DBFZ is GO! Daigo vs Tokido! 5 Takeaways from NCR 2018

The 2018 NorCal Regionals are officially in the books, and this year saw the best (and the worst) of the FGC come out in force. Plenty of familiar faces dotted the leaderboards of top fighting games, including two longtime legends who faced off in an epic Grand Finals. Here’s the top five takeaways from NCR 2018.

draGOn ball fighterz

Goichi “GO1” Kishida is looking for someone to challenge him for the Dragon Ball FighterZ throne, but every contender that steps up is sent packing in quick fashion. Pretty soon he’s going to be singing Pink Floyd to find opponents: “Hello...is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me...is there anyone home?”

His toughest competition at NCR came in the Grand Finals against Moke, but the Dragon Ball Dynamo still swept that match 3-0. Even when he looked to be losing a match, like in the tournament point round of the Grand Finals, GO1 continues to amaze with his impressive and precise DBFZ play. Who’s going to be the Rocky Balboa to DBFZ’s Ivan DraGO? We’re not sure that day will ever come, not if GO1 continues to play like this.

Legends Clash in Street Fighter V

Two names synonymous with the professional Street Fighter circuit are Hajime “Tokido” Taniguchi and Daigo “The Beast” Umehara. When these two cross paths in a tournament, you know you’re about to see the highest level of Street Fighter play imaginable. NorCal Regionals 2018 gave us this dream matchup in the only place that seems worthy: Grand Finals.

Tokido’s Akuma and Daigo’s Guile clashed for four matches, with Daigo narrowly avoiding a 3-0 sweep in the third match, but the reigning EVO champ proved too much and once again the Raging Demon stands tall. This match definitely brought the house down, putting a suitable cap on the entire NorCal event, and we hope these two face each other again in the near future.

The Patron SAINT of Tekken 7

We’ve talked a lot about Jae-min “Knee” Bae and his total dominance of the Tekken 7 scene, but he was noticeably absent from this year’s NorCal Regionals. That opened the door for a number of top players to take NCR for themselves, and in the end the two left standing in Grand Finals were Echo Fox’s Jin Woo “SAINT “Choi and Byung-moon “Qudans” Son.

The two put on quite a show, with Qudans taking an early 2-0 lead. SAINT fought his way back to a 2-2 tie, then found himself at quite a life deficit with the fifth match at 2 rounds each, tournament or reset point on the line. What followed was a comeback for the ages, the kind of thing those in attendance will talk about forever, and SAINT willed his way to the victory and the NCR Tekken 7 title. This game is still Knee’s domain, but SAINT showed he can hang with the best on this day.

Marvel vs Capcom Infinite Draws… A Few

Perhaps the most turbulent story in 2018 for the fighting game community has been the saga of Marvel vs Capcom Infinite. The once-loved franchise has found itself in a downward spiral, being dropped from EVO 2018’s main stage and, perhaps worse, left out of the Capcom Pro Tour by the company that created it. With very little information coming from Capcom, MvC:I seems all but lost.

That said, NorCal Regionals did its best to keep the Marvel vs Capcom dream alive with two tournaments, one for MvC:I and one for Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. UMvC3 yielded 30 participants, while MvC:I brought in a meager 44. While that is more entrants than EVO 2018 main stage title Guilty Gear Xrd REV 2 (27 entrants), that 44 did fall behind Windjammers (65) and Ultra Street Fighter IV (58) in attendance. The only way MvC:I can live on is if the community supports it, but there will be need to be more than 44 players at the next event in order for that to happen.

A Controversy Worth Yelling About

Amongst the furious fighting action at NorCal Regionals 2018 was a bit of weirdness that boiled over into a full-blown controversy. GO1 found himself facing off against 2017 Capcom Cup champion Saul“MenaRD” Segundo in a Street Fighter V Losers Semifinal Round 1 match. After the match GO1 took to Twitter to voice immediate displeasure with the conditions of his match, namely the noise surrounding it:

CABAうるさすぎ

真後ろで永久に叫ばれて、さすがに酷かった。今度は黙って貰うように言おう...。それでもやるなら出禁にして欲しいね。
萎えたー

— CYCLOPS | GO1 (@GO13151) April 1, 2018

(Rough and partial translation: “CABA was too noisy, it was truly indeed shouting right behind me and it was terrible.)

The offending party in this matter, Cristhoper “CABA” Rodriguez, responded in a manner that, well, didn’t make him look too great:

Im sorry you lost, but thats the way tournaments are.

Next time ill recommend headphones. https://t.co/qpJGzu4phl

— Cristhoper Rodriguez (@SPM_CABA) April 1, 2018

This sparked a massive outcry across social media, some calling for bans on CABA and MenaRD for allowing this while others defended their actions as normal heckling. It was a messy situation that further highlights the strange place fighting game tournaments find themselves in the grand competitive gaming scene. We can only hope something like this doesn’t happen again, as it only makes the fighting game scene look bad to the rest of the competitive community.

Some might not care about that, but there may come a time where they’ll have to start caring lest the scene as it is today ceases to be. That’s a strong “worst case scenario” of course, but with competitive gaming growing so exponentially the FGC will eventually face an “adapt or die” moment...but that’s another article for another day.