This Street Fighter 5 tournament match is some mindblowing stuff

Look – I know a lot of you aren’t as into Street Fighter 5 as I am, but sometimes something is so good it’d be a crime not to share.

The penultimate match of this year’s Stunfest tournament in France is one such event. Here’s the replay of the match – and for those of you who don’t follow SF5, I’ll explain why it’s such an awesome showing below.

Stunfest was an absolutely stacked tournament. It’s a huge event for Street Fighter with hundreds of top players from around the world flying in to duke it out thanks to Stunfest’s allocation as a ‘premier’ slot on the Capcom Pro Tour. Players included a ton of former EVO champions and runners up like Infiltration, Daigo Umehara, Fuudo, Momochi, Bonchan, GamerBee and Rici Ortiz – just to name a few. It was a brutal tournament, and a lot of potential winners crashed out very early on.

This match, between Oil King (Rashid) and Fujimura (Ibuki), is incredible. What you’ve got here are two players at absolute peak performance, playing their hearts out for a chance to got to the grand finals to play Infiltration, a beast of a player who already racked up first place finishes at both EVO Japan and Final Round so far this year. It’s rare you’ll see two players so absolutely in tune with their characters, setups and combos.

This incredible match also features two characters not even considered that great: Rashid was once considered a beast but got heavily downgraded in recent SF5 season 3 patches, while Fujimura’s mastery of every situation and setup with Ibuki will make you think that she’s top tier even though she’s widely considered mid-table.

That’s a testament to the skill of the players, plus SF5 Arcade Edition’s character balance in general. The Stunfest top 8 players’ finals featured eight different characters – with one player repping two unique characters and two players doubling up with Guile. That’s a pretty solid spread, balance-wise.

While professional Street Fighter mostly doesn’t have the flash and pizzazz of the Overwatch League (in part thanks to how SF tournaments are still ‘grassroots’ – unlike Blizzard Capcom doesn’t run tournaments, only supports them), often the matches can be just as thrilling, and this match was so special I just had to share it on the site. If you want to see where this went next, a link to the grand finals versus Infiltration can be found here.

Anyway, Street Fighter 5 continues to be pretty great, even though it no doubt requires a bit of work here and there. Matches like this are why I continue to stick with the game – and I’m pumped for EVO 2018, which is now just a couple of months away.

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