Gosho (Rufus) and Kyabetsu (C. Viper) won the 2009 Super Battle Opera SFIV competition, defeating Iyo (who you remember as a special guest at the Capcom/GameStop/EVO SFIV finals) and his partner, Abel-master Shiro.

I wasn’t happy to see the American teams get iced so quickly, but I still love a lot of things about these results.  First is that the winning characters were two new SFIV challengers.  Second is that Iyo got 1st in the Capcom Japan tournament, and 2nd place at SBO, silencing all his detractors and really repping Dhalsim.   

Finally, as someone with a monkeywrench on the insides of the game, I’m overjoyed to see another great example of SFIV balance in action: 

*Every* character except El Fuerte made it into this SBO main event, and we had 11 different characters represented in the 16 quarter-finalist spots! (Honda, Viper (x2), Abel, Dhalsim, Guile, Sagat (x3), Rufus, Balrog, Akuma, Ryu (x2), Chun-Li (x2)).  When you consider that this was an arcade tournament (so only 17 characters, not 25), this is pretty amazing. The final 4 teams were even better, with different characters in 7 of the 8 spots (Dhalsim, Abel, Honda, Viper (x2), Rufus, Sagat, Chun-Li).  

Congratulations to all competitors and especially Gosho and Kyabetsu’s beastly Viper!