Overall, I had a great time at EVO Japan. It was exhausting – I had two 12-14 hour days on my feet the whole time, didn’t have time for lunch either day, and was running around like crazy. It was really fun though. I really enjoyed meeting with and talking to other fighting game fan enthusiasts, and the atmosphere in general. I loved that there were side tournaments, some of which were run on arcade cabinets. I wish I had time to watch some of the USFIV tournament. Writing this up, I’m a bit sad that my list of good things is much shorter than my list of things that can be improved, but that is not a reflection of my overall experience. I had a great time, and would absolutely do it over again in a second.

• A huge turnout for lots of games. I primarily play and watch Street Fighter, and there was immense turnout for that game.
• For the number of people, and how much reliance there was on volunteer staff, things ran well. I don’t think there were major mix-ups, and things went smoothly for the most part. Almost all the volunteer staff were themselves FGC players, and it really showed in how the community pulled together to pull of this logistically intimidating event.
• Lots of people from all over the world came, and I think really enjoyed Tokyo.
• Lots of places to eat / shop near the venue. Some 24 hour places too.
• The event was streamed on Twitch with English commentary. Also, a second stream from Capcom Fighters covered most of the Street Fighter matches with English commentary.
• I liked the exhibitor booths that were there, and the preview of Soul Caliber was great.
• A really great atmosphere for all players involved – people were friendly and approachable.
• Entry was free. Free. Are you serious!?

While I really enjoyed EVO Japan 2018, and have nothing but good feelings about it, there are some things that can be improved. I really think that these are improvement opportunities, and in no way do I buy into the theories that the event was run for advertisers or media (I’ve been reading things like that on twitter). I’m not hooked into the world of the TOs and runners for this, but I know that some of the people involved on both the US and Japan sides are themselves home-grown FGC veterans and enthusiasts.

One thing you need to keep in mind about EVO Japan is that Japan is a country that loves their laws. In particular, there are laws about gambling that make it impossible to collect an entry fee and also have a pot to payout to the winners. I’m sure there is some way around this, but Tokyo Cup didn’t have a prize because of those laws. EVO Japan was free to enter – which is amazing – but I think because of that, they had to gather most of their capital from advertising and exclusive streaming agreements with e.g., OpenRec TV and AbemaTV. I think the overall size of the venue was due to the overall expense, and also since this was the first EVO Japan, an underestimation of interest. (The Sai tournament did happen last year, but I feel like that wasn’t a proper estimator for the interest of an EVO Japan event).

So here are some things that I think could use some improvement.

• The venue was a bit difficult to find. I’m more or less fluent in Japanese, and I had some trouble finding the venue. Once you make it to Sunshine City, getting to the Convention Halls is still quite a hike through the shopping complex. You get dumped out onto the first floor, and you have to know that Hall A and B are on floors 3 and 4 (I think). I should have talked to someone about putting up signs in English telling people where to go.
• The venue was too small. Running pools on the first day – about 2500 SFV entrants – was tough. We had one machine for each pool (this is ok) with about 8-10 people per pool. There was nowhere near enough room for 8-10 people to stand around the machine, since we had eight stations on a table, and another table not too far behind that. It was very hard to get to your pool if it was in the middle of the table.
• There weren’t enough seats in the venue to sit down. As a volunteer I was on my feet 14 hours a day, and that is expected, but there wasn’t enough seating for people in general.
• Overall, I don’t think the organizers did a good job of communicating in general, and in specific communicating in English. When I volunteered I thought I would be involved from a much earlier stage crafting signs, information, templates, things like that, but I didn’t hear anything about organization at all until the day before the event.
• Confusion over pool numbers. On the first day, the stations were numbered with three digit numbers, but pools were denoted as (A|B|C)##. It took me a while to understand what the relationship between the pool numbers and station numbers was. A future run should have a simpler to understand system, like “Morning XX”, “Afternoon XX”, “Evening XX” where XX is the same as the number on the station.
• Confusion over where pools were for people that made it out. There was a lot of confusion over where players should go once they made it out of their pools. As someone running one of those pools, I didn’t know until about 10 minutes before I ran the pool. The best advice I had to give people was to wait by their station for someone to call your name. This is something that was addressed on the second day where with Tekken people got cards that said what pool they would be in, so I’m glad to see that an adjustment was made.
• Confusion about what time players would play. This is something that generally happens I think, but I wasn’t able to tell people when they would play. I just ran the pool in Winners up to Winners Final, and then ran the Losers. I’m not sure what could be done here. I think it would be great if Smash.gg could integrate a notification system to call players when they are up or when they would be the next match.
• Volunteers were not organized in any way. I expected that a few days before the event, I would be told that I am running pools XX and YY, and where and when they were. That didn’t happen. We gathered in the morning right before the tournament started, and were told to just go stand in front of a station. Confusion was the order of the day. That said, I think we did manage to run all the pools and there weren’t many problems with it, but it was not what I could call planned or organized.
• No breaks for Volunteers. Since we didn’t have a schedule, we just were left on our own. I had to leave early one day and couldn’t run an evening pool, so I just informed the blue shirted guy and took off. I hope things went well. It would have been better if we had volunteer schedules, so I would have had time to eat.
• Not enough exhibitor booths. I liked the booths that they had. There just were not very many. I wanted to buy some of the specialty stuff, like the nice Sanwa stick, but it sold out pretty quick. Also, as a volunteer I had no time at all to actually look at what they had.
• No artists alley? I can’t believe they didn’t have a big artists alley to feature all the great anime and manga art in Japan. The crossover potential is huge. It boggles the mind. There was one booth selling a manga which I bought (and got signed!) If there is another EVO Japan I really think they should think about getting a much larger space for exhibits and artists.
• No organized after-parties? I’ve always wanted to go to Bar Fights. I didn’t see any Gooteks out there setting up fun stuff to do. I know BAS was setting some stuff up, but that is more or less personal connections and friends going out. I would not have the stamina to go out and do something, but I’m sure many other people would be interested. Especially because the tournament ended early for a US tournament. Why did it end early? The last train! So events have to run on time or people might get stuck far away from home or hotels.
• Talking about hotels, was there a venue hotel with a discount rate? Another missed opportunity.
• Not nearly enough planning for who does what for the volunteers. I mentioned this before, but I’m shocked that we were able to pull this off with the lack of planning we had. In the morning of the first day, the volunteers were asked “What game do you know?” and then they went and ran those pools. This is something that can be determined ahead of time.
• Not enough casual setups. I saw this complaint on twitter a bit. I know that it was possible to play casuals, but all the setups were used in official capacity at one time or another (aside from the BYOC area – which I was glad they had space for).
• Not enough sticks to lend out. In most of the events in Japan, they are either held at an arcade (so you don’t need to bring a stick) or setups are provided with sticks (because who wants to lug that stuff on a super crowded train to work just so you can go play a bit on the way home?) We had some people who didn’t have sticks, and I think there were only about 6 or so available to lend out. There wasn’t a system for that either. Of course, I think some good can come of that, because that forces people to talk to others in their pool and see if they can find a stick to borrow. In Japan, having an excuse to talk to someone is often necessary to start conversation, so that might have helped start some friendships. I know when I went to WNF last year, I didn’t have a stick, and since Salilou let me borrow his stick I’ve really wanted to pay back that favor, and we’ve become friendly since. I suspect many Japanese were expecting that they wouldn’t need to bring a stick though, and I certainly didn’t see any official communication about that.
• Really hard to watch matches. If you wanted to spectate pool matches, or later on streamed matches on Day 2, there was just no good way to do that. At some point a projector was set and that helped a bit, but the place was jam packed.
• Lack of coordination between the EN streamers and TOs. I ended up being the intermediary between the stream station for US Twitch on Day 2 and the TO. I only did that because I wanted to be involved in the SFV stuff day 2, and when I went to talk to the stream staff, they didn’t have any plan for how to move forward. So I stepped in and tried to help out. This is also something that really should have been worked out far in advance.
• On the second day, since I noticed that there was confusing over who to talk to if you only spoke English, I recommended that we put on tags or stickers or something on people who were bilingual. We then split our group up (all eight of us!!) over all the games that were running. Those were some ghetto tags too. I hope it helped a bit.
• Not enough tickets for the finals. Not much more to say about that.

The rest of this post is probably not interesting to people, but please do read on if you want to hear about things that just got me super excited.

I’m not particularly good at Street Fighter. I’ve got a Platinum/Gold Zangief, and a Silver Rashid. I really enjoy spectating Street Fighter though, and am familiar with most of the players and commentators. I love living in Japan, but I’m married to a Japanese woman who doesn’t really care for games, so I can’t talk to her about those things. It is very easy to get homesick and miss things from America (Pizza is one of them – hit me up if you want to know the best NYC style Pizza places in Tokyo). I really enjoy listening to UltraChenTV, The Gauntlet, and The Jump In on my commute to work. So meeting some of the people behind those things is something I was really looking forward to. While I also would like to meet players, I worry that top players are going to be preoccupied with preparing for their games, so I don’t really want to bother them.