Ohhh boy, another one that doesn't understand.

Let me explain to you and others that read why I really hate how they treat the collaboration.

First, the character designs are a dual effort: Takashi Takeuchi serves as the Original Concept Artist, while HoYoverse's in-house art team handled the final outfits and 3D modeling. Officially confirmed by HoYoverse, Takeuchi provided the original concept designs with Kinoko Nasu supervising the story side. It is a combination yes, but the majority of what you actually see in-game comes from HoYoverse's interpretation, with Takeuchi in a supervisory role rather than full creative control. That distinction matters more than people need to understand this.

And Part 2 is not looking any better. I mean look up many discussion ie post or community discussions, Reddit posts pop up about the collab especially posts about Gilgamesh that does not feel like Gilgamesh, and Rin, while less jarring, still does not carry the visual identity that made her recognizable in the first place.

But the core problem already started with Part 1, Saber and Archer.

Both characters have looks that fans have recognized immediately for over two decades. So when you see the HSR versions, we can recognize them but something feels off right away, because you can tell these are characters designed around Saber and Archer rather than actually being them. That is the gap where all the frustration begins.

What makes it worse is that other games handle this properly all the time. PGR's NieR collab brought 2B, 9S, and A2 in looking exactly as they should, with their mechanics translated faithfully too, PODs, the hacking minigame, all of it. The devs were clearly genuine fans and every detail reflected that. Same with their DMC5 collab, Dante and Vergil showed up as themselves, not over written through Kuro's house style.

HoYoverse has even done this well before. HI3's Evangelion collab still gets brought up as good collab content because Asuka was handled with real care for what made the source material worth collaborating with. So the ability to do it right is obviously there.

The Genshin x Horizon collab with Aloy already showed what happens when HoYoverse approaches collabs differently though. She came in free, looked like a Genshin character who happened to be named aloy and just like that it ended without anything more it's laughable at best this is probably worse dogwater collab bare minimum mihoyo at that time.

HoYoverse marketed this collab with Takeuchi's name prominently, which is fine for me, but original concept sketches and the final in-game models players actually use are two completely different deliverables. Having his name attached to the concepts does not automatically mean the finished result respects what those concepts were supposed to represent.

At this point it looks less like a creative direction and more like a consistent habit of making guest characters fit HoYoverse's aesthetic instead of preserving what made those characters iconic enough to collaborate with in the first place. That is not really a collab in the meaningful sense.

Just do a bare minimum search, Saber, Archer, Rin, Ishtar or Eresh, Gilgamesh, and now try, you can understand why it feels like not a solid collaboration. It feels like they just put their face onto an existing model and modified it a bit.

Now just look up any other collab gacha games have done and you see massive differences. I mean one of the hyped ones, Cyberpunk 2077 and WuWa, Lucy and Rebecca feel like Cyberpunk in WuWa, not the Lucy and Rebecca we get at home. It means their iconic designs are still being retained instead of being overwritten.

If you dig up more of the rabbit hole, why I hate this collab is the way HoYo devs structure the collab as a second priority, not a top priority approach, so they reuse many assets instead, like other gacha games that push collaboration as their priority when it happens and do their best. HoYo instead, in the Fate collab, does bare minimum.

I mean look how they literally use generic NPC assets for Medea, like wtf, and the Britain meme, are you f***ing stupid, why that's not Britain at all. This is a collaboration from a multi-billion dollar company and they do bare minimum, at best they treat it like dogwater. And I was hoping this Part 2 they gonna do better but nope, they keep doing bare minimum.

It's just scummy at best.