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2020 August JP FGC News Round-up

1 2020 August JP FGC News Round-up

I haven’t really been doing much translation lately – I’ve been super busy with work and family – but I have followed a few interesting threads on twitter. I thought I would gather things up in this blog post to preserve them, since Twitter is generally a blink-and-you-miss-it experience, unless you are talking about digging up old tweets about someone saying the wrong or right word of the day.

1.1 A restaurant explodes, and Torimeshi’s place is messed up

I want to lead off with bizarre news that impacted Torimeshi, a well-known Dhalsim player.

On July 30th, at 9am a restaurant exploded due to a propane gas explosion. 1 person died and 18 were injured, the building was entirely destroyed and there were severe impacts on the surrounding area. Torimeshi had a few tweets showing the damage, which have seen been deleted (I assume due to privacy concerns.) From what I saw, his place looked like it was unlivable. The news article did say that the local government set up shelters for people that were impacted. This is out in Fukushima-ken, f

Fubarduck first broke the news on my TL about the a 32 person single elimination charity tournament set up by ITKitsukick. The tournament brackets are on Challonge, the main stream was on Itsukick’s twitch, with the Fukui FGC channel hosting the B group battles. It was a good tournament, you should check it out. YHC-Mochi won, with Powell coming in second. I’m not surprised that a tournament run by a Dhalsim main (Itsukick), to raise money for a Dhalsim main (Torimeshi), was won by a Dhalsim main (YHC-Mochi). It seems thematically appropriate.

It looks like the Streamlabs donation counter was up to about $7800 by the end of the tournament, which is great. It is heartwarming to see the FGC pull together in times of need, and at the same time infuriating that in places like America sometimes that is the only thing that can be done in cases of medical emergencies.

2020-08-26. Addendum. Here’s the tweet where Torimeshi receives the donation, and is grateful to everyone. By August 15th he tweeted about finding a new place with AC, a washing machine, and bath but unfortunately no internet yet. Seems like things are going well, and the donation enabled him to get into a new place and continue his life. I was reminded of this by Dr. Danny Pham’s tweet about setting up a go fund me for MarioDB and LuigiDB, and I’m consistently impressed with how the FGC support each other.


1.2 Daigo wins CPT online East Asia 1 Qualifier and whiff punishes with sweep

The East Asia 1 Qualifier (Top 8 EN) on the Capcom Pro Tour was held July 26th and 27th. It was a stacked tournament! Lots of fun to watch. If you didn’t see Brian F’s video about how he changed the future that is a fun watch – Bonchan and RB had a tie match and Brian F was the hero that knew the tournament rules and made sure things went right. I’m sure everyone interested in this already watched the tournament, but I wanted to collect a few links to fun content around the tournament.

First, I saw Sasa, who was on the JP Stream commentary and is an all-around good guy, comment that Daigo wasn’t intentionally punishing people with roundhouse sweep. He say Daigo talk about that in a post-tournament stream, and I checked it out and while I was watching made a low-effort translation thread.

Of course, after I did my slap-dash translation, HiFight put together a great video talking specifically about that, and FGC Translated put together a translation of other parts of that stream and also worth your time. It is really interesting to see Daigo think holistically about fighting games, recognize a weakness, and put the time in to train his reactions to keep up with younger players.

The lead up to top 16 was crazy, and wasn’t streamed. Lots of different players were streaming their run through the bracket, so you were able to bounce around and watch that way, or look at the CFN matches as they were uploaded. Personally I watched Xian’s stream (I was putting together a desk, so didn’t have time to track down matches myself.)

If you were watching Yuka Kuramochi’s stream she was super happy when Fuudo won a close set against Momochi to survive in the Loser’s bracket. I saw and retweeted this clip by the Furious Blog (a Japanese FGC content blog) and if you don’t think that is super sweet and worthy of being something to strive for in your relationship, I think you have suspect judgement. Fuudo got second overall, and it was a tough loss for him. He woke up early the next day and went to beat the Field Boss (in some game – I don’t know which) and thought he was a true gamer. He also went out the next day to get some take-out for his wife, but found an Izakaya with 3 lemon sours for 500yen, and just had to take advantage of that. Yuka Kuramoti (his wife) is a model, and is always working hard. She recently got a hosting spot on a new Radio show “The World is made of Manga!” (or something like that). It’s on Tokyo FM Radio, and is a 30 minute weekly show where she co-hosts with comedian Eiko Kano, funded by the website Manga Kingdom (a digital manga distribution site.) This is already starting to sound like PR (since I got a lot of it from a press release) so I’ll skip the stuff about the company, etc. She’s also the founder of G-STAR Gaming, a female gaming group. She’s out there in the public eye, and totally vocal about supporting Fuudo, which is awesome. I didn’t see many people reacting negatively, but there should be none.

1.3 Chocoblanka did a karaoke V-tuber stream

Chocoblanka had a Virtual YouTuber karaoke concert July 26th. I don’t follow Chocoblank too closely – though do check out her video about her new car (EN subtitles available), she really likes cars and has been doing a lot with racing games / racing. I’ve noticed that she has done some streaming as a virtual avatar, and there are apparently two of them. There are two avatars, named Yucchyo (the high pitched school girl I think) and Kakao who has a more regular voice and isn’t in a school uniform. So there is some lore about those two apparently, I don’t know it, but Chocoblanka herself is a great singer – see her at SEAM 2018. I really enjoyed the concert, but not nearly as much as Tachikawa, who was donating like crazy. Momochi and Chocoblanka were also recently in an article by NCon about how they met, the good points of being a pro gamer couple, and so on. I’m always happy to see examples of success in gamer couples (Fuudo and Yuka, Momochoco, Sako and Akiki, Bon-chan and Anna, etc.)

1.4 The Japan Fighting Game Publishers Roundtable

On August 1st there was a roundtable with Arc System Works, Arika, SNK, Capcom, Koei Tecmo, and Bandai Namco. Jiyuna and Michael Murray provided English commentary and did a great job. I was really happy with the event because just seeing Japanese companies get together and talk about things like this in public is huge progress. There were some nice reveals, like a new character for Soul Calibur and new character trailers for Guilty Gear Strive. Capcom will host a stream later in the month (August 6th 2am JST – I’ll be sleeping) for SFV, and there will be a stream for DBFZ as well. I bought FEXL not too long ago, and want to play that since Arika went and implemented roll-back netcode for the game. That isn’t easy to do. It seems like the comments section was only going to be satisfied with all developers announcing that all their games now have Roll Back netcode and a full slate of upcoming DLCs, but whatever, just seeing Japanese companies be more transparent is great.

1.5 NTT e-Sports division makes some moves

Kagecchi is an important community organizer, he runs Fighter’s Crossover -Akiba-, the weekly SFV event in Akihabara. He was recently outed as being involved in e-sports at NTT (a large telecommunications firm in Japan) and is the vice-president of the (relatively new) e-sports division. There were two big announcements recently, one is that NTT joined JeSU. People have wildly different opinions about JeSU, and while I don’t like the idea of an external body imposing rules on fighting game events, in Japan it is important that some organization pushes to make fighting game events work. There all sorts of issues around prize money, advertising law, and other things, and JeSU is the organization that is trying (for good or bad) to make it possible to have larger scale tournaments. Knowing that someone like Kagecchi is involved makes me optimistic that there is representation for people who come from the grass roots.

The other announcement is that NTT is opening “eXeField Akihabara”. This will be an e-sports facility in the UDX building, with facilities for streaming / online events, a showroom for information communication technologies so you can try things out, a cafe area, and a play area. The facility is supposed to open August 11th, but with how things are going in terms of Corono virus in Tokyo, we’ll have to see what happens.

1.6 JP Street Fighter League Pre-Season


2020 JP SFL Pre-season hotlinked image

There will be a pre-season event for the JP Street Fighter League. Full details at the main CapCom site, but briefly:

  • There is an open bracket from which two people advance. August 8th and 9th.
  • There is an under-22 bracket from which two people advance. Also August 8th and 9th.
  • September 5th is a pro invitational with 18 people from which two people advance.
  • September 21st the six from above will join with the six team leaders (Tokido, Mago, Daigo, Fuudo, Momochi, Nemo) for a tournament. I don’t know if this is 2 on 2 or single.
  • Free to enter, must be over 15, must live in Japan, must be able to communicate in Japanese, they recommend fiber connections but PS4/Steam with net access is ok, ~ 28,000 USD total prize pool. Will be streamed, probably starting from 9am JST for day 1 and day 2.
  • Winner will get a JeSU license if they don’t already have one.
  • About USD $28,327 total prize pool for the preseason.

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