The unbelievably good-looking vtuber fighting game Idol Showdown now has a May 5 release date plus a complete roster of eight playable characters, and the last streamer to the party, Kiryu Coco, has rekindled a shockingly large fan base.
To bring you up to speed, Idol Showdown is a free, fan-made fighting game starring vtubers from the Hololive group owned by Japanese company Cover. The folks at developer Besto Game Team have been working on it for about two years, and it's finally out next week. In the runup to launch, the game's been rolling out debut trailers for its fighters, and Kiryu Coco's reveal has quickly stolen the show.
Character Debut Trailer: Kiryu Coco / 桐生ココCoco soars her way into Idol Showdown! 会長がIdol Showdownに飛び込む! #みかじ絵 #IdolShowdown #hololive #ホロライブ #indiedev #fgc pic.twitter.com/2RIqYVQlsJApril 23, 2023
As is often the case with the surprisingly frequent and fascinating crossovers between gaming and vtubers, there is some Deep Lore behind this, and once again I've had to learn all of it. Kiryu Coco, you see, is technically retired. She left Hololive – or as the fandom puts it, "graduated" – about two years ago after a relatively short but absolutely explosive career as a streamer.
Coco's YouTube channel is still up and has over 1.4 million subscribers, but the numbers that really blow my mind have all come from her final stream, which capped off a month-long sendoff. This two-hour stream alone has racked up 6.8 million views, apparently peaked at nearly 500,000 concurrent viewers, and reportedly (opens in new tab) brought in several hundred thousand dollars in viewer donations alone. So yeah, people really liked Coco, and those people are now really happy to see her character honored in a fan
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