Recently, Ayano-san went to the “STARTING OVER” tournament in Shinjuku and came back with some thoughts on the event and also thoughts on character balance. Hit the jump to see what his thoughts were in this week’s blog.

Hello everyone, Tomoaki Ayano here!

Last Saturday, August 24, I attended the Ultra Summer Festa 2013 at Club SEGA Shinjuku Nishiguchi here in Tokyo, Japan. This was the tenth tournament in the STARTING OVER tournament series. I’ve been to a few of them before, but this time the scale was much larger.

The tournament was a five-on-five team battle, and a lot of really strong, well-known players came out. In all there were 279 entrants!

I arrived just as things were getting underway, and the first thing I noticed was that it was a lot stuffier than usual…

The place was jam-packed! Just getting to the commentators’ table proved to be a challenge.

The commentators’ table was located in the thick of the action. The matches were streamed live on the Japanese video streaming site Nico Nico Douga.

The five-on-five format really brings out the team spirit in people. In Japan, people like to cheer in time with each combo hit. Also, seeing five players share the joy of winning was really something—it made me want to take part too! (I wanted to rep Hakan, since no one else was using him.)

One player that really stood out was a character specialist for T.Hawk. We don’t often see T.Hawk in tournaments, but this player was really good at controlling space, being patient, getting in, and landing his command throws. I learned a lot just by watching him.

EVO is one thing, but at this tournament I gained an appreciation for the team format. There were so many intense matches, and before I knew it I got caught up in the yelling and cheering.

I hope to drop by more Super SFIV tournaments in the future. Maybe I’ll even get to put my Hakan to the test!

On that note, I’d like to talk a bit about how the balance updates are coming along.

For Ultra SFIV, we want to, as far as possible, eliminate the concept of strong and weak characters, and make it so that every character has a fighting chance. Right now, characters that are considered to be strong see a lot of usage at tournaments. Even now we’re seeing new characters rise up in tournament popularity as people change their minds about their strength.

In other words, which characters are considered weak or strong is always in a state of flux. There are a lot of character specialists who can make a “weak” character look strong. And there are characters that might be considered strong, but once people figure out how to fight against them, they fall into the “weak” character category.

It’s not a stretch to say that the tiers for a game have a life of their own, as they’re constantly moving. This is something we’ll keep in mind when fine tuning the characters. We’ll look carefully at everything and make our adjustments from there.

…So! With that in mind I decided to use our development tools to tweak Ryu’s Shoryuken. He’s the star of the show after all—who better to get a few buffs?

Oh man, look at that beautiful hitbox. Sock ‘em on the chin and send ‘em flying!

↑With this I think I could take on everyone and still have an even chance of winning, no matter which character they used!

Well, that’s all for this week. See you again next time!