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The story
Footage of a new game from China’s HoYoverse, shown at Gamescom, became a hot topic on 5ch’s console gaming (Geha) board. While many praised the graphical polish, others pointed out a sense of déjà vu, saying it resembled Elden Ring or Monster Hunter—sparking a broader debate about how Japanese games’ technical prowess compares.
What people said
you can pull off anything—anime style, toon shading, photorealistic,
whatever you want.
Having clear, top-down decision-making as an organization is a real strength.
It's similar to Nintendo in some ways too—being able to shoot down even the higher-ups' opinions when needed makes for a genuinely strong operation.
What are you talking about? They haven't shut down a single game's servers.
They're developing all of these in parallel, and now yet another new title?
Can they actually finish all of them…?
Right now the only 'appeal' is the monetization model.
Well, it's an easy target to aim for, I guess.
This is the kind of thing Square Enix should be doing.
Why are they getting outdone like this?
Government, take some responsibility.
Good graphics alone make you want to try it.
I guess it's fine as long as it's fun,
but it's a shame they have such incredible tech yet can't find a new direction of their own.
youtu.be/I59kIiEDOMM
Looks like it could be fun.
There's a whole range going on—borrowing from Western games and movies, Monster Hunter influences, next-gen action game staging, and more.
Elden Ring itself is basically ripping off Western works, but otaku who only play games probably can't see past the surface.
It's just an anime style with finely detailed character models, and slapping a dark color palette on the world doesn't show any real sense of design.
It's not even ruins—there's nothing there at all.
You've played Star Rail (HoYoverse's other title) and that's your takeaway?
It's exactly like Japan's own old growth-era playbook.
Japanese games are bound to decline because of this.
Even Square Enix is already at a level where it can't compete on graphics anymore.
Honestly, as long as they're focused purely on graphics and blatant copying, I'm not worried—they won't actually surpass us that way.
What is this even about?
HoYoverse hasn't had any games shut down. Unless you mean some old game, maybe.
Nintendo's games have been doing the same thing for decades too, so that's not a problem at all.
FF16 isn't a copy—the action was made by the actual guy who worked on DMC5 and Dragon's Dogma. Didn't they say that?
Wait, 16 plays like DMC? I never even considered buying it since it's a Square Enix game, but now I'm a little interested.
Ananta (another upcoming action game) looks better.
Lately they've been doing all sorts of things aiming for a PC release, and it really shows.
Ananta looks just like Spider-Man though.
The fact that everything from the motions to the abilities looks so similar isn't that guy's fault.
He joined the project partway through, and what he actually worked on was stuff like fine-tuning parameters and enemy AI routines.
FF16 turned out the way it did because they deliberately referenced Devil May Cry.
There are countless action games out there, yet somehow they borrowed so many elements specifically from Devil May Cry.
'Partway through' just means the early stage before the specs were even finalized—the guy who actually built the action was combat director Suzuki himself lol
Background and Key Points
HoYoverse (formerly miHoYo) is the Shanghai-based studio behind Genshin Impact (2020) and Honkai: Star Rail, gacha titles that generate reportedly billions of dollars a year and have let the company fund AAA-scale production despite starting as a mobile-first developer. Gamescom, held annually in Cologne, is Europe’s largest games trade show and a standard venue for splashy trailer reveals. The new footage sits alongside a string of other HoYoverse projects reportedly in parallel development — a life-sim, an auto-battler, an action title — reflecting the company’s now-familiar strategy of running many genres at once rather than sequels to one franchise.
The thread’s actual fault line isn’t graphics quality, which nearly everyone conceded is strong — it’s whether visibly borrowing FromSoftware’s Elden Ring/Nightreign and Monster Hunter’s design language counts as competent genre execution or a lack of original vision. That argument then pivoted into a tu quoque: several posters countered that Final Fantasy XVI’s unacknowledged debt to Devil May Cry makes Japanese studios guilty of the same thing, just less openly credited.
What’s likely to trip up readers unfamiliar with the board: the repeated claim that a “photorealistic HoYoverse game” had its servers shut down abruptly is not established fact — it’s disputed inside the thread itself, with multiple replies denying HoYoverse has ever shut down a title. That detail is worth treating as unverified rumor rather than a real precedent, since no game name or date is ever supplied to back it up.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “HoYoverse’s New Game Is Seriously a Masterpiece lololololololol.”
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