Now, Fight A New Rival
While most spent their Memorial Day weekend with family, at various cookouts, or simply enjoying their (hopefully) day off, thousands of fighting game fans from around the world all centered in a tiny little suburb named Schaumburg. This past weekend was Combo Breaker 2023 and it would be my first Combo Breaker since 2019.
A lot has changed since four years ago and I'm not just talking about the location but it does serve as a great starting point for the rest of my thoughts. When I first attended Combo Breaker back in 2018, it was held at the Pheasant Run Resort located in St. Charles, Illinois. During 2020's events, the original venue had closed down and several kids took it upon themselves to give the Resort a proper sendoff by razing it to the ground.
The new location would be closer to the airport and have several facilities including a 7-Eleven down the road, multiple neighboring hotels, and plenty of options to eat. I didn't know what to expect with Combo Breaker returning to Schaumburg and this being my first Combo Breaker at the new venue. The first time I attended, I was new to the FGC as far as branching out past my "local" group of friends. It was the first time I ever traveled out of state much less my first visit to Chicago and the mid-west. That year's Combo Breaker in 2018 was amazing and I recall saying if you're a fighting game fan, you should make the trip out to Illinois on Memorial Day weekend as it's the place to be.
I'm pleased to say that five years later I still share the same sentiment. Combo Breaker this year was one of the best events I've ever attended but here's where my similarities from 2018 ends. Five years does a lot to a person, much less a fighting game player. While I've been fortunate enough to be a part of the Tekken 7 community, a game that has continued to see an increase in relevancy as the years went on, many games have come and gone. New fighting games that have yet to be released have been the focal point of the "future," with the present sending off the current run of fighting games.
Street Fighter 6 releases in two days and while I wasn't one of the lucky ones to obtain a review copy, I have followed its development for over a year since I played it at EVO last year and based on early reviews, Capcom has done their homework as well as extra credit to ensure Street Fighter 6 passed with flying colors. While the normies like myself wait with bated breath, we sent off Street Fighter 5 as the final major tournament for the game during its lifespan. Juri specialist JustAKid was this year's Street Fighter 5 champion after a close match with Capcom Cup winner iDom in the Grand Finals.
Tekken 7 was another game that had seen itself comfortably nestled as a major game staple since its release in 2017. The reason why Tekken 7 was a huge deal in 2018's Combo Breaker was that it was the first Combo Breaker to feature the game as it was released in June the year before. Despite being in Combo Breaker's rotation for five years, support for it has increased due to its ongoing content and the passion felt by the developer, Katsuhiro Harada, and the Tekken Project staff. However, Tekken was especially important this time around as Combo Breaker was home to an exclusive Tekken 8 Closed Alpha Test.
Guess who got a chance to try it out in the eleventh hour?
GET READY FOR THE NEXT BATTLE! TEKKEN 8! NEW CHALLENGER! 1UP INFINITE!
While none of us at the alpha test couldn't capture and record media for obvious reasons, I can talk about my first impressions of the game. Keep in mind that these are very early impressions. Everything I say now may very well change the following day, but the alpha build that I had a chance to play managed to enlighten me about the direction the game is headed. Pick any of the ongoing Tekken 8 preliminary coverage I've written and it has all been 100% speculation based on trailers and showcases. After playing it for twenty-five minutes, I can attest that the Heat Mechanic will make or break matches.
Every character has unique character traits that activate when Heat Mode is active. Jun Kazama restores her health from certain attacks and Nina's gun attack power is boosted as well. While I don't remember every single unique trait like Xiaoyu's Hypnotist stance receiving a buff or Lars just sliding everywhere, one stood out and that was King's Heat Mechanic. King has a new move called "Jaguar Dash," which gives him all-new moves and throws to play with. It'd be a shame for his opponent if they were unable to tech a single throw, thus giving him bonus time for each throw he successfully lands, would it? Fortunately for the King player, this is exactly what happens.
If you had the biggest grin reading this news, then you are part of the problem. But I understand as someone who plays grapplers on Sundays.
For an alpha test, the new graphic engine looked amazing. Dirt and grime appear on the characters, building it up on their skin and clothes in real-time. This, alongside fluid animations and all new voice lines, is giving the series new life. Hearing the same grunts for over two decades to hear fresh new kiai yells convinced me that Tekken 8 was an entirely new game. New assets, new move lists for everyone, and a mechanic that rewards understanding the strengths your character can do over what your opponent expects your character is capable of. The Heat Mechanic featured in Tekken 8 reminded me of one of the few games I'd enter in the community-run brackets, Bloody Roar Extreme.
"Be lucky it wasn't a full moon!"
In the Bloody Roar series, some humans are "zoanthropes" and have the power to transform into beast forms, or "Beastorize," as the original title for the first game was known in Japan. While there's a very long and convoluted plot that spans across way too many games than it needs to be, there's a dedicated BREX community and it was represented well at Combo Breaker. Growing up, the Bloody Roar series had been a mainstay in my growth as a young fighting game and it would be another game I never knew could be played competitively.
Each match begins with both fighters in their human form and fighting builds a meter bar that allows them to transform into a powered-up "Beast" form which unlocks the other half of their move list. Benefits like increased attack power, defense, unique moves, and super moves are also granted to the player while in beast form.
There's also another form called Hyperbeast which activates each character's hidden trait. Ganesha is a large man who transforms into an elephant as an example and his Hyperbeast mode is that he gains super armor and his attacks can't be interrupted. In a game with a ring-out, this proved very valuable to have in the tournament bracket.
Notice how "hyperbeast" and its conditions sound similar to the "heat mechanic" in Tekken 8? Even the concept of building meter to reach a buffed state of your character, untapping their hidden power, felt similar to Bloody Roar Extreme. Fighting games are cool because a player can pick up one game and use the tools learned from that game and apply it to others in unique ways. What was once mechanics that were difficult to grasp were easy to understand when my thought process was like this.
I didn't do too well in the bracket but I did play against Mustard (Of the popular Mortal Kombat content creator duo, PND Ketchup and Mustard) who has been a long-time Bloody Roar fan as well. While we didn't get a chance to talk much as he was bouncing back and forth from bracket to bracket, this leads to another reason why I love fighting games.
No one is a celebrity. It says it right there in the tagline for Combo Breaker: No Coasts No Kings. I've met several cosplayers and content creators I've been fans of for years for the first time in person and they have been some of the kindest people I've met. Some come from the United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, and everywhere in between. We're all united for this one reason and it's a great feeling to connect to others like so.
The Strongest Waitress Of Them All
The other game I entered was Advanced Variable Geo 2 or V.G. 2 as I will shorten it for the rest of this article. This was a game I've had no experience with whatsoever but I did watch the original anime it was based on. I have to be very careful with my next few words here, but originally the series began as Variable Geo on the PC-98 which was never released outside of Japan.
The original game featured rather risque scenes when the characters were defeated, something that would be kept in the Sega Saturn remake with updated graphics. The Sony PlayStation version, as expected from Sony, omitted all of the "mature" content in favor of a more family-friendly experience. It would follow up with a sequel which would directly pick up where the last game's story left off.
While the original fighting games had an anime adaptation, there was an anime exclusive sequel which had no relation to the original plot at all. Variable Geo takes the "fighting game tournament" plot and flips it on its head by having a tournament full of waitresses. The winner gets the title of the strongest waitress and the prize is too good to pass up for some. That piece of trivia isn't important but what was important was how broken this game was.
Advanced V.G. 2 was a console-exclusive sequel to the console-exclusive Variable Geo. This meant that things like betas and localization tests that existed in Combo Breaker this year for Tekken 8, never occurred for any of these games. This is immediately noticed when it comes to how easy to do very cheap things in this game.
Kaori is considered by many to be one of the best characters in V.G. 2 because she has access to a very easy infinite that's even easier to get caught in. Another character, Ayako, can breathe on the player and take 60% of their health away from a single throw that no one else can do. The character I used, Satomi, was a more traditional fighter who is compared to Kyo Kusanagi from The King of Fighters with the easiest 50/50 mixup in existence, a DP that takes up half the screen, and a kick super that's plus on hit, block, whiff, wake-up, sleeping, napping, everything.
I had to fight a Kaori player in the tournament and they would make it their mission to get me in her infinite and my strategy was "don't get hit." I pressed every single button I could to get them off of me only for them to pick the cabaret girl Ayako and, well, you read what I said about her above already. My point is, the game shouldn't have been as fun as it was but much like the Sailor Moon S community, there's a market for those who like to play a roster with nothing but cute girls and crazy gameplay that would absolutely get patched out Day 0.
The winner of the tournament received a really cool Advanced Variable Geo 2 table mat created by SaigaDos, very talented artists whom I've met at EVO with who I've developed a kinship in terms of rhythm games and obscure fighting game conversation. They also attended the tournament as well and I'm proud of how well they did!
Check out the mat as it's available for purchase on their website here while it lasts! I'll be checking both Bloody Roar Extreme and Advanced Variable Geo 2 as a part of two separate retrospections in the future. Definitely give both of these communities some love.
Do Ghosts Dream Of Galloping Horses?
For the first time since I've begun attending Combo Breaker, I finally had time to visit the Galloping Ghost Arcade, located about thirty minutes by car from the venue. As with most locations, this one was in the "middle of nowhere," but lines of Combo Breaker attendees flooded the venue during off-hours. For a place that's proclaimed to be the "largest arcade in the world," a cool hundred folk wouldn't hurt navigating through the arcade maze at all. In fact, they could probably fit a hundred more if it wouldn't be considered a fire hazard.
There are literally hundreds of arcade cabinets inside the arcade, with isles and rows of machines everywhere I looked. I unfortunately never grew up in the arcades like that. My biggest "arcade memory" before discovering Chinatown Fair in 2009 was a fun center in Brooklyn known as Funtime U.S.A. If you grew up in the 2000s and lived in Brooklyn, you'd know how big of a deal that place was but what gravitated me was its impressive arcade machine collection. I felt like I was in elementary school again minus the quarters in my pockets as all the machines were set to free play.
For the authenticity of it, some of the machines were either broken or the seats were off the hinges! It was fun with games that had force feedback as it was a coin flip whether or not I would fall out of the chair. However, I did get to play some of my childhood favorites including San Francisco Rush 2049, Hydro Thunder, Gauntlet Dark Legacy, and even The Grid with other players at the arcade. If Midway games aren't your fancy, there's enough Capcom, Namco, Taito, Konami, and a plethora of names I've never seen or heard of to make anyone go "They have this game here!?"
One of my favorite games from Galloping Ghost Arcade was Rad Mobile which was the deluxe cabinet that featured a sit-down racing setup. That moved. A lot. Violently. Released in 1990 by SEGA, Rad Mobile is best known for being the first game to feature Sonic The Hedgehog. As promo for the yet-unreleased platformer, Sonic made a cameo appearance as a mirror ornament that swung around as the player drove. Playing Rad Mobile in any way outside of the deluxe cabinet is cheating yourself. The console version does not compare at all, especially when you get to experience the power of late 80s and early 90s force feedback!
Combo Breaker Is Just One Giant Side Quest
Here is where things start to come together as to why I labeled everyone who attended a fighting game "fan" and not a "player." This was the first Combo Breaker (and second major in a row honestly...) that I have not attended a main game. However, the difference this time was that I wanted to focus more on the "community" aspect of the "Fighting Game Community." Surely there's a drive in wanting to get better that's felt somewhere right? It's not just about competing but experiencing lasting memories that you take with you to other events and even in life. I felt this best during the final day when I played Power Stone 2 on one of the arcade machine set-ups on the upstairs floor.
Power Stone 2 is more of a "party game" than its prequel, which felt more like a fighting game with added environmental elements. It's a three-button fighter disguised as a multi-button fighter thanks to the Dreamcast version making the controls easier to manage. While it was fun learning the button combinations to grab opponents and pick up items, Power Stone 2 was one of my favorite games growing up. It had a very short arcade mode but it had tons of single-player content and unlockable goodies. It was also something I spent a lot of time playing with my childhood friends.
I played Power Stone 2 with a complete stranger and in those ten minutes, we bonded. I was teaching them how to fight certain bosses that were annoying to deal with that I learned through those hours-long sessions. It reminded me why I loved fighting games and video games in general. It's one of the best forms of media to connect through to others and it's a very sociable aspect. It was a brief moment of my day but it was a very appreciative one.
I got to meet so many awesome people this weekend and link up with many more who I hadn't seen in months. While I may not have won any tournaments, I felt like I left Combo Breaker and Illinois as a winner. The fighting game community as well as branching communities are the only family I have. Not to get sentimental, but it's a sentiment I'm not alone in feeling. Three days are not enough to celebrate but that's why the fun never ends. Street Fighter 6 is right around the corner and I'll have enough to talk about in terms of fighting games for weeks.
Overall, while not perfect, Combo Breaker 2023 weekend was amazing from the perspective of someone who wasn't a "Competitor" in the traditional sense. It doesn't matter if you hadn't won a trophy or a medal. I was told by several confidants that they've had fun even if they didn't enter their main game and I can echo that statement. Until next year, Combo Breaker!