Evo 2018 Report

Hey there Fantasy Strike fans! We recently exhibited our game at the Evolution Championship Series in Las Vegas, Nevada. With the help of the talented Esteban Martinez (@thebesteban on Twitter) we've got another great recap video of our booth and tournament. Check it out!

As you can see, we had a fantastic turnout as usual and the game is looking better than ever. Sirlin made a flyer specifically to highlight all the improvements we’ve made since last Evo:

That’s a lot of new stuff! If you’ve been following along with our development, you’d know about most of these new modes and features, but it’s pretty crazy to look back at just how far we’ve come in just a year’s time. We’re getting closer and closer to the actual launch of the game, and at each showing we’re told that we’re looking more polished as the months go by.

Booth was pretty much this packed the entire weekend...

...and more packed as time went on.

Last year, we had some extra time in the booth to run two tournaments, both capped at 32 players. Juan Faria-Jones won the early tournament, and the late afternoon tournament had a fantastic grand finals of LordKnight (Prominent Anime FGC competitor) and Snake Eyez (Renowned Zangief player across multiple Street Fighter titles) with LordKnight’s Valerie play edging out Snake’s Rook.

This time, we decided to run one mega tournament at 2pm on Saturday. Before we knew it, we already had over 50 signups, and decided to cap the tournament at 64 so we wouldn’t be completely overrun (we only had 4 stations at the demo booth). Shortly after, we hit the 64-player cap and had a waitlist that would have resulted in 90 or so entrants!

Juan Faria-Jones (aka "FinalAbe") ended up winning the tournament, defending his title from last year. CIRCA Nicky took 2nd and Solacracy and Bio Billy Bones rounded out the rest of the top 4.

1st place Juan Faria-Jones and 2nd place Nicky posing with their bead sprite mains

More about Nicky; he has been a fan of our game since he first played it last year at SoCal Regionals, competing in both of our tournaments there as well. He is one of the best Killer Instinct players and dabbles in other games like MKX, Injustice 2 and recently Tekken 7, so he’s an all-around fighting game player with lots of high-level competitive experience. He ended up winning Evo 2018’s Killer Instinct side tournament, and during his winner’s speech, he told the stream that Fantasy Strike had made him a much better KI player, and that they should all go play Fantasy Strike to practice good decision making and fundamentals. Thanks again for the endorsement, Nicky!

seriously guys, i can’t stress it enough.

PLAY.

THIS.

GAME.

it will change the way you play and understand fighting games! https://t.co/XXEEA2aS5s

— Nicky 🙏🏼🌚 (@NickyFGC) August 5, 2018

Nicky falling in love with DeGrey at SCR2017

Speaking of Killer Instinct, we decided to check in on some of the other side tournaments at Evo and found that we had more entrants for our Fantasy Strike tournament than Killer Instinct did. We applied to be an official side stage game at Evo this year but didn’t make the cut, but our tournament numbers this year give us hope that there’s a community out there that wants to see more Fantasy Strike events at major FGC events.  

Sirlin teaches Woolie Madden of the Super Best Friends the latest Geiger tech

A last note about release platforms. Right now, we're available on Steam and we're coming to PS4 and Switch early in 2019. In selling Steam keys at Evo, two moments stuck out to us. One was right after some players played an insane match of Lum vs Lum (random items everywhere!), they were all laughing and Sirlin said "How many Steam keys will that be?" Known they were checkmated by how much fun they had, they bought three. A bit later, there was a player who said his computer isn't good enough to run games, so a Steam key wouldn't help him, but he loved the game so much and wanted to support it that he bought TWO keys anyway. That was pretty heart-warming.

We hope you'll all help us spread the word, help run Fantasy Strike at your own local events, and generally grow the scene. By doing that, we'll be able to afford more content and features, which we'd love to do.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth at Evo!