East Coast Throwdown, a yearly fighting game community event that has been held since 2009, has just finished its 2023 run with a fantastic showing. As a fighting game community event it doesn’t just feature a tournament for one or two games, but rather it’s a celebration of the community as a whole and runs several tournaments simultaneously. This year had beloved and classic titles from the rich history of the FGC including Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Mortal Kombat X, SoulCalibur II, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and of course more recent titles like Guilty Gear: Strive and Tekken 7. But of course the spotlight for newer members of the FGC will probably be on the two newest titles in the lineup: Street Fighter 6 and Mortal Kombat 1.
On the Street Fighter side of things the game has had several months to cook and is a bit more figured out, with players knowing exactly which characters are strong and which are weak, but still, the top 8 results might surprise some of you:
The winner of the tournament, Shine, got there using his signature Kimberly as well as a pocket Chun-Li pick. The runner up, Naji, got 2nd using Juri. These are interesting results because, while Chun and Juri are almost universally agreed upon to be top tier characters, they rarely featured in conversations of best in the game. That title is usually debated as going to Luke (which the top 8 featured two of), JP (the top 8 featured one), or Ken (who surprisingly had no representation in the top 8).
Though even going as far back as top 24 it seems the God tier characters are running slightly sparse, you won’t see any Jamies or Ryus but several character specialists placed highly including the aforementioned Shine as well as the ever-popular iDom, who took what many consider to be one of the worst characters in the game in Manon to a top 8 finish. It’s good to see that, despite being several months old at this point, Street Fighter 6 is looking like there’s still room to innovate within its current state, which is a good thing as Capcom has said many times that they’ll only give the game one major balance patch a year.
On the Mortal Kombat 1 side of things there are some surprises and there are some non-surprises:
The non-surprise would be, and you’ll see this coming if you follow that scene, SonicFox and Ninjakilla were the top 2. SonicFox is heralded by much of the NRS community as one of the best NRS players of all time and Ninjakilla, who won the Mortal Kombat 11 tournament at EVO this year, is not too far behind. The surprise though would be their character choices. Ninjakilla is long celebrated as a Liu Kang specialist, and his decision to mainly go with Raiden throughout the tournament may say some unfortunate things about the state of that character, though fellow top NRS player Xombat was able to use Liu Kang in some matches to great success so maybe that’s a debate for when the game evolves.
The bigger surprise is SonicFox’s character; SonicFox played Rain for most of the tournament, a character he very recently said was top tier but much of the community was ignoring and, by winning this tournament with him, it looks like we’ll be seeing many more Rains in online matches. And I would be remiss to ignore British player VideoGamezYo’s Shang Tsung, a character many think is good but with a high skill floor, and Rewind’s Reiko, an underrated character in general.
On a less surprising note would be the rest of the top 8: Johnny Cage, considered to be one of if not the best character in the game, had heavy representation with 4 appearances in top 8. Much of top 8 was backed primarily by the Cyrax or Kung Lao kameos, considered by far the best kameos and it doesn’t seem like there’s much wiggle room in that area unless you have a very specific strategy, such as Rewind’s Reiko backed by Darrius.
But still the game is very young, this being its first major, and there are several more months of play to develop and experiment. As SonicFox proved with Rain, a character can secretly be top tier and win a tournament literally over night, so the possibilities are endless.
All in all, this was a fantastic event full of the classic FGC fun and competition that the community is known for and I’m grateful for viewing the event. It’s good to see fighting games thriving as much as they have in the past year and it’s good for everyone to read about, watch, and play these games as the community continues to evolve. Be sure to continue to participate in your favorite fighting game’s community, no matter how old or new, and be sure to buy a hitbox.