At this year’s Japan Premiere 2018 Momochi tweeted a bunch of interesting tweets. I’ve collected and translated them here. English after the embedded tweets.

At this year’s Japan Premiere things were a bit frantic and there was lots of running around, but personally it felt a lot like how the old tournaments used to be. I really liked it.

Lately, the prize pool and scale of tournaments (including overseas) has really increased. While I think that itself is a good thing, I feel like it has become harder to feel the passion of both the players and audience.

I think there are people who feel like due to the rapid development of the business [tl: side of eSports] that aspect has been left behind.

What I’m trying to say is that this time there wasn’t a huge venue with lots of space, and I liked it. The distance between games and people, players and fans, was really good.

Of course, it is really great when you have a huge venue with large projection screens, but I also like that feeling when people are packing in tight, and you have to writhe your way through the sweating crowds to see the match you are interested in, and sometimes you just get stuck and that ends up being good too.

From a player’s perspective, I really like it when people are behind me cheering me on and watching the match even when it is off stream.

When there was a really good match going on both the players and spectators were cheering, fans were friendly and unafraid to ask for pictures and autographs, and so on. People always say that the fan support and atmosphere in foreign tournaments is really wild, but this time I felt like Japan was right up there with them. (Sorry I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here, lol).

So just repeating myself one last time, I felt like this tournament had a really good feeling of “closeness”. [tl: lit. “distance”.]

There are many more who came before me [tl: lit. senpai] but I am just a gamer who who can’t live without games forgetting about all that pro and prize money stuff. This event was really reminiscent of old tournaments with all the chaos (in a good way) and it was lots of fun.

As for the result, well, I’ll just have to try harder, lol.

Translator comments. Last year, 2017, Momochi’s Shinobism company ran the Japan Premiere. It was held at Hulic Hall, in Asakusa and was the only thing there. They had a bit more room (or maybe there were people) but it didn’t seem as cramped as this year. It was my first major tournament to attend (I’m generally a stream monster). At their setup they had at least 10 casual setups available all day (no casuals this year, except near the end). I thought the organization for that event was well done. I also this this year was well organized – many thanks to Topanga’s Toyota who pulled off the incredible 32 parallel pool logistics to go, on time, from 700+ down to 8 people in 9 and a half hours.

I was a volunteer this year, so I’m not going to say much more. Certainly there are areas for improvement but I agree with Momochi’s central idea here: there was a lot of passion on display here. All the staff is in it for the love of the game and certainly not the eSports big buxx.

There were some great offstream matches and it is a shame people didn’t get to see them, but being there was a lot of fun.