For those of you who don’t play HoYoverse’s turn-based RPG, the planet of Penacony is one of the main locations currently in the game. It’s a former prison colony that’s been transformed into a kind of carnival, which people visit in their dreams. In other words it’s all synthetic and artificial, but it’s perpetually happy and you can live there for eternity. Obviously that comes with its own quandaries, which are explored in the story.
In order to promote the update, which launched as part of v2.0 earlier in the year, the Chinese developer actually recreated the planet in real-life – and we were lucky enough to be invited along, on a rooftop mall in Taipei.
This was actually a really cool event, because there were a slew of carnival-style games to play, including hoopla and coconut toss. After completing each of the attractions, with each stall run by a different cosplayer, you got to pull for a limited edition trading card and stamp your ticket. Once you’d collected all the stamps, you got to pull on a real-life gacha machine to collect some keyrings and other rewards.
The sheer number of cosplayers, both official and unofficial, was impressive – although the likes of Honkai: Star Rail and Genshin Impact are so big in Asia these days, it’s not uncommon to see characters from the games simply wandering around the streets.
It’s probably worth mentioning that elsewhere in Taipei, on the same day as this event, a local boba tea chain was offering rewards for Genshin Impact cosplayers who bought a select number of drinks. So, on our journey to Penacony, we passed a queue of cosplayers for HoYoverse’s other major game. If you take nothing else from this article, then perhaps you may have an appreciation for how monumentally massive these games have become.
