https://puyo-camp.jp/events/13286 🇯🇵
https://twitter.com/puyonewherofes 🇯🇵
https://tonamel.com/competition/ZUAra 🇯🇵
Earlier this month, Japanese pro Puyo Puyo player Piponeer announced Puyo Puyo New Hero Festival, an online tournament for Puyo Puyo eSports/Champions scheduled for next weekend, with a few different aims in mind: one, they want to demonstrate just how many players are out there in the wings; two, they want to create a flashpoint of people all playing/streaming at once; and three, they specifically structured the tournament to attract people who'd otherwise be put off by the thought of going out of their way to enter only to be immediately bodied: they're running a double-elimination tournament with a second single-elim tournament for anyone who gets knocked out before the second round of the losers' bracket, so that people can be assured they'll at least get a few games in, and hopefully come away motivated to enter more events.
They're at 170 entrants right now, which is great but quite shy of Piponeer's target of 300 entrants—not only would that be a massive turnout but it'd up the amount of pro circuit ranking points that could be awarded to the winners, so it'd offer an extra incentive for the pros to go all-out. I wish I'd caught this sooner, as I would've liked to get the word out and maybe help some international players to sign up... if the JP/intl scenes were more in-sync, a 300-entrant tournament seems entirely within the realm of possibility, and I'm sure more regular smaller events would be less of a crapshoot, too.
(if anyone does want help signing up, lemme know!)
checking in on this and they're at 208 signups atm, pretty strong! they might at least hit the meme number (240) by the weekend
the URL for the official stream is up—icymi, it'll start at 13:00 Japan time tomorrow, so ~21hrs from now:
They've pushed past 240 entrants, in part due to the participation of streamer Mokou—they're a veteran of NND/Youtube streaming and someone who's championed Puyo on and off for quite a long time and some that's often cited as one of the big influencers that drew young people to the game, but they've been relatively quiet on the game for the last few years, so their return for this tournament is getting a lot of attention.
(They're also very good at the game and were among the first people awarded a pro license, which they seemed a little sheepish about and did nothing to maintain... they even did a voice for one of the characters in Magical Stone, if anyone recalls that debacle.)
Mokou made an appearance in this promo video for the Tetris battle featured at Daigo Umehara's Kemonomichi IV event—for whatever reason, their talking-heads were a streamer who half-considers themselves a Puyo player, and live, a full-on Puyo pro:
one last reminder, this kicks off in ~1hr:
They're at 319 entrants, too... I can't say I saw this coming.
(entries closed at 355!)
lots of hype matches, with many surprise showings from younger players & others outside of the usual names, and the event ran without a hitch, which is especially impressive considering they ended up with 350+ entrants in the end. They had ~1800 people watching the main stream at their peak, too.
The immediate takeaway from those involved is that they were very pleasantly surprised that so many younger folk not only participated but were able to hang with the established elite players—it seems they were expecting a wider spread of weak to strong players, especially given how many people signed up, but the average level of play was higher than anticipated. The flipside to that is that their intentions of making sure everyone went away feeling like they at least got a few games in might not have totally panned out, but I don't know that there's much else they can do within this format to improve things in that regard.
To me, this reaffirms the notion that there are a lot of players out there who want more opportunities to play and compete that aren't tuned into all the existing venues, and that finding a way to actively and consistently engage all those people in the leadup to and immediate honeymoon of the next game ought to be priority one.
