EVO Japan 2023 took place from 31 March to 4 April, and was the first in-person Evo held in the country since 2020. Hosted at Tokyo Big Sight, the world's premiere fighting game competition was coming home and hopes were high… but it all turned out to be a bit of a mess.
There were still plenty of great fights to be seen, eventually, but the problems were numerous. There were a lack of staff, the venue was cramped, disorganisation over brackets in certain games saw enormous downtime between matches, and many players complained about the game setups being laggy.
