Possibily unique question...

[Vagabond Aeon]

Anyone know what the competitive battling scene in Japan is like? Someone on Smogon wanted to know if the Japanese had an equivalant to that website, or if they even have a competitive metagame...

 

[Archaic]

They have the union rooms with the joyspots. The competitive battling scene is thus highly active and supported by Nintendo, but there's a lot less communication online that I'm aware of, and the metagame isn't as developed, owing to the slower time it takes to train up a competitive team, and limited TM's.

 

[Vagabond Aeon]

I see... what sort of tactics are used, and have they caught on to the Skarmbliss combo?

 

[Archaic]

Not sure to be honest. I was one of the top 20 trainers for the first week or two after the joyspots were introduced, but that was only against the NPC trainers, not against the actual human players.

 

[Vagabond Aeon]

Well, that gets me nowhere... then again, I wasn't expecting too much anyway.

Thanks anyway, I really appriecate your answer.

 

[Naas02]

hey we should try finding out where (if anywhere) do the japanese players go to share strategies, even if they dont battle online there's gotta be somewhere people would post their ideas for attacks. I tried using babelfish but the only thing i could make out on most of the sites was talk about ev's and effort points so i see what you mean about the union rooms and joyspots owning the metagame in Japan

 

[Vagabond Aeon]

What I'm interested in is their tactics and movesets, and if they use similar stuff that we do...

 

[MattW]

Can I ask if anyone knows what the state of competitive Pokemon was before Ruby/Sapphire, with RBY and GSC around the turn of the century and before? They didn't have union rooms then, right, so how did that work?

 

[Archaic]

Yikes, now this is what I call thread necromancy.

One would suspect that they organised themselves in a very similar way to how we all did. Given that they didn't have the Pokémon Centers at that point, their only method of communication would've been online forums, and occasional meetups at game stores.

 

[MattW]

Do you have any way of finding out if or where those online forums existed, or do you know a way I could find out (but I do not know any language but English well)? I am pretty okay at finding old things on the internet but the language barrier is difficult.