Onmyoji's ¥440 Premium Skin Gets Roasted as 'Chopstick Spirit' — A ¥68 Skin Looks Better? Players Are Fuming

A 440 RMB collector skin that somehow looks worse than the 68 RMB one — Onmyoji players have officially had enough.

A player recently posted a detailed comparison on NGA between Onmyoji's latest "Zhen Cang" (臻藏, collector-tier) skin — priced at roughly 440 RMB (~$60 USD) — and the character's default skin. The in-game screenshots reveal grotesquely exaggerated proportions: impossibly thin limbs that earned the skin the nickname "chopstick spirit" (筷子精) from the community.

The OP also pointed out that this isn't an isolated incident — Onmyoji has been pushing out characters with similarly skeletal body types throughout the past year, backing it up with a batch of comparison images. The post argues this represents a systemic aesthetic downgrade in the game's art direction, not just one bad skin.

The comment section was absolutely ruthless. One user sarcastically asked if this was that certain other gacha game's so-called "high art aesthetic" — only to get clapped back: "That game may have a tomboy art style, but at least the characters look like they have actual muscles. Onmyoji's lead artist has the anatomy skills of someone who failed art school." Others called the body proportions "vintage shoujo manga physique" — something that looked passable in the early 2000s but is straight-up cringe in 2024.

But the real killshot came when someone dropped a GIF of another female shikigami's skin from the SAME event, priced at just 68 RMB. The quality gap was devastating — the cheap skin looked legitimately polished compared to the 6x pricier premium one. A classic gacha community move: nothing hurts a bad deal more than a good deal sitting right next to it.

Players also noted the problems go beyond just the art. The skin's exclusive interactive story event reportedly has worse writing, and its VFX are apparently inferior to the default skin's effects. So for 440 RMB, you're essentially paying a premium for a downgrade across the board. Another widely-circulated comparison image made the case even more damning:

But beneath the outrage lies a deeper frustration. One commenter nailed the core paradox: "Onmyoji still pulled in about 400 million RMB (~$55M USD) last year. The dedicated player base is too loyal — collectors and die-hard fans will never leave. But the dev team (zen) genuinely doesn't deserve such devoted players." Another added with bitter sarcasm: "Revenue is still too high, keep accelerating the decline." The implication is clear: players curse the game with their mouths but keep it alive with their wallets, which is exactly why the devs feel zero pressure to improve.

Others delivered the verdict with dark humor: "It's Zhou Yu beating Huang Gai — one willing to hit, one willing to take it. A beautiful two-way love story, meow." (This references the famous Chinese idiom from Romance of the Three Kingdoms.) One veteran player offered the most resigned take: after surviving countless Onmyoji controversies, if you're still spending money on this game, "just learn to stomach this kind of thing."

From a ¥440 premium skin roasted as a "chopstick spirit" to a ¥68 skin casually outshining it, to players helplessly acknowledging that the game's revenue stays sky-high despite plummeting quality — this drama is a masterclass in gacha's toxic loop. As the community's dark humor suggests: it's not that players can't leave the game, it's that the game can't leave the players' wallets. The question is whether zen realizes that even the most devoted whales have a breaking point.