When will there be a VShojo game?

When you ask people on the interwebs about VShojo there are usually three camps. There’s the “I don’t know who they are camp” that I’m pretty sure didn’t click on this article because that would be weird. The “I hate them camp” who are both entitled to their own opinion and wrong. And then the absolute adoring fans of which my embarrassingly old ass is one.

If you’re part of the first camp that has no idea who VShojo is, it’s a talent agency that brings in popular VTubers into their camp. VTubers are streamers who use virtual avatars to, essentially, create a character to “play” as during their stream. They’re still pretty much exactly who they are in real life, just with a neat anime look and a weirdly deep backstory. The VTubers get a wider audience and a bigger set of tools to work with and VShojo, of course, gets a cut. It’s not a bad thing though because, to hear the VTubers of VShojo say it, they’re treated pretty damn well.

Many of the VTubers are pretty big within the gaming community considering a lot of them stream more than anything else. One of the biggest of them is Ironmouse who, in addition to having over 1.5 million Twitch followers, has around a million on YouTube as well. Ironmouse streams regularly, often with her friend Connor who’s also known as the voice actor/streamer CDawgVA. So she’s pretty damn well known.

And she’s just one of many of VShojo’s talent roster whose current list you can see on their talent page here.

One of the interesting things about these VTubers is that, while it never really comes into play, a lot of them have extensive lore, even having animated videos telling the story of their character. Whether it’s the aforementioned Ironmouse potentially being Satan, Haruka, the lonesome deer spirit of the forest, or, one of my personal favorite VTubers, Henya the Genius who, as her lore on the official sites states:

"A genius with an IQ of 999. She has escaped from a research facility that gathers children with special abilities and has retreated into a hyperdimensional space to hide from her pursuers. The cube hanging from her neck occasionally glows blue-white and emits energy, charging all her electrical appliances so she doesn’t have to charge her phone. She likes cats, games, and sweets, and her name Henya comes from the Spanish word Genia (genius), but even with an IQ of 999, she can’t remember how to spell it, so she tells everyone “Henya” as she hears it."

Here’s a more detailed video on it.

So this raises a question for me. VShojo has a wealth of talent with incredible vocal range and abilities (and in many cases exceptional singing voices as well as many of them release songs on the regular). And that wealth of talent tends to have a well-detailed backstory. So…if this is the case, why doesn’t VShojo capitalize on this?

Imagine, if you will, a VShojo game on your mobile device that plays kind of like Honkai: Star Rail but with a Hyperdimensional Neptunia feel in which the virtual universe in which the VTubers live is under attack and they have to team up together to stop it.

There are enough characters each with a wide variety of outfits and looks that you could fully justify a gacha mechanic to unlock new characters and skills. Especially if you involve many of the independent VTubers the VShojo gang hangs out with sometimes including Bao the Whale, Fillian, ShyLily, KoboKanaeru, and the queen herself AmaLee. AmaLee isn’t just a gaming streamer, she’s also a voice actress, most recently voicing Honkai: Star Rail character, JingLiu.

It would genuinely work. Every character has something about them that would translate well into this sort of game. Henya the Genius has lore describing the cube on her necklace as a power source. This would be an easy thing to turn into something that would allow healing buffs. Where as AmaLee is an unofficial scuff queen meaning she could be casting debuffs. There’s so much potential with these characters and they each pretty much write themselves.

Keep the characters as they are, don’t make them overly serious, sort of like in Hyperdimensional Neptunia where the characters are still having fun. And then give us some moments where we could just chill in the hub world and listen to the characters talk to each other. Honestly, I don’t even care if they’re just having the characters dub over or recreate their past moments because I’d love to be in a virtual universe watching this exchange go down.

So with the free-to-play model that miHoYo is utilizing AND their love of creating games filled with a variety of anime girls it BEGS the question, “Why hasn’t this happened yet?”