London has received from October 6th until October 8th the Revolution 2017 fighting game tournament, featuring 10 different main games and focused (although not exclusively) on anime titles. Being one of the biggest events at Europe, I made the effort to get out of Portugal and come to UK to attend it, and boy it was an amazing decision!
Before I keep going with my thoughts though, I need to make this clear (since someone on the event already made this confusion), I am NOT the Italian player who’s also called Blue Link. I am a Brazilian player who’s been living in Portugal since February 2017, and because of that I’m not too knowledgeable about the European FGC (and neither are them too knowledgeable about myself as well). Because of this, those thoughts come from a perspective of a player who’s not from the mainstream regions for fighting games, and there will have comparisons with how things are in Brazil compared to Europe.
This was not my first major here in the old continent, however. I attended Lockdown in Portugal last month, and although some of the thoughts I’m going to express here were things that I also felt at it, I didn’t made an article about Lockdown because I had some terrible personal problems (completely unrelated to the event itself, Lockdown was an AMAZING experience) happening on that same weekend. In fact, I always make an effort to watch Guilty Gear Top 8 in every event that I attend, and on Lockdown I was just at the bar of the hotel trying not to cry from stuff that had just happened.
Anyway, now that you know who I am, let’s talk about Revolution. Personally, I really loved the event, to the point that I think it was the third best tournament that I’ve ever been to in my life, losing only to EVO 2016 and Final Round as a whole! The organization was amazing, even though they had 10 main games to run on only 3 days there weren’t any noticeable delays and everything ran smoothly. In fact, I’m still amazed at how they managed to create a schedule where there was practically only one main game running at each time, so the players didn’t have to worry about going around from one pool to another. As someone who already had issues with that in at least 5 tournaments in the past and that considered dropping out of AH3 for fear of conflicting with Pokkén (I’m glad I didn’t), I really appreciate it.
Speaking of which, I also loved the line-up of games available. As far as I know, Revolution started as an Anime focused major, and since my first main game was BlazBlue back in 2010, I come from an era where people had the mindset that only games that were available at the main stage at EVO were worth competing at. Back in 2011 I watched BB and Marvel at EVO and really thought about how much I wanted to be there competing and playing with all those amazing players… only to have all my hype crushed by BlazBlue not being at EVO in 2012 (the year where I was actually able to attend the event), and that was one of the most depressing moments for me as an fighting game player, it is one thing to lose or go 0-2, but you still had the chance to go there and do your best. You see, EVO at the time was seen as the prime example of what games should be played competitively or not, and people just had this mindset of completely ignoring or talking shit about anything that was not on its line-up, which ended up putting BlazBlue (and the entire Anime subgenre) in a very bad spot. Fighting games are the “thing” in life I most identify myself with, and at the time I was a depressed 20 year old person, so the thought of finally finding something I really love to do in life and have that be underappreciated like that was terrible.
That’s why it was so important for me to see that an event on Europe actually had the GUTS to leave the Street Fighter franchise outside of it and put BlazBlue at the prime spot on Sunday. Not only that, but a lot of the games available this weekend were not present at EVO this year, and this shows how much the mindset on the FGC as a whole has improved, because now people WANT to show that those games can be appreciated and played on high level tournaments, so I really appreciated that both here and in Lockdown (which actually had Tekken 7 on the prime spot instead of Street Fighter V), specially because out there in Brazil we are still stuck with that toxic mentality that it must exist main games and side games (seriously, there are people who still think out there that Tekken and Guilty Gear are not as important as Street Fighter or Marvel), and a lot of games out there goes underappreciated (even though our longest running major is focused on anime as well and do its best to give spotlight for those type of games).
Also, another thing that I liked on both Lockdown and Revolution that is non existent in Brazilian majors are the awards for notable members of the community. It is heartwarming to see trophies and medals being handed out to TOs and other important people who not necessarily get Top 8, but without them we wouldn’t be here competing. I really liked in particular that Sabrewoif got a trophy, because he is focused on Pokkén which is not an anime title, and was treated with a lot of respect! I believe it is safe to assume that every single TO in Brazil feels that they are really underappreciated (hell, I even stopped running monthlies because of that), so you have NO IDEA of how happy I was to see this happening on the only two majors I’ve been here in Europe so far!
The venue was great, and it was really cool to see it happening in a hall that has been around since the 19th century, the people from that time probably had no idea that one day people would be battling each other out in virtual arenas out there, and I always find that kind of stuff really cool, to see the past coexisting with the present. Aside from that, it was really comfortable there, and the first floor had a bar with a lot of freeplay stations, so I never felt I didn’t have fun stuff to do.
There were also a bunch of unreleased and/or indie fighting games available to play at the event, the most notable ones were DragonBall FighterZ and Dissidia, but there were a couple of indie games, and I had an awesome time playing Them Fighting Herds, there is an ice based character there that is as annoying as Braixen, I absolutely love it *evil laugh*. I couldn’t play DragonBall FighterZ because unfortunately my arcade stick doesn’t work it with (seriously, why Tekken 7 is the only game that I played on PS4 so far that gets legacy controllers right? I had to borrow an arcade stick to play Marvel…), BUT I did spend a lot of time with Dissidia (I think it was more than 3 hours with it, since there were virtually no lines for it), which is a game that I been hype to play for a couple of years now (I probably have watched more than 30 hours of footage from the arcade version of it), and boy, it really is everything I expected it to be and I enjoyed every single moment of it, it was fun, fast paced and the strategy is on point once if you figure out how the mechanics works! In fact, after I properly learned how to use Terra I started becoming really addicted to the game, always wanting to be able to play at least one more match.
So that’s it, those were my impressions and thoughts. I will end this giving a message to the TO who said in the end “if you have anything to say, then come and say it”. And what I have to say is… THANK YOU!!! Just keep doing what you are doing, you and your team are awesome and I really mean it when I say that Revolution is as good as Final Round and EVO, you are all awesome for putting this together and making an outsider like me feel like he was in a family meeting, even though almost everyone there were strangers to me.
Thanks for reading!
Facebook Album with some pictures:
https://www.facebook.com/paulo.naressi/media_set?set=a.1816685408371535.1073741833.100000902801890&type=3
Blue Link Gaming 