Do you know that Korea has its own Blazblue community?

While there are quite a few famous Korean Street Fighter IV players like Laugh, Air, and Infiltration, you don’t often hear about their communities for other fighting games. A friend showed me some match videos of a recent Korean Blazblue: Chronophantasma (BBCP) tournament, and I’ll admit I was surprised at the level of play I saw.

After watching that, I was eager to find out more about the Korean BBCP scene, so I got in touch with CLKing, the guy who posted the videos on Twitter. He was more than happy to share a little about his community with the rest of the world.

CLKing has been actively involved in the fighting game community since 2012. Like most fighting game communities,he says the Korean community grew from humble beginnings. He started out running fighting game tournaments named ‘Intercolo’, where they borrowed a tiny stage from the company Najin, which now owns two League of Legends teams.

In 2013, when they could no longer run tournaments at that venue, they moved to Zone IST, an arena for arcade gaming set up by the IST Solution Joystick Company, where CLKing manages and plans tournaments to this very day.

CLKing lamented that BBCP is quite a popular game in Korea, but the competitive scene is still not very big. The biggest tournament was two years ago on an older version of the game, Blazblue Continuum Shift Extend, with a total of 50 entries and 500 stream watchers. Nowadays, he can only get around 20 entries per tournament.

Quite a crowd at a 2012 tournament for Blazblue Continuum Shift: Extend in Yongsan, Seoul

I asked CLKing if any of the Korean players would be attending the South East Asia Major 2014 (SEAM 2014) tournament happening in Singapore in June, and he said a lot of the players are interested, but they are concerned about the cost.

I think it would be awesome if they could make it for SEAM 2014, though. Not only would it be a great way for them to test their strength and mingle with fans of the game in the region, but it would be a great way to get their community even more recognition.

Check out the rest of the match videos from their latest tournament below!