The origins of competitive Tenkaichi 3. I spoke with its oldest player.

[Yokumi24]

First, a little background on why I did this. My name is Majin Xu recently I've been actively looking into the competitive scene of Tenkaichi 3 and its history. As someone who has been trying to build a community of players in North America via discord server and utilizing the Wii emulator Dolphin's netplay function getting to know where it all began and getting in contact with some of the game's founding members was a goal of mine. For those who are unaware Tenkaichi 3's competitive community has its origins in South America and parts of Europe. Notable European players being Paige, Ninkazai, and Rob. All the game complexities and tech stem from Tenkaichi 2 with two unique individuals those being Zoso a South American player and Zeroannihilated a North American player. Both had been making content centered around the game around 2010. Zero making probably the best tutorial for understanding the game back in 2013. The games South American player base growing and embarrassing the game, it became rather popular with big tournaments and a thriving irl community that still play to this day. Sadly, due to the fighting game community perception of Dragon Ball games pre-FighterZ being rather negative the game even with it's very melee level movement and tech never was able to take off here in North America. Also, the fact Dragon Ball games were being dropped for the next one since they came out every year leaving no room for experimentation and desire to see a games full capabilities.

Nevertheless, after looking through some old forums and the South American BT3 discord I managed to get in contact with Zoso and got to talk to him about the game and where it all really started for him. Also, he gave me input on how to grow the game's community here in North America. If you would like to participate I will put the North American discord at the end of the post as well as my channel.

Zoso:
So, the first thing you have to know is that I had a youtube channel back in my Tenkaichi 2 days, which is where I started. It was almost at the same time Tenkaichi 3 came out. But this is important because the Spanish community (and therefore, the whole south american community) had basically nothing to do on youtube. I was the "bridge" because of my language skills and my time put into youtube.
I developed lots of techniques on Tenkaichi 2 alongside a user called "Zeroannihilated" from USA. A freakin' lot of techniques were also usable on Tenkaichi 3 and were the basis for the meta of the game (like movement, how to get to the opponent's back, elite techniques which were usable in 1-2 situations, you get the idea). This means that the youtube community was developing various skills at the same time I was playing offline with my friends and also getting those techniques into youtube. It was a feedback loop.

Now, when it comes to our community, first, in 2010 all we had was some Anime events here where I live. There I met some of the "big names" here, like Shuelx, Zzzolapa, etc. We knew we were some levels above the rest of the competition here, so we started chatting and hanging out in order to play some more. All of these, while I started uploading matches to youtube, you get the drill.
After 2012 I started to lose interest in the game, but what I have done in the beginning was already alive even if I wasn't playing. Zzzolapa became an icon for youtube fights of high level between players; while here new players always appeared.
This kept happening until twitch became mainstream, so shuelx started streaming when he could. This was maybe 2015-2016. There you have the beginning of the present community, where shuelx host tournaments from time to time and the cycle where I left keeps repeating itself, but with less "novelty" from the gameplay since there are less things to be discovered.
But, on a side chapter, this allowed us to get closer to other countries' communities like the one in Peru, where they have without a doubt the strongest pvp players in the world and the biggest offline community in the world too. In February they hosted the biggest offline tournament to date.

I hope what was given was informative and gave you some more insight on Tenkaichi 3's competitive origins. My end goal is to get the games community out there as there is some really dedicated North American players who want to see the game receive more attention beyond it being a casual button masher. The Tenkaichi Online is listed below discord if you want to know even more and play online. I try to do tournaments as well for those who would like to test their skills. The benefit we in the North American community have is since we're small and fairly unknown there is a lot of room for competition so why not try to be the best.

https://discord.gg/upZf85D

[Yokumi24]

You also had some North American who played back in 2015 but besides Ultimate Gohan player GrandMasterHawk everyone else dropped the game after a while.