VTuber Shishiro Botan offers new voice lines for Idol Showdown mid livestream 

Developer Besto Game Team announced that their fighting game Idol Showdown, which just launched for free on Steam, has surpassed 200,000 downloads and 10,000 concurrent players. 

The studio has been vigorously updating the game since its release on May 5. In the midst of this, an idol on which one of the characters is based requested for the voice lines used for her character to be replaced. The studio has been quick to implement the provided voice into the game. 

Idol Showdown is a fan-made fighting game developed following the Derivative Works Guidelines of the female VTuber group hololive operated by Cover and features idols from hololive as characters. Currently, the game includes the following playable characters: Tokino Sora, Aki Rosenthal, Shirakami Fubuki, Nakiri Ayame, Inugami Korone, Hoshimachi Suisei, Kiryu Coco (alumna), and Shishiro Botan. 

Each character has unique moves based on memorable scenes or unique traits of the idol they’re based on and can be played with relatively simple controls. Game modes include a tutorial and training mode, and rollback netcode is used for online matches. 

The game has an “Overwhelmingly Positive” status in user reviews on Steam, with 95% of the reviews being positive at the time of writing. The popularity of hololive has also attracted a large number of players, as mentioned at the beginning of this article. The VTuber Shishiro Botan, on whom the character in the game is based, also played the game on the first day of its release. 

Shishiro Botan streamed a video in which she mains her own character, enjoying the numerous moves of the character which capture her own characteristics. However, she did not seem to like the voice lines used for the game, and said with a laugh, “Oh man, my voice kinda sucks.” 

The voice lines that the idols say when they unleash their moves seem to have been taken from video footage of the idols themselves. Shishiro commented that, while all the other voice lines have a proper vigor to them, her own voice is clearly too emotionless. She felt apologetic about it and offered to provide new voices to the developers (the scene starts at around 1 hour, 27 minutes and 14 seconds into the video above). 

While streaming, Shishiro turned off the game’s background music and started voicing out the lines she wanted to be used for replacement, all while interacting with her audience.  

After that, an update for the game was released. The patch notes indicate that the developers have begun replacing the voice lines at Shishiro’s request. 

Only about 21 hours passed between the time Shishiro offered to provide the voice lines and the time this patch note was posted. The developer most likely saw the stream when it was live and immediately started with the update. The comment section of the patch notes is full of people expressing their surprise and appreciation for the speed of the response. 

Incidentally, Tokino Sora, who also appears in this title, recorded a voiceover for her character during a livestream of the game. She recorded with the BGM turned off in consideration of the developers, and as a result, it was speedily implemented once again. The voice lines were included in the recent update 1.0.6.

Idol Showdown is now available for free on PC (Steam).  

Written by. Amber V based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2023-05-08 16:55 JST)