Thursday March 30th was the first day of volunteer activity. The day started at 1pm after you got your own lunch. At 1pm I showed up at the venue – it’s fairly close for me, only three stops on the Rinkai line where I live. We showed up, and there was a small desk to check-in, get your “Volunteer” pass, and volunteer shirt.

Note that there are multiple classes of volunteers:

• Blue Shirts. These are people that volunteered and do not get paid. I initially thought that people here would be from the FGC and know how things run, but over the course of the three days I found out that there are also blue shirts that don’t know much about fighting games. There were some young people that I think were from one of the universities like Sofia University with bilingual students that didn’t seem to know much about fighting games at all.
• Red Shirts. These are people that are paid, though not much. They are not necessarily involved in the FGC, though I didn’t talk with many of them. They are the most likely to die in an away mission.
• Black Shirts. These are the people that are involved in the organization and decision making. These people span all disciplines, from production to technical support, bracket runners, stream support, and so on. Many of them are recruited from contacts like Matsuda’s crew (the owner of Game Newton, heavily involved in organizing and fighting games – and Matsuda was a “Director” for EVO JP) or Nyanshi/Toyata’s crew (Toyota is the founder of TOPANGA, and also has been involved in almost all fighting game events in Japan since the start). The major players for different games have groups of people that they often work with, and many of them came in as black shirts.
• Black Shirts with ribbons. Even more power.

I can’t remember the last time I bought a real paper magazine. Only two pages on Tanukana but it should be a fun read.
本物の雑誌何年振りに買ったかな。 pic.twitter.com/v6xb3TyDy0

— FuguTabetai (@DocFugu) March 30, 2023

We waited around in the volunteer room for a while, I took the opportunity to read the Weekly Spa! issue that had an interview with Tanukana. It was a short two pages, check the twitter thread for some comments.

After a while we got the call to action: the day was going to be spent putting together the bags that attendees will get. There were about 20 or so of us, and we went down to the venue, lined up at tables that were too short, and started an assembly line to put four flyers, one jelly drink, and one protein bar into the EVO JP bags. The tables were about six inches too short to be comfortable, there were no chairs, and there were lots of bags to stuff.

We had I think two breaks of half an hour, and we might have been provided a bento box for dinner; I just don’t remember. I struck up a few conversions, all the blue shirts I talked to were fighting game fans (veterans even in some cases). One person was relatively new to fighting games – they saw an arcade near their university, and started to go there about two years ago. Out of all the games, they thought Street Fighter III was super cool, and so her start with the FGC was Street Fighter III. In 2021. Tell me that isn’t awesome, because it is awesome.

The work was pretty tough, and near the end – I was there until about 7pm, so nearly five hours of stuffing bags – I was exhausted. I had hoped to meet people and go out to dinner, but I was too tired, and just went home to get some leftovers. We packed lots of bags though, and there is something to be said for doing physical work that results in a tangible result, so that was nice.

You’ll note that there wasn’t any training or anything – I vaguely recall at the initial meeting they asked who knew what was up, and we got separated out. According to an account on twitter it looks like people did get an hour or so information about how to run a bracket.

Report time for Friday was 8am, which isn’t hard for me. I’m up at 6am most days, and it’s only about 35 minutes door to door for me if the trains come quickly. Friday was the main day of work; I expected to run some brackets. Start time was supposed to be 9am for Street Fighter brackets, which I assumed I would be in since I was also playing in Street Fighter. The organizers did ask people what tournaments they were in, and tried to accommodate people – of course, what that meant is that you would run the bracket that you play in (which makes sense to me.)

We got in, then headed to the venue and were assigned to the games we would manage. They also asked us the languages we could speak, and people wore arm bands indicating the languages they knew, which is an improvement over the first EVO Japan. I remember at that one, I explicitly asked the organizers (Hameko actually!) to make some kind of marking (I think we improvised something with tape and markers?) This worked a lot better.

There were a lot more bilingual volunteers / staff this year than the first EVO Japan. That was nice.

After assignments were done, we did some setup work on the stations – one setup per pool, same as 2018. I expected between 30-40% no-shows, which makes running a pool with one setup not too bad. We also each ran two pools at the same time – or at least, I ran my two pools at the same time, I don’t know why you wouldn’t. The setup just included turning on the machines, and then logging into the accounts such that P1 was on the right, and P2 was on the left. No big deal. Then logging into SFV and making sure the illegal tournament stages were not selected for random select. I’m surprised we didn’t run pools on training stage, but whatever.

Once things were set up, we had a lot of waiting to do. People were asking if they could run casuals on the setups, and we confirmed that they could (which was surprising to me – I’d normally think at a Japanese event they wouldn’t want you to do that, but we got verification that it was ok.) 9am came and went, we were still waiting for the brackets and directions. A bit after that Toyota passed out brackets to us. We would mark the results on paper, and hand them in to the command desk to get recorded.

In previous events I’ve volunteered for we did bracket entry on our phones – they didn’t go with that option this time because in the past so many people accessing the same event led to problems with the platform, so they wanted to reduce the number of people accessing the site at once. That does have the unfortunate side effect that it takes a long time to update the brackets on start.gg.

After that we went out and ran out brackets. No problem on my side. About 30-40% DQ rate, but I think I got done with both pools in about 2 hours. If you line up the next people to play it goes pretty quick. They did want us to run all winner’s matches and then loser’s, so theGameTwoK wouldn’t be happy about that, but for pools it is easier to remember and do, especially with people that aren’t familiar with running pools.

I, of course, went 0-2 in my pool. One of these days I’ll get a win, but my first opponent was Arlieth, who is super good, and a good guy, so I didn’t mind. I probably could have won my second match, but for some reason my stick wouldn’t register back for blocking (it would backdash though) and after futzing around with it for a while I couldn’t figure it out. I need to inspect the settings, but again, I can’t complain too much about that, it was on me to make sure my equipment was working before I went to EVO. I totally should have played on that stick (I usually don’t play on my Victrix because it’s so nice) before I went.

After pools were done, they asked me to float around and answer questions / help out (since I’m one of the bilingual staff). At some point we organized shifts between the volunteers to head to the staff room for our (provided for free) bento lunch. We also took turns taking the blue shirts off and walking around the venue a bit to experience the tournament. It was nice.

The afternoon started a bit late – the brackets had to be finalized – about 30 minutes late I think. No problems in these pools either – in one of the pools I had cosplayer Hiro_andHiro_ who dressed as and played Cammy. She was super fun, and I got some pictures with her too. Misokrattz, a good Zeku player, was also in my pool, and she made it to loser’s final. Near the end of the day, the staff asked me to hold the final match for the stream, after finishing up everything else, I took her and iEgis3rd up to the stream setup and did some minor translation. It was a super fun match, and when she won she was very emotional and excited. It was one of those fighting game tournament moments that I really enjoy seeing.

Afterwards it was already pretty late, so I checked out and headed to Shimbashi where I met some friends for dinner – starting at 10pm! Super late for me, but I did make it home before the last train (it was close though!)

Saturday was a 7:30am start, which wasn’t too hard for me. I’m not sure why the volunteers started so early; all we did was hang around the game area we were at and answer questions. They didn’t need any volunteer Blue Shirt staff to run games, so I just wandered around and tried to help out where I could. Took some pictures. Had a lunch break. At some point an NHK camera crew interviewed me, said it would be on BS-3 at some point or something, but I know I’ll never be able to find that, so too bad.

Once the afternoon came around, we got assigned to clean-up duty, and that was pretty tough work. I put myself on monitor duty, so I learned how to take down and re-pack the Sony monitors. Those monitors are pretty nice; well built and sturdy. I don’t know anything about the monitor settings, and I’ll note that none of us changed any of the monitor settings. I’m no Yung Art, so I wouldn’t even know what settings would make sense. Based on people who know better than I do (Fubarduck) I’m not sure that the monitor settings would even make much difference given the PS4 hardware.

I packed monitors for a few hours, it was getting a bit rough. It was nice seeing all the Top 24s and such go on around us. Toyota came around and asked me to help with some translation stuff – that was nice. I always got the feeling that I annoyed him somehow, but maybe that’s not the case. There were a few English speakers in Top 24, and he wanted me on call to help out if anything happened. So I sat down in the player section, met the staff there, and talked with them a bit. They didn’t expect to need much help, unless an English speaker got into Top 8, in which case I’d need to help with translating for the photographer that would film the intro sequence. I ended up doing that with Punk and Oil King, and then Oil King also wanted to see if he could get a ticket for his wife for Day 3, so we talked to a bunch of people until we finally got an answer on that. All Top 8 competitors get a guest pass, you need to talk to the staff at the check-in desk on the day of, I really wanted to make sure things would go OK there, so it took longer than expected.

In the evening I wanted to meet up with the AnimeIlluminati dinner in Shibuya, but I wouldn’t have been able to get there until about 10:30pm, which was too late for me. That’s unfortunate; I haven’t really had a chance to actually talk with any of the Tatakai Tuesday guys, and I’ve known them for a while, and have some friends there that I would have really liked to have spent some time with.

Nothing! On Sunday there were no volunteers (at least of the kind that I was) needed. When tickets went on sale, I bought the S class seat, so I was able to sit up as close to the stage as I liked – on a first come, first served basis.

I got a set up in front in one of the S-section rows, and ran into a friend or two by chance. So that was great! Strive was a lot of fun – I play a bit, but the Top 8 was much more fun than I expected. I particularly liked Poka, the 14 year old Happy Chaos player who came in his school uniform. School Uniforms in Japan are considered dress clothes, so people will wear those to weddings or funerals, for example. Gobou was the other player I really liked, well, along with Daru I-No. Gobou is just such a character with how expressive he is. Really good matches through the whole Top 8, and seeing Gobou win was great.

Before Tekken started I wanted to get lunch so I wouldn’t be hungry during Street Fighter, so I went out, and met some friends and we all got lunch at McDonald’s. That was really nice – it’s a bit of a walk – but we got back to Tekken at the start of the Loser’s matches, so we got to see a lot of that too. I was cheering for Arslan Ash – how could you not? – and so that turned out really well from my point of view. I’m not big into Tekken, the last one I played with any frequency was Tekken 2, but it is a fun game to watch. The announcements were great, and I really like Harada and Michael.

Street Fighter is the main game for me, and we were able to move to get seats right in front of Aru and Hameko on commentary. I was with one friend, and by chance two chairs away was another friend (someone who I used to see weekly at the SFV offline event, she often helped out run the brackets there – we haven’t seen each other since Corono!) We were chatting, and the guy sitting in between us asked if he should move – we both were just talking across him, and I felt bad once I realized that, but he kindly swapped seats so we could continue chatting.

I really enjoyed the SFV finals, I won’t talk too much about the games. I was supporting Punk and Mono as NA competitors, but once they were out I was hoping for a Momochi – Nemo finals. I had brought the book Nemo wrote “The Power to Believe” in hopes I could get him and Itazan to sign it, but a good time never came up. I’m sure I can get it signed at some point, I run into those guys with reasonable frequency. I was also wearing my Shinobism Polo shirt – and really, why aren’t there more nice, comfortable, subtle e-Sports Polo shirts? This shirt is super comfortable, I can wear it at work without looking like a race car, and is all around nice.

Seeing Oil King win was nice though, and when he ran out to hug his wife I was super happy for them.

Things went long, and while I was hoping to meet people for dinner, by the time things wrapped up, it was too late for me (I’ve got work!) so unfortunately, I didn’t get to spend as much time with people outside of the venue as I would have liked.