Well there was no Elena trailer or Season 3 trailer much to the chagrin of everyone watching, but at least Capcom made up for it with a relatively exciting Capcom Cup 2025. While the general discourse surrounding high level Street Fighter 6 gameplay is a pretty even 50/50 split on whether or not it’s even good, this weekend provided us with some pretty exciting moments as well as the second ever millionaire crowned by the Capcom Cup.
Kakeru even grew out his facial hair to look like his main, JP. JP is an interesting character because, a lot of the criticisms people have about Street Fighter 6 like insane corner carry, raw drive rush, and throw loops (the last of which nearly ruined the experience of this year’s Capcom Cup and DID end up making the Street Fighter League matches Saturday night very tedious to sit through) JP doesn’t really take advantage of and yet, he’s still arguably the best character in the game. Kakeru is now the second millionaire in Street Fighter history, after last year’s winner UMA, though unlike UMA Kakeru is unlikely to retire from fighting games altogether due to encouragement from his wife.
Another breakout star from the tournament is Blaz, a young 15 year old prodigy from Chile who shocked the world by mowing through some of the best Street Fighter players of today and getting a very solid 2nd place finish. Chile has actually produced some incredibly talented fighting game players, such as Nicolas and Scorpionprocs of Mortal Kombat fame and KaneBlueRiver from Marvel vs. Capcom 3, but never one quite as young as this. People have started to even call him Blaztheprodigy and praised the World Warrior system for allowing him to compete when in the old system, his region wouldn’t have had enough easily obtainable points to qualify for the Cup.
But when all is said and done, the show must go on. Capcom Cup has crowned a new winner and the grind continues. Worryingly, Capcom did not announce the prize pool for next year’s Capcom Cup as they did for this year’s, meaning that it’s likely the next Capcom Cup will not feature a million dollar 1st place prize, but we all know Capcom, at this point they’re as likely to drop that announcement on a random Thursday than at an event.