#I barely used references for the poses so hopefully things are not too off

[bogdoom]

Trekking to Jacobstown

[p5x-theories]

I think I just found something worrying/disapointing about Akechi in the game. The pose he does at the end of his special attack is....copied from this fanart.

Between the fact his model shading is still weird, people saying his kit sucks and to skip him unless you really want him, him being shoehorned into maruki's palace and the fact they did not realized this is a fanart and not his real finisher....i feel like they did not wanted to have him in the game and added him just to please the fans. He is also the only one whose finished does not reference anything from the game.

"But Sumire is in the game too and she is good" yeah she is a girl tho, the game clearly know girls sell more 😭

(Screenshot of Akechi's pose at the end off his Highlight, for reference.)

I can understand the concern, because his right arm is raised in a very similar pose, but given the expression and left arm are distinctly different from the art, I think it's a bit harder to say for sure that it was copied from the fanart. They may have accidentally referenced it, if one of the developers has seen that art before, but it's different enough that I feel like jumping directly to "this is intentionally plagiarized from fanart" isn't quite supported by what we know at the moment. It also feels a bit unfair to accuse them of "not realizing this is a fanart" when, again, we don't know the story here, and obviously they use his correct AOA cut-in in combat, so clearly they do know what his real AOA cut-in looks like.

That said, hopefully if it was inspired by or copied from the fanart, intentionally or unintentionally, Perfect World will make a statement about it and apologize? I just think you're jumping to some conclusions here that aren't really lending any good faith towards the developers.

As for "his model shading is still weird", "his kit sucks", and "him being shoehorned into maruki's palace", I still won't have this update until Wednesday, so I can't really speak to those. But at least as far as whether his combat abilities are good or not, they've had to make adjustments to that with other characters in the past. Balancing a video game of this scale isn't exactly simple, after all! If his abilities are really that bad, I'm sure the developers are working on fixing that.

I'm also reasonably certain that the reason Akechi's Highlight (I think that's what you meant by "finished"?) doesn't reference anything from P5R is because there's not a lot they could reference, without it being spoilers, and they're clearly avoiding spoilers for that game at the moment. I can see why this might be disappointing, but so far the developers have given us reason to believe they're doing their best, and sometimes things are just accidents or out of their control. I can understand why these feelings may be your initial reaction, but he's only been in the game for three days, which means Perfect World has barely had a chance to even respond to any feedback. Personally, I'd like to give them a chance before drawing any conclusions.