#lanceblue

I’m sure there’s also a bias on my part as to why I generally don’t like mihoyo designs, but while to some extent “gachafication” and subsequent criticisms of such in character designs were somewhat always present since this corner of the game market came about, it wasnt a relatively big talking point until mihoyo games rapidly surged in popularity. at least as far as I’ve seen. so I was wondering if you could help explain and parse the difference in the approach to these details or if it’s just my biases.

granblue itself actually offers a great case study here

event zooey (2016) on the left and fenie (2024) on the right are both granblue fantasy characters, and the silhouette and color blocking of their designs is functionally the same. they have the shrine maiden sleeves with the brown shoulders, the short white dress with splits showing the miniskirt, the brown waistband, the thigh highs, the wide top booties, the hair flower. but fenie feels decidedly more mihoyo right?

that's because zooey has more texture to her, she has more tactility. the gold trim on her sleeve is thick and heavy, it makes a big ridge, it's a different material than the rest of the sleeve. the belts that keep the sleeve on her shoulder are clearly some form of leather, with a big metal buckle. you can tell the gold pattern on the dark part of the sleeve is some kind of metallic applique that sits on top of the fabric. the thing on her hip has a texture of scratched metal, with leather straps over it. you can feel what materials these are. the random belts and accessories and details have a weight, a chunkiness to them.

fenie is a lot smoother. she still has some of that granblue chunk in the metal at the end of her sleeve and on the trim of her dress, but most of the patterns on her clothes lack that thickness, that sense of layering different materials that you see in zooey. the pink trim on her sleeve could be either a different fabric or just printed on. the gold details on the dark parts aren't applique like with zooey, they're just as printed. it's all the same material, and as a result the design as a whole has less weight to it

now let's grab an actual genshin character (I don't play any mihoyo games all my knowledge is secondhand)

sure, if you look at the art closely there's some ridges and stuff on the outfit details. but there's no sense of material to any of it. what's any of this made of? well, some form of fabric, presumably. maybe those bits at his shoulder are meant to be metal? does that mean the trim on the lapels is too? but if stuff with that degree of shine is supposed to be read as metal, what the hell is up with the gold line going from his armpit to his elbow? this outfit isn't made of materials, it's just made of lines, and since there's no material weight to those lines they add nothing. you just glaze over them.

i picked zhongli in particular here because a while ago I met a zhongli cosplayer and it stood out to me that the place where he bought his outfit didn't even bother trying to preserve those ridges you see in his artwork, they just printed all the patterns directly on the fabric. that's a common technique among cosplay sellers that saves immensely on time, effort, and materials, and in most cases the result looks anywhere from perfectly fine to actively better than if you'd tried to do it with applique or whatever. in zhongli's case it looked perfectly fine as well, because his outfit didn't have a real sense of texture anyway, so losing the nominal sense of texture created by those ridges in his artwork didn't do anything to harm the overall impression of the design. it's all just lines.

let's grab a stupid granblue design that makes no sense

oooh yeah baby, that's metal and leather and thick heavy fabric. how does the metal fit together? how does he move in his stupid metal bodysuit? doesn't matter, that sure is metal, and there's so many gaps and ridges that you can suspend disbelief enough that it just slides around however he needs. you'd be forgiven for just printing this one on a bodysuit for a cosplay, but it's still gonna lose something, and the official cosplayer did what they could to preserve that chunk

now let's grab a granblue i've actually made a cosplay of myself

you can tell exactly what combination of leather and textile is needed and how you should layer it to replicate this. you could make those pants by just printing the pattern on fabric, and it would save you effort, but it wouldn't look right because it's so obviously made of two different materials. there's texture to it, and that gives it a sense of realness.

here's genshin's ganyu next to granblue's payila, whose designs have loosely similar shapes but imo payila's is a lot worse

but the materials of ganyu's outfit have to be extrapolated, because it's all rendered the same. you have to just sort of assume that's nylon for the bodysuit purely because that's what we make tights of usually, and the blue parts of her sleeve could be cotton but it could just as well be hard plastic (personally i would probably layer slightly different shades of tulle for it, but that's an interpretation). payila's outfit is more cluttered and less coherent, but the materials are tangible. you can tell payila's bodice is leathery, that the sleeves are heavy fabric, and that the gold diamond shapes on the sleeve are that classic granblue metallic applique.

here's a genshin design i really like

the way furina's ruffles are layered makes the material and texture of her outfit much more tangible than that of some of her colleagues, so all the details feel more like elements added to the outfit rather than just more lines added to the image.

here's an adjacent genshin design i think is pretty decent

i actually like the shapes and colors a lot here, but the texture is missing. the colors and patterns are ultimately still just printed on what we can only assume is fabric, and it makes the whole thing feel plastic-y. compare this to lobelia granblue, or lumen arknights while we're at it actually. the shapes are similar and so are the colors in lumen's case, but the texture of the fabric is much more tangible, so they feel less fake.

so long story short, it's the way all those details are rendered that makes the difference, because granblue rendering all their little details in a way that gives them material weight and texture + tangible contrast between those textures prevents the outfit from feeling like some fake plastic bullshit even when it's way overdesigned.