GamerBraves Newsletter vol. 17 - The Science of Building A Waifu
A lesson on neuron activation
There’s a lot of benefits to having a game that panders to waifu culture. Fans can be incredibly loyal to their favourite character, which is great for anyone running the game as a business since that means one customer who’s going to stick around.
It isn’t particularly new science, either. You only need to look at all the anime-style mobile games to see that a lot of developers understand this. But with every mobile game coming out having huge rosters of characters, why isn’t each one covering entire buildings in Akihabara?
Like any game feature, some people just have it down better than others. This is definitely the case for developers like miHoYo, whose self-proclaimed Tech Otaku have really done a lot right in creating lovable waifus.
You Don’t Need A Whole Banana, Just Appeal
Obviously, we’re gonna steer clear of the obvious “make them hot” point. There’s no accounting for taste, and there’s nothing interesting to learn from it. However, one key feature more games need to consider is appeal.
To put it simply, appeal is an umbrella term used to describe what makes people just like things. There’s plenty of ways to do it—one of them being to make them hot, yes—and it almost never hits with 100% success.
Instead, miHoYo does something many modern anime do—have a big roster instead. Rather than have one universally appealing character, it pays to instead have a broad spectrum of characters, presented in a way that you could easily base your entire enjoyment of the game around that one character.
Knowing Your Tropes
Sure, this means bigger investment—you’ll need to have your artist generate more assets, but having five characters with their own loyal fans is much better than putting all your money on trying to create a universally loved waifu, and risking the inevitable comment of “I don’t like this character, yet 80% of the game is you talking to her”.
It’s not just wildly shooting in the dark either—part of the reason modern anime gets accused of being so samey is that there’s a lot of tropes that just work. These can include:
The Genki—these are upbeat girls, best described as your best friend in high school. They’re optimistic and upbeat, and it’s not uncommon for them to often have lines about wanting to help the player character. They’re also usually mixed with a dash of clumsiness or bad luck as a character flaw, which only helps push their well-meaning nature further. (Examples: Amber, Genshin Impact. Kiana, Honkai Impact 3rd).
The Kuudere—Literally coming from the word “Cool”, these characters are stoic, with many almost straight-up lacking emotions. They’re usually drawn with serious eyes, and speak in soft voices. A common trope for the Kuudere is to have them be just learning about the bigger world, with the player character usually being the one to help them out of their shell. For this trope, having the characters become obsessed with something mundane like ice cream or cute animals is practically mandatory to show them coming out of their shell. (Examples: Bronya, Honkai Impact 3rd. Ayanami Rei, Neon Genesis Evangelion).
The Onee-San—while usually used to mean Big Sister, Onee-San can also generally refer to older women. These are characters who give off a mature aura, and in some games will even have markedly different faces compared to the Genki-type characters. For Onee-San characters, a lot of the appeal will be their interaction with the player character themselves—they’ll often be playfully flirty, but never directly make advances on the player character. A common trope in Japanese dubs will be their use of the phrase “Ara, ara” (lit. Oh, my), and often times their personalities will be tuned to be the type of character who’d use that phrase. (Examples: Lisa, Genshin Impact)
Of course, simply following this template is how you get boring characters. Instead, it’s important for these games to mix and match traits. Kisara from Tales of Arise is a doting character, but also has the social inaptitude of a Kuudere, and is prone to tough love as a result of not understanding other characters’ feelings. As a result, you wouldn’t really call her an Onee-San type, but you can tell she’s built off the same mature appeal template characters like Lisa from Genshin Impact.
On the opposite end of that, you’d have characters like Rita from Honkai Impact, who is the same mix of traits as Kisara but reversed—she speaks softly like a Kuudere but her personality is built around doting on you. The key takeaway here is that personality traits are like building blocks—and just moving the concepts around is a great way to make interesting characters.
Personal Interactions
While this is a general piece of advice for just making characters, part of miHoYo’s enduring success is knowing how to use them. Creating a good waifu also means creating a space where you can see or interact with the character. Personally, I’m really fond of how Honkai Impact 3rd does this, as it should be held up as a gold standard.
Similar to many gacha games, Honkai Impact 3rd features a home screen with your character of choice, and the character greets you as you log in. The characters can have multiple voice lines, commenting on everything from the time of day to even the weather and season. They’re not particularly huge character lines either—don’t expect Rita to tell you her tragic backstory just because it’s raining. But it’s a simple, innocuous conversation you’d have with anyone you bumped into at a bus stop.
Other gacha games do this too, definitely. But the sheer amount of possible voice lines in Honkai outclasses other games in that regard.
But what if your game doesn’t have a home screen? miHoYo solved that problem too with Genshin Impact, where all the characters’ voice lines are simply viewable from a menu.
They’re listed in an easy-to-understand way, too—often phrased like “Favorite Food” or “When It Rains”. While not as casual as Honkai’s, the fact that they’re presented in the form of your character asking them a question builds up the social rapport to make you feel more intimate with a character.
This is a stark contrast to games like Overwatch, which had a good amount of hype with each player having their own favourite characters. But because you never had easy access to learn more about each character outside of things like Story Events, it was hard to ever feel attached to any character in the same way many anime games do to their players. Remember, when building fandom, players would rather know a character’s favourite dessert than how they lost their arm. You want to give them knowledge that wouldn’t be in a trailer.
Supporting the Community
Finally, the last big thing you want to do is enable the community. If creators feel safe enough to create things like fan art for your characters, you’ll soon find that many of them will take a life of their own, creating a whole new legion of players loyally standing by their waifus.
Unfortunately, this means that as a community manager, you’ll want to take a step back. Publishing fan guidelines can be a good way to let your community know that you want to support their endeavours, but you’ll want to avoid restricting content if you don’t want artists to feel like they’re too much of a hassle to draw. Artists will always draw their favourite characters, it’s up to you to make sure they feel welcome to draw yours.
The best example of this is D.Va from Overwatch, who started as a generic esports athlete who piloted a giant robot and had a milquetoast gamer personality. However the community created the Gremlin D.Va meme associating her with less savoury gamer personality traits like a love for Doritos and messiness, and the community rolled with it enough that the potato chips became a part of some of her in-game items.
It might have been tempting for Blizzard to decide to protect the more clean image D.Va had at launch, but by leaning into the gremlin D.Va they made fans feel like they could add to the world of Overwatch, even if it was ultimately a minor way.
There’s a lot more to creating a waifu game than just drawing a pretty girl—from inception to even post-launch support, there are plenty of ways to make your characters feel more appealing, which in turn means more players will likely want to get into the game just because their favourite character is in the game.
It might feel insidious, but giving your players a reason to feel invested in your characters is a good way to keep them playing your game—and the more ways you allow them to keep thinking about it, the better it’ll be.
What We Learned:
Anime tropes are tropes for a reason: understand what kind of audience you want and build your characters around appealing to them.
If you make a player feel like they’re talking to a real person, they’ll be more invested in the character.
As a community manager, don’t restrict the community, even if they start to transform a character from what they were originally meant to be.
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Feature by Wan Amirul, waifu connoisseur.
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