Approved by 5gen & S1nn0hC0nfirm3d | Amazing Art by Albatr0ss and butchered by me. Thread formatting stolen from Jett
(Interview Date: 14th of October, 2021)
Hey friends and welcome to ZU
Ditto used Transform!
Ditto transformed into Hattrem!
*hattttttrrrr*
Hey Jett, how are you doing today?
Hey czim, I'm doing pretty good. Just chilling at the moment. How are you?
I'm also doing fine. Thank you for asking! To start the interview, please tell us a bit about yourself outside of Pokémon!
I'm a 19 year old Economics student and im currently in my second year of university. Why did I pick economics; I pretty much disliked every other subject I was doing in school and I'm glad I made this choice. During my free time I often play a lot of video games, or watch youtube or shows, cause of pretty introverted for the most part and socialising often becomes quite draining for me very quickly lmao. I also enjoy playing and watch football or "soccer" for the americans >:(.
I also am a bit of an introvert so I can relate. Which video games do you like to play?
I play a wide assortment of games; people may have seen me type in the League of Legends channel, and LoL is a game I used to invest a lot more time into a couple years ago but I more so just mess around with friends. I've been very much into a card game called Legends of Runeterra (card game based on LoL characters) recently because of the new expansion bringing a really fun set of new cards and it's honestly one of the best card games I've played, brings me back to very early hearthstone days but rng feels far less impactful and it's very easy to grind for cards.
I also play a fair bit of CSGO on and off, I think I peaked around DMG, which isn't too shabby since it's slightly below top 10% and well I'll just the fact the game has a cheating problem. Other FPS' I've enjoyed in the past include Valorant (I wonder where I got my name from), Rainbow Six Siege, Superhot, and the Halo series. I actually haven't played many battle royales, only one I really invested time into was PUBG when it initially came out and was super unoptimised lmao.
Then there are platformers, which I'm an avid fan of. Hollow Knight is honestly like the gold standard for games of this category and it's really hard to find games that match it, and I'm super excited for Silksong to release (in not February 2022 let's be honest). Celeste is another platformer I really love, very different to Hollow Knight since it focuses purely on platforming rather than combat as well, but it's beautifully made and together these two I think are a big inspiration for many of the newer platformers such as Ori, Ender Lilies etc. A game that many streamers have infamously played and one I played during ZUPL, Jump King, is a game that caused me a lot of suffering and pain but I managed to complete it in under 13 hours and I was very happy with that. Hella tilting though.
Lastly, are Nintendo games, and honestly the games that really are the reason why I became a "gamer", Pokemon Emerald was the first game I played and I've pretty much played every main game in the franchise since. As for spinoffs a big fan of Conquest, and as you can probably guess I'm a massive fan of the Fire Emblem games as a result. I also enjoy Zelda games and the Mario series in general (Mariokart, 3d games, 2d games, party) and have even played a lot of the games that were made during czim era (aka before when I was born). I could go into a lot more detail about all these games but I think I'll avoid boring people too much... for now.
Well, this was an incredible answer and I share a lot of gaming interests with you. Platformers are my most beloved genre and seeing some titles like Hollow Knight in your list is great. I also played a bit of Valorant back then and I knew your nickname was from there! Anyways, I'm gonna have to be that guy and ask for you to make a list of top5 or top10 games (whatever makes you more comfortable) considering the passion you have for them.
Oo that's a difficult one, given that the games I play are so varied when it comes to genres but if I had to give a top 5 it would be probably:
1) Hollow Knight (I love this game so much, I've played it multiple times and it never gets old and still provides such a challenge. It's like the perfect amount of platformer, exploration, and combat in one game. Fuck Deepnest tho)
2) Super Mario Galaxy (original was a lot better than the sequel imo although the sequel did provide more of a challenge, it was for sure welcome but the first game was already so amazing because everything just worked so well together and it's been so long since we had a 3d game. The hybrid of 2d gameplay and 3d visuals really worked out)
3) GTA V (I've had way too much fun with my friends on this. I suck at many things in this game such as driving and flying but at least I can put my good aim to use :>. Still going strong after so many years as well.)
4) Breath of the Wild (Usually I'm not a massive fan of open world single player games, and I know this has an end goal but there are times I can get easily bored of a game if I'm not prompted with something to do in a long time. Breath of the Wild is one of the exceptions and it's honestly a brilliant game despite the fact it ventures a bit away from the classic zelda style)
5) Minecraft (Classic, extremely fun and chill with friends, and I very much enjoyed the revival of the game)
Fire Emblem: Three Houses as an honourable mention though.
Good stuff. I'm also patiently waiting for Silksong to be released soonTM. You also said you like to watch youtube and TV shows. What type of Youtube content do you usually like? Which shows are your favorite ones?
Well with shows it's mainly anime ngl, but there are a few tv shows such as Peaky Blinders and Brooklyn 99 that I enjoy a lot. The first is an excellent drama with a really good set of unique characters, which is honestly a massive reason as to why I like to show, while Brooklyn 99 is just very chill and funny.
As for anime, my all time favourites include Nichijou, Kaguya-sama: Love is War, Aot, Violet Evergarden, HxH (but I still haven't finished it LOL) and even though it's not a show, I very much enjoyed Kimi no Na wa (Your Name). There's like a bunch of very popular animes I've yet to watch hence my favourites miss out quite a lot of the most populars (sorry to offend anyone).
As for youtube, I spend a lot of time watching VTubers LOL. Mainly because I'm a massive weeb and there are such a wide variety of them but I don't really venture outside of the Hololive ones. Favourite is definitely Pekora, cause she likes to pull pranks off and causes a lot of chaos in any game she's playing. Other than that I do watch more serious gaming streams in general on both Twitch and Youtube, and occasionally I'll nerd out on YouTube and watch some random history or science video and think damn I shoulda picked x course to study that before quickly remembering that I wouldn't be doing any of that as a uni student.
Nice, my gf also loves Your Name! I realized I didn't ask about movies so... Are there any others you like?
I'm not a big movie watcher in general unfortunately but there are still some that I very much enjoyed. I liked the original Star Wars series a lot, and I guess the prequel wasn't too bad either but wasn't that big of a fan of the latest trilogy. I also like the MCU movies and I especially love Guardians Of the Galaxy since it has some of the best characters and the humour is on point. Other movies that I enjoyed were the Lord of the Rings series, Harry Potter series, Interstellar, and Spirited Away.
A lot of great movies there. Interstellar and Spirited Away are on my top 10-20 movies of all time. On the subject of sports, you said you like football! Which team you support? Any other sports you like?
I'm a Chelsea fan, and have been ever since the team got a massive injection of money. Jokes aside it's cause I liked the colour blue and it just so happened that they transferred ownership of the club when I was young so growing up, so they started to get a bunch of good players, they were the team I rooted for and it also works out pretty well since I live in London and the stadium is based there. I do enjoy watching most sports to be honest; I like racquet sports a lot cause of their dynamic, watched Tennis a fair bit when it was Wimbledon and the US Open, but I rarely ever play Tennis myself and I'd be awful at it. I'm also a pretty big fan of Table Tennis and Badminton as well and I used to play them a lot more often :( but nowadays I just tend to watch it, and I'm always impressed by the reflexes that are demonstrated in both.
Nice! I'm a Corinthians supporter myself and we won the Club World Cup vs Chelsea in 2012 iirc, I don't know if you remember that but still lol. Now let's shift the topic a bit to mons. How did you first get into PS and Smogon? How did you end up in ZU?
I do remember that lmao. To be honest, when we won the Champions League in that year we weren't even the best team in Europe cause Bayern Munich were xd.
Yeah, we were the last non-european team to do so. Was pretty epic when it happened
Anyways as for PS, I had a friend in primary school recommend that I should check out PS (at the time I was like 11 or something lol) I basically lurked for a year, until I discovered Smogon, since I mainly spent my time hosting tournaments in the tournaments room; the room was vastly different with many users hosting their small tours while room tours were going on. I think I spent a good deal of time playing Monotype on the weird side servers where there were leagues before returning to main again. Eventually I started to pick up LC given the fact that "Stall is unviable" was very appealing to me and the mons there were also cute. Was I any good? I was alright but I quickly grew bored when it came to the start of generation 7 and I quit... for about 2 years, and then I had this sudden urge to come back for whatever reason (during exam season might I add) and I found out one of my only friends left on the site was leading NFE checked it out became TL, retired eventually but during this time I met Tuthur because I was added to a private room where a bunch of NFErs would hang out. Eventually Tuthur and Apagogie convinced me to sign up for the secret santa and well I decided to stick around, and here I am ZU Room Driver (bad mistake from you guys smfh). It's been a fun journey so far though :).
Our paths in PS/Smogon have been very similar, I'm surpised. I also mained all the tiers you did for a while, like I said in my interview. How was your ZUPL experience while playing SS? What're your thoughts on the current metagame?
The first week was a rollercoaster of emotions, being "basketballed" around but I was quickly given an opportunity to start in SS ZU, and the for the most part it was fun despite the fact odds were constantly against me. I think that pretty much summed up SS ZU in ZUPL, in that most games weren't particularly clean, and matchups were often a massive factor in determining the winner of games. For this reason, I wasn't a fan of the metagame during the tournament; it wasn't super unfun to build in nor was it super unfun to play but it was just so easy for players to bring some niche mon or archetype and then essentially sweep you. Options were certainly limited when it came to certain roles or the requirement to have certain typings to have sound teams obviously didn't help SS ZU's case. I haven't actually played that much of the SS ZU metagame with the October Shifts because I've been pretty busy with uni as of recent, but I feel that the metagame still has these issues. Stall got gutted, and then we lost two other defensive Pokemon, Jellicent in particular being a massive staple for many teams. It kinda sucks that we're losing a lot of defensive options since the alternatives aren't nearly as good rather than the removal of our best ones allowing more opportunities for other Pokemon to shine. Metagame's in a bit of a weird state but ultimately not a lot has changed, the so called "cheese" archetypes are still annoying but probably don't warrant anything being done to them and well Rotom's still a bitch to deal with, especially the WispHex set which absolutely dominates all our Ground-types.
Yeah, you actually managed to be on all 3 teams that made playoffs lol. About the metagame, would you ban/suspect Rotom and/or anything else?
I don't really know still but I don't think I'd mind one; I'm certainly not sure as to what to vote if there was one. Again I'd have to play more so I guess this is a bit of a cop out answer. I guess most importantly is that the council should be open to the idea of suspecting it even if remakes are right around the corner. Shifts won't be happening for a while for ZU at least and I'd much rather ban and then unban, instead of not doing anything, and ofc it Rotom were suspected and not banned, that's also perfectly fine, but complete inaction shouldn't be an option if a fair amount of the community start seeing it as somewhat problematic to the metagame's health. I feel like there isn't much else to really suspect or watch out for at the moment; a lot of things are just unfortunately out of our control such as defensive options being nabbed from us etc and retesting Silvally-Ground back (heard some people wanted it back and tbf Silvally-Ground metagame was far better than ZUPL one even though it wasn't really that healthy for ZU) isn't even an option any more since it's NU now.
Now onto the most important question. How do you manage to make those great smogon posts? Not only they have great content but also they fit a theme and all. Any tips for us mortals to get better?
I don't exactly remember when I started focussing a lot more on formatting of posts but it was probably towards the middle-end of my NFE TL career. At this point I was very well versed when it came to metagame, tiering policy, and the actual content of the post but when you often read posts, it can be well quite boring. It's a wall of text and I'm not someone who likes reading walls of text unless there is visual stimulation; this can be anything from images to colours. This became the very basic building blocks for my posts as I started to add something thematic to them to make them more interesting, standout, and more memorable as a whole. As for the themes, a lot of the inspiration I get is just from stuff I watch whether that be anime or YouTube or w/e. For instance the post where I had the mystic idea with Silvally-Ground and Alcremie were because of the Kaguya-sama: Love is War OP where Chika and Ishigami are depicted on playing cards, and it immediately struck me that Alcremie looked like the Ace of Spades. My Magneton post is probably the most standout one where I chose horrible font because it fits a newspaper style but the idea came about cause I wanted to try something different, and a newspaper article was like the first thing I could think of where I could stretch the possible formats of a Smogon posts, sorta like mini article esque.
As for tips, I've kinda gone through a method which I've stuck to for most of my recent posts which is basically all my ZU ones:
1) Spend time thinking about what you want to write about and what would be the main points of the post. Ultimately, it's a post the contents are the most important. This is also the stage where if you're making arguments about whether x or y should be suspected or banned, you should talk to other people and get a more varied view as well.
2) Think about a potential style, themes or some interesting pictures you can make with your very subpar editing skills or just take pictures off the internet. I'm not expert when it comes to making pictures but I think most of them turn out okay and they hopefully help to space out long paragraphs and keep the viewer engaged. I spend way too long on this but maybe it's worth it.
3) Actually do what you thought about in part 2, and format the post in a way you want to lay out the points you've been thinking about in step 1. Obviously this isn't fixed and can be changed when you actually start to write but it's a good idea to know how you want things to link and be presented.
4) Now it's time to write your post. For my best (imo anyways since they took the most effort) and longest posts this might take me over several days to do, though I'm normally able to do the whole thing in a single day but over many hours. I do get distracted fairly easily so this could probably be done quicker, but I do try and write everything down. Take your time though, don't feel like you're forced to get things out before a certain day or time.
5) Check your work to the best of your ability. Important step, you'll still make mistakes just fewer and hopefully most people don't notice.
6) Post and hope everyone doesn't hate your work :D!!
Honestly though, just find a pattern that works well for you. Make sure what you write looks good and what it says is sound.
Wow, that was a very elaborated answer. Much more than I expected to get! This is actually a very interesting thought process and it makes sense that your posts end up the way they do. Now onto another thing you've been well known for, being the POTW host. How was hosting the project? Which one was your favorite interview? Anyone who surprised you a lot?
Hosting the project was very enjoyable since I got to talk to a lot of my frens and learn more about them but also got to know some people I probably wouldn't ever have talked to which was nice. One of the biggest reasons I wanted to host it was because I wanted to see the format and the art idea come in to fruition and I think the art that Albatross made is incredible, and I'm super happy that I've adapted the format further when compared to what other tiers do. Spending several hours a week to do this wasn't easy given timezones and some people have slower responses or shorter responses than expected. Maybe I just write a lot haha. Anyways it just required a lot of adapting on the spot and often I'd have like some questions in mind but I often would create new ones from previous responses since I wanted it to be more conversational and less just just asking and answering; adding a bit of my own personality where I could rather than generically moving onto the next question. I did have a couple interviews that stood out more to me because of the responses, I liked Kay's a lot given he went into a fair bit of depth when it came to building and so on. Yours was probably the longest of them all and was great and it was probably when I started freestyling a bit more. Then the recent managers ones I did were also very good, especially Durza's (maybe recency bias) but honestly, he gave superb answers and really went in depth on the questions I asked him which was awesome. Especially on the matter of old gens, that was quite surprising to me how he essentially offered his thoughts as to what to do and what was sort of best for ZU's progression. I guess Drud's age surprised me lmao since I thought he was more mature and the fact he could handle shittalking well as well made me think he was a fair bit older
Glad you had fun. Having you hosting these for 20 editions was really nice for the format and for getting to know more our community! Ok, a less serious question now lol. If you were a famous moviestar/musician, which 3 ZU community members would you pick for your entourage and why? Feel free to talk about what their roles would be and so on
Honestly I'd be an awful person to have as the lead singer, not cause I'm bad at singing (or at least I'd like to think previously having some choir experience means I'm decent) but cause I lack a lot of confidence. Because of this I'd get at least 2 giga chads probably Ho3n and Durza in order to help out with the mood and divert the attention slightly. Obviously as the main vocalist, I can't be the least significant member of the band so the last person would be someone who is less of a chad than me so I'd pick Tuthur. Durza also is pretty good at music as well as we found out in the previous interview so that's an added bonus, and I'd probably have him on a Piano or Keyboard. We'll put Ho3n on the drums, since he loves Belly Drum Swirlix so much in NFE and lastly Tuthur would be on the guitar, for no particular reason whatsoever but someone has to fulfill that role.
LOL, that's a great answer. I see you went for the musician route. Do you have a team you'd like to share?
I really went out and teamdumped all my ZUPL teams the other day rip but here is a team that I didn't end up bringing
This team was one of the ideas we were testing for TheFranklin but he didn't have to play in the end. He wanted to bring a Rapidash with Wild Charge to lure in Water-types and pair it with LO Fire Blast Gourgeist for Tangela's since Jellicent Tangela core were annoying to deal with and were fairly common. The core in general was just pretty solid vs OBB from the scout and while btboy had been trying to make several attempts with the core, I decided to give it ago myself. Then there is just a standard Stealth Rock user in Rhydon and Fighting resist and Defogger in Altaria and then we have a weird Alcremie set you passed which was quite neat into a few things, Substitute punished switch-ins pretty well and offensive Alcremie is far less expected and I think overall more effective in most matchups when compared to the Double Dance and more known sets. Also needed something for Dark-types but this wasn't sufficient so we added Scarf Sawk which also gave us nice Speed control. Obviously this team is by no means perfect, rough Qwilfish matchup, lack of pivots means that you get a lot of progress off said lures working and double switches but it was certainly fun and has quite a few unique quirks.
Stop leaking Morpeek-a-boo's teams, we need teams for Majors/Seasonal SMH! Finally, what's your favorite Jett pun?
Favourite Jett pun has to be Aqua Jett which you were the first to make; I'm pretty sure I used it as a justification as to why I had it on Scarf Kabutops as one of the filler moves. There some other decent ones like jettison but as long as you aren't Ho3n calling me Jettoroni and Cheese we're all good :D
LOL, that's my favorite one too! We're starting to wrap this up so, anything you wanna say? Anyone you wanna shout out?
Ye sure, s/os to Tuthur, kay, S1nn0hC0nfirm3d for getting me up to speed with the metagame so quickly during Sneasel suspect where I suffered on multiple alts, and are honestly a large reason why I stuck around. Close friends like Greybaum, keppy, laevin who are all chill and have been there for me for various reasons also deserve a mention. Rest of staff are also cool and deserve s/os for the effort they put in running the room etc. Thanks Morpeek-A-Boos for being such an awesome team, thank you to all the viewers of ZU PotW and lastly thank you for hosting this and inviting me onto the show.
Also, peko is peko
Thank you! You're a tough act to follow but hopefully this was a good one lol! Was a blast having you here and thanks again for hosting this project for as long as you did!
:)
Feel free to ask to Jett any questions you want!
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I had a lot of fun hosting this and I'll be taking over this project for the time being, so expect more interviews in the following weeks. Stay tuned and thank you for reading!
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I had a lot of fun hosting this and I'll be taking over this project for the time being, so expect more interviews in the following weeks. Stay tuned and thank you for reading!
