Honkai Impact 3rd Part 2 hasn't even been out for a week, and the design drama is already here. Players got their hands on official discarded character design drafts and started matching them one by one against Blue Archive (BA) characters — arriving at a conclusion that's hard to ignore: across four different draft versions, allegedly consistent design signatures pop up across three different BA characters. This level of 'coincidence' has set the community ablaze.
The original poster laid out a stack of comparison images and told everyone to 'judge for yourselves.' Of all the comparisons, Draft #2 sparked the most heated debate. Players dug up its alleged resemblance to a popular BA character known as '168' (Shiroko) — the hairstyle, accessories, and core visual markers overlapped to a degree that many found damning. One sharp-eyed commenter even pointed out that fan-created derivative works of the character appeared to have been used as reference material. '168 is basically confirmed,' they wrote. 'They even threw in the doujin reference look.'
On top of that, Draft #3 was flagged for a hairstyle suspiciously similar to BA's 'Mailbox' (Iroha — nicknamed after her in-game mechanic), and Draft #4's black-and-white streaked hair was called a near-copy of BA's Kayoko. The only comparison most players couldn't see was the first one — the OP claimed it referenced Hololive VTuber Inugami Korone (known as 'Bread Dog'), but the overwhelming response was 'bro, I genuinely cannot see it.'
The comment section split into two camps fast. The 'definitely copied' crowd went all in: 'miHoYo NOT plagiarizing would be the real news,' one wrote. Another fumed: 'Ugly as hell — stitching together corpse-parts of other people's designs to sell gacha waifus is just disgusting.' Veteran players pulled out the receipts too: 'Their PV literally copied Frieren and Mushoku Tensei before, and they're still playing dead about it.' A particularly colorful take read: 'miHoYo acts like an AI art generator — every character gives you vibes of a dozen others. Even Palworld would have to call them grandmaster. At least Palworld used tools; miHoYo was doing this with raw manpower.'
But the other side pushed back hard. 'Forcing the BA angle is just cope disguised as criticism,' one defender shot back. Against the most contested comparison (Draft #2), skeptics posted detailed breakdowns pointing out that the 'messy puffy hair + hat' aesthetic exists broadly across gacha games — NIKKE's Poli sports a nearly identical hairstyle, and even the game's first-anniversary animation featured a similar design. 'This evidence is flimsy at best. You can talk about the shared messy-hair element, but calling it 'confirmed' is a stretch.'
Some players tried to take a measured approach, acknowledging that 'the first one is invisible unless you follow VTubers' while conceding the latter three do carry a certain déjà vu. Others urged the OP to 'focus your fire — don't hand them ammo,' meaning a scattered list of comparisons is easier to debunk one by one than a concentrated, airtight case.
What makes this even messier is that it's not Honkai Impact 3rd Part 2's first design controversy. As one commenter noted, the game has been accused of copying from Guilty Gear, Blue Archive, AND Punishing: Gray Raven simultaneously — 'just days after launch.' The final sarcastic jab — 'Can you people have some shame and stop picking on our Honkai 3rd?' — reads as defense, but the exhaustion between the lines is real.
As of this writing, miHoYo has not responded to any of these design allegations. The discarded drafts themselves also raised a meta-question: is it hubris or obliviousness for a major studio to voluntarily release designs that look this derivative? Either way, it seems Honkai Impact 3rd Part 2's character designs will be under the community microscope for the foreseeable future.
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