A little over a year ago, Richard, a pillar of our local Fighting Game Community, had an idea: what if we hosted our own tournaments?
There are plenty of grassroots tournaments across South-Western Ontario, but few, if any, have happened in our city of London. I think the local college, Fanshawe (yes, that Fanshawe), has an e-sports league, but that’s only open to students. Aside from that, London seemed completely bereft of anything larger than our get-together every Wednesday night.
This was the driving motivation for what would become Forest City Fighters. If no one was going to host an event here then we’d make, and host our own.
I bring all of this up because the third, and most recent instalment of FCF happened on April 18th, and I thought it would be neat to share some of my experiences from the event. Doubly so since I volunteered to help with setup, and tear-down so I was there the whole day.
Regardless, our story starts on the Friday night before the event. In preparation for Saturday’s festivities, Edwin, Richard, Szymon, and myself showed up to the venue, Game Knight, to drop off some of the equipment. Edwin also took the opportunity to map out how we were going to orient all of the setups.
It was at this time that we noticed we were going to need additional chairs. Thankfully, all 4 of us had spare folding chairs that we could bring along to the event the next day. Admittedly, mine could’ve used a proper brush down beforehand. Somebody spent a significant amount of time covering the chairs in white fur, though no one gave me shit for this. I think everyone was simply grateful to have somewhere else to sit since we were in desperate need of additional seating.
Thankfully, we finished setting up in record time, which meant people were able to get some games in before we started in earnest. For my part, I sat down with Alex, the same Alex who recommended Mouthwashing and Antonblast, and we played a handful of games while shooting the shit. In a lot of ways, this looked exactly like Wednesday night, except I wasn’t intoxicated…yet.
We were also approached by Roshawn, the COO of Incendium Gaming, who sat down for a handful of games with us. He goes way back with Richard and Edwin, so Roshawn has always made a point of attending our events in London when he’s able. If that didn’t already give it away, he’s super friendly, and I even managed to get a few pointers from him before I swapped off the setup.
It was at this time that I took a quick glance around the venue. I wish I’d thought to take a picture of what I saw. There were maybe 2 dozen people playing games, laughing, and having a great time together. The energy in the room was absolutely infectious. It perfectly encapsulated why these sorts of events are so important. Yes – competition is fun, but the real value of in-person events is the people. Nowhere was that made clearer than it was during those fleeting moments where we were playing together before Forest City Fighters started.
Thankfully, Edwin, Szymon, and Kass all took pictures while we were there. As such, I do have an action shot of what the event looked like:
Oh, speaking of Kass: they were responsible for making the poster we used to advertise the event. That’s the same artwork that I used for the banner of this post (with their permission).
I think it turned out great. Plus, it’s always nice when people are able to share their other talents, and hobbies within the community.
Anyway, the spirit of camaraderie was briefly interrupted when we needed to start the first bracket of the day: Street Fighter 6. This prompted everyone to quickly file out, before Richard started calling matches.
For my part, I wasn’t terribly invested in the Street Fighter 6 bracket. That’s reflected in both how well I did (I finished bottom half), and how I originally wrote about it in an earlier draft of this article.
As such, I’d like to shift focus away from myself, and cover another set of matches. Specifically, I want to cover loser’s finals, which saw Drew and Rodrigo facing off.
For a bit of background, Drew is a bit of a local legend when it comes to Street Fighter. The historians among our scene describe him in the same way that you’d talk about a generation defining natural disaster. It might be a little hyperbolic, but Drew was considered a bit of a prodigy who came out of nowhere back when Street Fighter 4 was the game of choice.
Several of us, myself included, only had the pleasure of meeting him for the first time last year when Richard hosted the first FCF tournament. Despite having less experience in modern Street Fighter, Drew absolutely mopped the floor with the majority of us. All of his combos on Ryu were outdated, but that hardly mattered when he was absolutely bowling over us. This reaffirmed Drew’s reputation and skill, though it was with an entirely new group of players.
That said, Drew was keen to see the lot of us improve. I know for a fact that he gave several pieces of advice to participants during the first FCF. Namely because I was one of the people he’d talked to. In fact, I’m fairly certain the stream archive for the event shows him discussing matches with almost every player after the fact.
Drew also made a point of regularly asking for games in our community Discord server. If you search for the term “FT5” (first to five), then you’ll be bombarded by a slew of messages from him. In fact, I think he asks for games more than anyone else. Again, offering advice when and where he thinks it would be helpful.
This gave all of our SF6 players a golden opportunity. We could learn from someone who far outstripped our abilities. Hopefully, with enough practice, we could even best him at a future event.
That’s where Rodrigo comes in.
He was already one of our best SF6 players. However, that didn’t stop Rodrigo from seizing the multitude of opportunities that were afforded by Drew to play, and practice alongside him. There’s no short supply of banter between the 2 in our community Discord, and there was a period last year where you’d frequently see them camped out in voice chat either playing, or discussing a set after the fact.
This almost gives the 2 of them a master-student style relationship, which even extends to in-person events. There have been a few “documented” cases of Drew cheering for Rodrigo at Toronto events throughout last year, and he even jokingly refers to Rodrigo as his nephew. Or maybe it’s not a joke. Who’s to say?
Regardless, the master and student were facing down one another in loser’s finals. Who would come out on top? Would Drew’s tutelage, alongside Rodrigo’s determination, finally prove to be his undoing? Or would the master continue his reign of terror?
As it would turn out, nephew Rodrigo bested uncle Drew, handily taking the set 3:1.
There were several good moments throughout, but my favourite happens right at the end:
It was a lot easier to see in person, but there was a brief hug exchanged there between the 2 players. These 2 have spent hours playing one another remotely, but they give off the vibe of friends who hang out every weekend. It speaks of a friendship, and a respect for one another that’s much stronger than what you’d observe between most of the other attendees at the event. And I’m grateful I had an opportunity to see it.
From here, there’s a bit of a gap in terms of what I’ll be covering. Namely because I don’t know anything about BlazBlue Centralfiction, nor Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes. In fact, I know so little about the 2 games that I had to google the full names for both. As such, we’ll be skipping ahead a few hours to the next bracket I was playing in, which was Dead or Alive 6.
Now, if you’re a regular reader of my blog you may be wondering why I’ve never mentioned playing Dead or Alive before. I’ve written about every other Fighting game that I’ve played in no short supply, so it stands to reason that I should’ve mentioned DoA.
Here’s the thing: I don’t actually play it. Not seriously.
In fact, we need to go back in time several weeks to even explain how DoA got added to the tournament roster in the first place.
The date is February 12th, 2026. Sony is hosting a State of Play presentation where they showcase a wide variety of upcoming titles for the Playstation 5.
That’s when it happened.
The triumphant return of Dead or Alive with a dual announcement of both Dead or Alive 6: Last Round, and a new in-development Dead or Alive title.
As a direct result of this, fans of Dead or Alive within our scene exploded with excitement. Chief among them was Andrew who decided to leverage the momentum from these announcements as a catalyst to revive DoA within our scene. It wasn’t enough to simply let all of the existing fans play. No – Andrew had to rally everyone behind Dead or Alive.
From there on, Andrew was asking everyone who showed up every week to play DoA. If you said you didn’t know how, he countered that the game was simple to learn. If that wasn’t enough, he’d volunteer himself to teach you. And he was a man of his word. I remember walking in 1 week to find Rodrigo taking notes as Andrew poured over all of the ins and outs of Dead or Alive 6.
That sort of passion is infectious, and it got a lot of us to try the game. I mean, how could we not? One of our friends was asking us to try a thing that he enjoyed because he wanted to share it with us. And you know what? It was really fun. I was one of the longer hold-outs, but even I had to admit I was wrong. Andrew was cooking with his push for all of us to play Dead or Alive.
Fast-forward a couple weeks, and Richard announced the line-up of games for Forest City Fighters 3. Unfortunately, Dead or Alive did not make the cut, despite Andrew’s insistence that it should be included.
But then, something magical happened:
This prompted Richard to make a poll to gauge interest from the wider community about including DoA as part of FCF.
As luck would have it, all the campaigning work that Andrew did for his baby paid off. There was enough support for Dead or Alive, and it was added as the only free entry game at the event. This also meant that it was the largest bracket of the event with 29 of the 50 event attendees participating. I was told after the fact that this meant our tournament had the biggest DoA bracket in Canada, which is kind of hype.
Though, I think the bigger takeaway here is Andrew’s passion for Dead or Alive being reciprocated by the community. Were it not for a couple additional voices speaking out, Dead or Alive wouldn’t have been included in the roster of playable games. I think there’s something especially heartening about that.
Finally, following the conclusion of Dead or Alive, we were able to play the 1 game I was actually interested in competing in: Guilty Gear Strive.
Until relatively recently, there hadn’t been a ton of interest in Strive. That changed with the recent announcement that Strive 2.0 was right around the corner. As such, a bunch of other people started picking up the game again.
Then the patch hit, and it was actually really good. Developer Arc Sys nerfed the general power-level of the game, which evened out some of the more…unfun aspects of previous iterations of Strive. This helped with maintaining people’s interest, so we’ve had more Strive in the past few weeks than we’ve had in basically the entire time I’ve been attending locals.
Prior to this recent development, it was mostly Katie, Alex, and I playing Strive from week to week. Those 2, Katie and Alex, represent our scene’s best Strive players, and they’re very close to one another in terms of their abilities. When we host brackets, Katie usually takes the win, but she’s been saying for months that Alex is right at the precipice of overthrowing her. I’m inclined to agree because their sets are always super close with the winner being decided by the thinnest of margins. It always makes for a great watching experience any time the 2 of them are playing.
Then there is me.
I…uh…I’m okay at the game, but I usually describe Wednesday nights as “my weekly ass beating by Katie and Alex.” I always mean that as a joke, but the gap between my friends and I is very apparent any time we play.
Though, they’ve both been really patient with me, and have given me a deluge of pointers. These come either explicitly with advice, or implicitly through repeatedly punishing my bad habits. Then I try to correct whatever it is that I’m doing (or not doing as is often the case), practice against some scrimblos on ladder, and come back the next week for another round of training.
While I lack the confidence to actually say it, I do think the results speak for themselves:
In fairness, it’s not like I had a free ride up to third place. My set against Justin was very close. There is definitely a version of it where he beats me with his Millia. Game 4 was especially bad with me guessing wrong on all counts, so Justin absolutely mopped the floor with me, evening the set’s score to 2-2.
However, I barely managed to cinch out a win at the end of game 5, which I’m pretty chuffed about.
Also, in the VOD you can see that I almost look like I was going to cry after I won because I was. I know that FCF is just our (relatively) small local tournament, but winning here was still really meaningful to me. Justin is an incredible competitor across multiple games, so beating him was already a huge accomplishment in its own right. But, as someone who lacks confidence in themselves, especially as it relates to fighting games, this was…proof that I’m wrong about myself. I can play really well. I’m not just a fucking caveman who relies on high damage characters, like May, as a crutch. When I put in the time, and practice with my friends, I can learn and play a much higher skill floor character like Dizzy.
Unfortunately, I knew that third place was the end of the line for me. I’ve played Alex way too much to know, in advance, how our set was going to go.
That said, I still played some of my best games ever against him until the tournament fatigue started to set in. I think that fatigue is best exemplified by a fumbled burst bait in game 4. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but my brain was so drained by that point that I didn’t capitalize on it, and Alex killed me for it.
He then went on to fight Katie in grands, and lost after a bracket reset. Again, the 2 of them were neck-and-neck until Katie pulled ahead right at the end, closing out the Strive bracket.
Edwin then got a picture of the 3 of us, which he’d been doing for all of the players who’d placed top 3 in each bracket. For what it’s worth, I was really proud to be standing there alongside my friends who I regularly practice with. I owe no small part of top-cutting the bracket to them, so it felt somewhat symbolic to be standing there alongside them at the end of the night.
After coming down from the adrenaline high of Strive, we realized that it was after 11pm, and most of us hadn’t eaten all day. As such, the TO crew, alongside several volunteers, began packing up the entire venue in haste. We were all eager to get the hell out of there, and go somewhere for a proper sit-down meal, and a beer.
Well, ok – that’s not totally true. Edwin and I had been drinking most of the day, but everyone else was ready for a beer.
Regardless, we got the venue packed up, and everyone who’d stuck around to the end met up at a pub where we grabbed some late-night food and drinks.
As was true with the games that were played before the tournament, this moment right here is another perfect encapsulation of what makes in-person events so great. We were all tired as sin, but still managed to enjoy a good meal together. It’s moments like these, or the collaborative mad-dash to pack-up that really solidify the C in FGC.
It’s a community, and I’m so happy that I get to continue being a part of it.
Did you enjoy what you read? Consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee over on Ko-fi.
Frostilyte Writes 