If you have not already listened to the podcast of this category, these are the final results, so this will spoil the course of the discussion on that podcast! Be warned!
2024 wasn’t the most competitive year for new fighting games coming out. We had Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, Rivals of Aether 2, Tekken 8, and Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes. We were however supplemented by a healthy serving of DLC characters, and all in all I think we had a very fun and diverse list of characters to pull from this year. From that list, this is the cream of the crop.
The Winner
Akuma (Street Fighter 6)
We might be suckers for a cool new take on an existing design. Akuma from Street Fighter is one of the all-time character designs, both visually and in toolkit. Across Street Fighter 2, 3, and 4, we’ve gotten some excellent takes on the character, but all pretty loyal to the original version. Street Fighter 5 had some ideas to mix it up… but sadly, it was Street Fighter 5, a bad game for fools.
Street Fighter 6 takes those ideas from 5 and pushes them even further, while also putting them in a good game. The toolkit tells a story: Akuma’s gotten old. He’s still a master martial artist, he’s still a fast flurry of strikes. But what he’s not? Flexible. Acrobatic. Sure, he can still Demon Flip and Zanku Hadouken, but he’s not doing flipping throws anymore, and his Tatsumakis aren’t quite the rapid helicopter spins they once were.
Akuma himself isn’t ignorant of this change, and he’s changed his style to cover the shortcoming. Maybe he can’t twirl like he used to, but you know what he’s got? MUSCLE. SF6 Akuma is built bruiser who mixes superb technique with raw strength and vicious brutality. He punches with the force of a truck. He slams his ki together to form blasts. And maybe he can’t do his throw out of the Demon Flip, but now he can command throw you out of his teleport- a “throw” that’s really just punching you in the spine, then the face.
There are more changes than this, but taken as a whole, it’s an amazing vision of how age changes a warrior… and how they can adapt to become more dangerous than ever despite that.
The Runners-Up
Nen Master (DNF Duel)
For me, DNF Duel will always be a story of what might have been. Developed by the legendary studio 8ing under the production guidance of the equally storied Arc Systems Works, DNF Duel had two fighting studios with incredible pedigree going for it. It had an excitingly fast pace and explosive neutral. And it could draw on years of amazing character design from Dungeon Fighter Online, known overseas as Dungeon and Fighter (hence DNF). So what went wrong?
Well, 8ing… 8ing is a little too wild sometimes. And if you don’t keep a close eye on them, they might just make a game that’s crazy unfair, because it’s fun for them. That’s the fate DNF Duel suffered, where characters have such disgustingly good options for mixups, combos, neutral, and more, that it can often turn into a one-touch game of 100% kill combos. Long stretches of not being able to interact as someone just erases your entire health bar for a single mistake.
These touch of death combos exist in other games, they’re not necessarily disqualifying, but combined with other elements of the game, they just made an experience that felt too frustrating to take seriously. And so it took Kyrie and I way too long to try out Nen Master, and discover a just wildly cool design. Her toolkit would already be cool enough with her armored DP, rushing hitgrab, ki beam zoning, and more, but they gave her an install too. An install that’s just an MP Skill, so she can access it all the time, but loses it if she loses the offensive.
And that install is shooting ki dragons out of her hands and feet. Throwing roaring dragons with her palm strikes. Getting amazing chip pressure and spacing that is hard to fight back against, but the moment you do so successfully, she’s suddenly at a huge disadvantage. It’s amazingly fun, powerful, and looks cool as hell. People often underrate that part, but they’re fools to- games are sounds and images that occur on a screen. You wanna win Best Fighting Toolkit? Those images better be sick. Nen Master’s are the sickest of all our nominees this year.
Asura (Modded Marvel 3)
Honestly, Asura was made for fighting games. There’s the DLC in his own game, Asura’s Wrath, that has two fights in an imitation of the Street Fighter 4 engine (maybe even the real thing? I’m not a coder.), but even the regular content of his game is just a series of divine brawls and punchouts. Literally divine, of course: he’s a god. They never say expressly what of, but one has to imagine it’s “anger and punching.”
He never got a chance. Maybe he would have been Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite DLC if that game had survived for long enough, but it truly didn’t. And nobody is talking about Asura’s Wrath anymore. Enter the modding scene for Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. Enter… tabs.
I can’t tell you much about tabs. He (pretty sure right pronoun) is a modder, of course. His modding work has gotten him at least one gig working officially on a fighting game (we don’t know what, something unreleased). And he is the most prolific creator of new characters for UMvC3 since the game came out. His mod, simply titled “Palette Swap Characters” (referencing an old method of injecting new character code into the game) adds a staggering 32 characters to the game, ranging from interesting variations to completely new designs.
Oh, and we know one other thing: he’s a big Asura’s Wrath fan. He’s said so himself, but even if he hadn’t, the work he put into Asura speaks for itself. Lovingly crafted with an excellent and distinct toolkit, inspired by the game itself, going so far as to put key dramatic moments in as Supers. Great implementation of his voice lines from the original game. Just an incredible effort, resulting in a character that, excusing a touch of modding jank, could be confused for an official release. And a damn good one, at that.
That’s the first day of the Gimmick Awards down, but stay tuned- we have a whole month of releases, three a week, for all of February. Next up is Most Misguided on Wednesday, a lamentation of works that had real potential, but went astray somehow.
Our art is a commission from Sarracenian on Bluesky.
