America’s lengthy Avenue Fighter drought ends with a win at Evo 2024

Evo 2024 wrapped up late Sunday evening with Victor “Punk” Woodley beating Adel “Big Bird” Anouche in Avenue Fighter 6. Along with his victory, Woodley turned the primary American to win a mainline Avenue Fighter match at Evo in over 20 years.

The match was nail-bitingly shut with Anouche, who made it to the grand finals by way of the loser’s bracket, beating Woodley 3-0 to reset or “flip” the bracket requiring one other best-of-5 match to find out the winner. Their second match went the space, with every participant having two set wins a chunk and tied 1-1 within the ultimate match. A well-executed tremendous transfer from Woodley’s Cammy ended the match and America’s lengthy Avenue Fighter Evo championship drought together with it.

Individuals really fared exceedingly properly at Evo 2024, taking dwelling championships in 4 of the eight most important tournaments: Avenue Fighter 6 ( Victor “Punk” Woodley), Mortal Kombat 1 (Dominique “SonicFox” McLean), Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising (Aaron “Aarondamac” Godinez), and Responsible Gear Try (Shamar ”Nitro” Hinds).

Moreover, Avenue Fighter 6 wasn’t the one Avenue Fighter match at Evo the place memorable moments have been made. Over within the Avenue Fighter III: Third Strike match, Hayao, a participant from Japan, memed his means into our hearts along with his infectious enthusiasm and over-the-top celebrations. Throughout one celebration, he bent his physique clear in half, touching head to ground in a pose solely characters from JoJo’s Weird Journey appear able to. In one other, he bust it open on the primary stage finishing a full break up — notable, as Hayao is 41 years previous.

However Hayao cemented his place within the Evo historical past books with enjoying ability. In the course of the loser’s quarterfinal with solely a pixel’s price of well being, Hayao pulled off an astounding parry — in mid-air — then deftly sailed over his opponent’s follow-up tremendous assault to come back again and beat his opponent, advancing to the following spherical.

Hayao sadly didn’t win the match, falling in his subsequent match to complete in fourth place. However his unimaginable show of ability was so electrifying that some are referring to it as “Evo Moment 38,” or the religious successor to Evo Second 37 — maybe the best clip of combating recreation competitors of all time. Regardless that he didn’t win, Hayao nonetheless received.

There was a smattering of different hype Evo 2024 moments. Twitch streamer LilyPichu received a Tekken 8 present match towards the sport’s producer Katsuhiro Harada. Tekken 8 resurrected the franchise’s longtime villain Heihachi Mishima regardless of Harada remarking greater than as soon as that the character was properly and really useless. Evo additionally plans so as to add two new occasions in 2025 with the primary Evo Awards going down in Los Angeles and Evo France, marking the match’s first look in Europe. Evo is already the largest, most fun combating recreation match on the planet, and it’s good to see that it continues to develop.