokido and Infiltration. He even extended his dominance to South America, doing in Brazil much the same thing that Japanese players have repeatedly done in the US: making their top local players look like rank amateurs. His character of choice, Karin, suits his methodical style of play much better than Rufus ever did. At NorCal Regionals, he came within inches of beating Tokido, and, while he’s yet to get a crack at Infiltration, many believe he matches up stylistically very well against the South Korean. The problem for Justin is that his local competition is nowhere near good enough to prepare him for the depth of foreign experience he’ll eventually have to fight through if he progresses far enough. As the No. 1 seed thanks to his ranking, he does at least have a favorable bracket. He won’t run into any real contenders until the top 32 (tenth match, assuming no losses), when he’ll likely face either Hong Kong’s HumanBomb or NuckleDu, the next-best player in the US.
After NuckleDu, the rest of the US is pretty free. For a minute, it looked like SonicFox—the teenage LeBron James of fighting games, who has been completely dominant in Mortal Kombat and Injustice (and random other games nobody cares about)—might become both the worst nightmare and the best hope for the US Street Fighter community, as he promised to finally bring his talents their way in Street Fighter V. Unfortunately, his skill in Mortal Kombat X hasn’t quite translated. Still, the kid is a fighting game genius who thrives on the big stage, so I wouldn’t count him out entirely.
The Evo Factor
The other factor that makes Evo different from smaller tournaments is Evo itself—just the gravity of the event. Over the length of the three-day tournament, the tension is only going to build, and then, once the finalists are on that grand stage competing for the most storied trophy in all of fighting games, anything can happen. You could argue that the big names have all been through this before, but the reality is we’ve seen that professionals across all sports and at every level still experience nerves. They’re only human. That’s kind of what makes it great.
Oh wait, Tokido’s a god. One of Japan’s five gods of fighting games, isn’t that what they say? I guess we’ll find out this weekend.
