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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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MiHoYo's popular titles - Genshin, Honkai Star Rail, Zenless Zero - caught on in many ways because they just aped Japanese anime styling to the extent that initial players would have no idea they are Chinese made. I played a lot of Chinese gacha and other phone games in the past, and they were nowhere near as accessible as those titles.

Did those other titles include games like Girls' Frontline or Arknights? Those games also lean heavily on the anime style (even to the point of relying on Japanese VA), and also deemphasize Chinese-ness considerably.

Nah this was years ago, since then several developers have become more international friendly without necessarily having a breakout hit like MiHoYo. But there was a lengthy period in the mid10s where there were dozens of huge F2P Chinese titles that could never have a hope of crossing over to other markets

GFL's origin is that a small Chinese doujin circle consisted of people who really liked Kantai Collection but 1) were more interested in guns than warships and 2) were having trouble with Kancolle's zealous attempts to IP ban every single player who was not physically in Japan. The game caught on largely because it turned out there was a decent amount of people in China/Korea/the west for whom those same two conditions applied.

I honestly thought a big chunk of the popularity was because it did the gun girl thing like the anime Upotte!, but also paired it with an interesting sci-fi story. Like, Arknights was made by some of the same devs, and that also caught on real good even though it mostly lacked gun girls. Interesting.

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