Out of nowhere, Sega of Japan has announced Puyo Puyo Global Ranking Series, a run of official and community-hosted events with the explicit purpose of courting international competitive play and encouraging more interaction between international/Japanese communities—these events will run through January, and tie into the existing Japanese event schedule that's bookended by Puyo Puyo Grand Prix Final in March:
The Puyo Puyo Global Ranking Series schedule thus far:
- October 25, 20:00 Japan time: a community tournament hosted by Japanese TO hisyachu using Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 (Switch)
- November 30: an official Sega-hosted tournament, again using Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 (Switch); this event will be broken into "Class B" (beginner) and "Class S" brackets; further details coming in mid-October
- December: a community tournament hosted by Japanese TO shino; details TBD
- January: another community tournament with an as-yet-unannounced host
- January 26: Puyo Puyo Global Ranking Match, a top-8 event featuring the 4 top-ranked global players and the 4 top-ranked Japanese players in a double-elim, FT10 tournament, using Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 and probably, but not definitely, the PC version. The winner will be invited to participate in the Puyo Puyo Grand Prix Final in March (which includes an expenses-paid trip to Japan for international winners) and be awarded an official uniform, and they're also working to organise some sort of cash prizes
Players will earn ranking points for entering and/or making it through the various stages of these tournaments, with official tournament awarding more points than community events; players who accrue over 24 points will be awarded free merch (which may be determined by raffle, depending on how many people qualify).
After years of Sega's various branches doing virtually nothing in the way of global tournament outreach, I was genuinely surprised to see this announcement and even more surprised that they're not just running events for funsies and are offering actual prizes, especially given that they seem to be doing it for the sake of it, and not as a hype campaign for a new game (as far as we know...) There are a good handful of international players who can hang with the elite Japanese scene, too, so I hope people check for them.
(If you're wondering why they're running Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 and not the JP tournament-standard Puyo Puyo eSports/Champions, it's because PPT2 simply has more reliable netcode. The Japanese tournament scene flip-flops between PS and Switch; they're back to Switch as of this year, and that's probably the preferred option for global players as well, just due to the fact that virtually all the players are there.)