This Sunday, a Street Fighter V Championship Edition Tournament is being held in Japan for blind players called the Shingan (Mind’s Eye) Cup powered by SYCOM.

The tournament will be held on Sunday the 17th of April at 14:00 JST and will be organized by ePara Inc. The venue will be the Milairo House in Tokyo. You can watch a live stream of the Shingan Cup from their youtube page.

There will be six contestants competing in the tournament. Their names are Naoya, Igupi, Chocolate Tart, MM, KYO, and Clé.

“On 17 April (Sunday), ePARA Inc. will hold the ‘Shingan Cup powered by SYCOM [Street Fighter V Champion Edition]’. The “Shingan Cup” is an e-sports tournament in which players compete by judging situations using only their voice, without any visual information. This tournament is the first of its kind, an individual competition in which only blind eSports players compete in the Street Fighter V Champion Edition world.

The players will work together with their clear-sighted counterparts to understand the world of Street Fighter V Champion Edition, practice, and compete in the real competition. Watch how blind players, who are often thought to be incapable of playing games, use their hearing, sensitivity, and instantaneous force to put in the effort and compete on the eSports stage.”

Here are the features of the Shingan Cup:

1. blind players’ efforts
   Blind players (blind players) learn and progress through a combination of speech and manipulation. The beauty of striving to transcend obstacles and the depth of e-sports that makes this possible will be conveyed.
2. Sound-focused strategies and tactics
   By blocking out visual information and specializing only in audio, the battle will produce strategies and tactics unique to the blind, and clever psychological warfare.
3. Diversity of the gaming experience
   We believe that a gaming experience that is not restricted by visual information is a form of diversity and inclusion.”

It is always great to see greater efforts to make the fighting game community more inclusive and represent a group that many people likely thought would not be able to play video games at all.

We wish the best of luck to all the competitors.

Street Fighter V: Champion Edition

Developer: Capcom

Release Date: 2016-02-16

Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Steam

Rule the ring with Street Fighter V: Champion Edition, the most robust version of the acclaimed fighting game! Choose from 40 diverse fighters, 34 dynamic stages and over 200 stylish costumes as you fight your way through a variety of exciting single-player and multi-player modes. READY? FIGHT!