Man, we are burning through these types of “first” events quickly. Sure this isn’t the first time I’ve seen a Vtuber promoting a game in general, however this is probably the closest to home it’s ever been for me. This year has been huge for Vtubers with their cultural influence continuing to grow and enter into collaborations with other markets. Voice acting in games was a pretty big step already, yet now Hololive’s Korone and Miko are now promoting games… for the official Arc System Works. Recently I was checking my subscription feed and noticed some new uploads from the famous developer that put anime fighting games on the map with series such as Guilty Gear, Dragonball FighterZ, Blazblue, Persona 4 Arena, and more. Oh shit, a video about the new update perhaps? A new character announcement? Surprise bitch it was merely a video promoting games for the Tokyo Game Show that took place in late September. Personally I didn’t watch anything from the show which meant this upload was a complete shock to my system and I can’t believe it went under my radar completely.

"Biggest fighting game of the year, maybe you've heard of me."

This is probably one of the bigger collaborations I’ve seen in terms of working with a popular company. I’ve heard about some other Vtuber collabs from Hololive though they weren’t nearly as known worldwide as Arc Sys. Obviously these things tend to slip past me though so it’s certainly possible that bigger ones have been done before. Still, I see this as a massive push for Vtubers further into mainstream Japanese culture. The full video was about an hour long and I won’t sit here and lie and say I watched the entire thing. I did skim through it a good bit, and it appeared that the girls were mainly promoting the upcoming game River City Girls 2, alongside another one that I had no fucking idea what it was. Interestingly enough, at the end of the presentation it was time to make a few short Guilty Gear announcements and I didn’t see them at that point. I wonder if big companies still have reservations about letting Vtubers show involvement in their big boy franchises, or if it merely wasn’t worth it to keep them talking for like 5 minutes or less of Guilty Gear announcements. Regardless, you can peep through the entire presentation below if you so choose.



The day the next Guilty Gear character is announced by a Hololive member is the day I know that Vtubers have gone from Kizuna Ai dicking around in video games to a complete cultural and ultimately worldwide revolution. This whole concept is fascinating to me, and reminds me of the Black Mirror episodes where a political cartoon bear got so popular that he was voted into office. Uh, not insinuating we’ll ever get to that point, but it’s interesting nonetheless to imagine a damn Vtuber president. 

Now if we can just get these damn doujinshi and hentai to catch up, I’ll be in heaven. At least the lewd artists on Twitter and the like have already picked up on the Vtuber growth and acted accordingly. Nothing beats a classic 30 page piece of literature though. What big step do you think Vtubers will take next? When will the authors catch up on the trend and create more lewd content, or is it too dangerous to do so considering Hololive’s online savviness? Share your predictions in the comments below!