Unexpected Character / Azur Lane

Starting in 2019, Manjuu and Yostar developed a bit of a habit of introducing shock, unexpected announcements to go along with major events, keeping players guessing about what exactly is coming until it suddenly arrives.

• Now, to be fair, the very first of these happened in 2018; for the first Japanese anniversary of the game, around the time the English server was just finding its feet, the game's first big crossover was announced at the anniversary stage event. The collab partner in question? Utawarerumono, Aquaplus's classic strategy/visual novel hybrid. Specifically, it would cross over with the then-recent sequel, Mask of Deception, and feature the central cast of that game as playable characters. This had not been hinted at in any way prior to the announcement, and even on stage only Mafia Kajita and Producer M-san know what's coming. (And just to be clear: Utawa has absolutely nothing to do with naval combat in its strategic layer. It focuses almost exclusively on Heian-era-esque land combat. The main link it has to Azur Lane at all is having a lot of pretty girls on the cast.) Everyone was left stunned at the announcement (and the event itself was enjoyable), and it began to establish Azur Lane's reputation for going for "oddball" crossovers and general surprises. Sadly, licensing issues and general timing kept the collab from making it to the English service of the game, becoming that version's only true content gap.
• Armored Trooper VOTOMS had a collaboration event between it and Azur Lane. While Azur Lane is no stranger to crossovers such as Hyperdimension Neptunia, it's pretty out of left field to pair an overtly gritty anime about war, death and PTSD with a mobile game that, while not without its own moments of tragedy, is superficially about cute girls with battleships as armor. The actual event turns out to be a case of a Marshydog ending up in their world and a story about some of the allied ships dealing with Sirens and such; while semi-serious, it's lighter fare compared to the other series.
• Once Friedrich der Grosse was introduced as part of the World of Warships collab and required the player to have Ironblood back-line ships to unlock fully, a few folks expected Manjuu wouldn't be that cruel and would start adding more Ironblood backliners. A few even thought something might be done about the ships that currently live only in the "Divergent Chessboard" event. Not one single soul on the entire planet outside of the Yongshi/Manjuu and Yostar offices expected a new Ironblood backliner to release right after Fred... in the form of "Zeppelin-chan"/Zeppy.
  • And then, if nobody saw Zeppy coming, their heads were left spinning when Hiei-chan came even further out of left field (especially since "little" ships hadn't been introduced in groups previously and unlike the other two, Hiei was not a super popular ship). It was even crazier for the English version, since Hiei-chan got announced for that service before Hiei was.
  • And while people were befuddled by this, a look at the Japanese patch notes revealed one more: Akagi-chan.
  • The smoke settled with some people wondering where the Eagle Union/Us Navy mini-boats were. Little did they know what the devs had to in store for China's children's day (June 9 while Japan's was May 5th): Younger versions of San Diego, Cleveland and Helena. Even more surprisingly, Clevelad and Lena were announced to be permanent additions to the build pool, where all previous little ships (and Li'l Sandy) had been limited builds or acquired through event missions.
• So with the Bismarck event to commemorate the second overall anniversary, people had anticipated Bisko for years. They'd expected Admiral Scheer and Blucher, who were teased. Those up on their history weren't surprised by U-556 and U-73 and King George V. Echo was a bit of a surprise but still certainly relevant. Z-36 was an outlier choice, but okay. And Z1 and Leipzig getting teased retrofits on the Chinese dev stream was a pleasant surprise, but folks had wondered if those two might not get some help given their already latent potential. That all was plenty, and so nobody expected much more... so just about everybody was blindsided when Köln had a visually-elaborate retrofit announced right alongside the new ships and in time for the event, as this had not been even remotely hinted at. What made this even more shocking was that the last IB cruiser retrofit was Karlsruhe all the way back in December of 2017. After eighteen months, most fans were resigned to the remaining K-class sisters remaining unremarkable Com Mons, so Köln getting a retrofit, let alone one with such high-effort art and one which made her the poster girl for an entirely new equipment type, was a great surprise. English players were surprised to see said refit come straight with the event (being used to some sort of delay on various refits).
• The full rollout of the Sardegna Empire. Now, Sardegna had been teased for nearly a year (as far back as "Crimson Echoes" when the servers began to sync) and was even mentioned by name in King George's skills (as "Sardinia"), but what was pleasantly unexpected was the number of them rolled out. You see, "new" or "minor" nations in AL had, prior to the Sardegna debut event, often debuted without the ability to field a full player fleet - the Northern Parliament still infamously had one actual ship in the game by the time of Sardegna's debut, the Dragon Empery only had frontliners (which makes sense historically, but still feels frustrating for some) and French representative vessels were split between Iris Libre and Vichya - and you had to mix the two sides to fill a fleet, which some French fans had objections to, and prior to Gascogne's debut you'd still end up short a backliner. Sardegna, meanwhile, debuted with exactly enough ships to fill a player fleet - one destroyer, two heavy cruisers, and three battleships. While the actual composition is not entirely ideal - full BB backlines tend to be a little specialized and made viable mostly by skills, and destroyers tend to lose their advantages when paired with heavy cruisers - fans were still happily surprised to see that one could build a full "pasta fleet" out of the gate, if you got everyone.
• Halloween 2019 also had a surprise. Now, an Erebus skin was practically mandatory given her general themeing and Terror having a (very infamous) one. Edinburgh was a surprise but a welcome one, and it made sense for her to finally get something like her sister had. Memphis and Abercrombie were not too surprising, given how active their artists were and their popularity since release. Smalley made sense since she was debuting alongside Halloween anyway. But no one, not one soul, could have predicted Gneisenau, of all people, getting a skin a full two years after her initial release (and her subsequently being completely ignored)... let alone a Live2D skin and one of the most hilariously over-the-top looks the game had ever seen.
• The Muse ships introduced the "Crescendo of Polaris", as while they foreshadowed it with a tweet, people expecting a smaller event with just skins as opposed to a rather large event with both skins and "Muse" versions of Cleveland, Admiral Hipper, Sheffield, Akagi, and Gascogne, which was the first time outright alternate versions (not counting the younger versions, which Cleveland and Akagi happened to have versions of already) of existing shipgirls were added to the game.
• The announcements for what was being added to the year-end event bridging 2019 and 2020 were as "unexpected" as any announcement might be — more IJN ships, L2D skins, nobody could "predict" it but it followed the usual major event pattern. Toward the end of the announcements, though, there was a bomb: in addition to the previously-announced and much-expected Laffey wedding skin (which was particularly expected after her popularity poll performance), one other wedding skin was announced! The girl receiving it? Kawakaze. Kawa didn't even make it to the finals of the 2019 popularity poll in any region; people like her okay, but there were far more prominent girls ahead of her. Moreover, she hadn't gotten a single skin since her debut in June 2018 deb, and didn't even really appear in content after the Ink-Stained Steel Sakura event prior to the hololive event (and that was largely driven by meta-humor). To say this getting announced nonchalantly on the Christmas-New Year's stream in Japan was a shocker would be an understatement.
• April 2020 would see another surprise be revealed that wasn't covered in the recent stream: Little Renown. While a little ship isn't surprising with Japan's Children's Day coming up, Renown is a very unexpected choice since she largely fell into obscurity rather early on in the game's life, with even Hiei being very popular in comparison (she has gotten a number of new skins between Hiei-chan's release despite the lack of the event being reran).
• The Chinese 3rd anniversary stream announced formal skins for a number of boats, most of them rather popular and/or mainstays, but it turns out there were skins that were kept secret. Ships like Forbin, Biloxi, Albacore have been shown with skins after seemingly falling off the map or in Biloxi's case overshadowed by other things in the Chinese New Year 2020/maid battle banner. This has people wondering what else will be revealed next.
• In a story example, in the May/June 2020 event "Skybound Ontario", no one expected Gascogne appearing in the event's ending bits, since she's a Prototype ship. This was forshadowed with the Cherry Blossoms event with Story!Prinz Eugen stealing the relic that can manifest history-less ships.
• In August 2020, in the run-up to the rerun of "Scherzo of Iron and Blood" as part of the English 2nd Anniversary, the stream had announced a bunch of new swimsuit skins and some new characters, and everyone imagined that'd be plenty... so everyone was smashed across the face when, out of absolutely nowhere, York had a swimsuit version announced. She didn't have a single thing to do with the Bismarck event and hadn't come up during the EN stream, so nobody even remotely saw it coming. It's true that her artist loves York (and has had a different swimsuit design drifting around for years), but nobody had any reason to suspect Manjuu would take it up and implement it, especially with this kind of timing and with all of a single very vague tease on the weekly JP internet radio show.
  • The English 2nd Anniversary also announced a collab event with Dead or Alive Xtreme: Venus Vacation, which started on November 26. Kasumi, Marie Rose, Honoka, Nyotengu, Misaki, Nagisa, and Monica became playable characters thanks to Akashi building riggings specifically for them, which makes them the first known flesh-and-blood humans (and tengu, via Nyotengu) in the setting with this equipment.
• The Japanese 3rd anniversary had a number of surprises. First would be among the 3D model skits characters. Akashi (mascot-ish character), Sirius (popular sexy maid with her Crosswave model being used), and Dido (also a popular sexy maid) weren't surprising. But the 4th was Pamiat Merkuria, pleasantly surprising many as while most were expecting a more popular ship like Tashkent (drawn by Kincora who did both Sirius and Dido), Pamiat has her share of fans and got some new ones seeing the cheeky cruiser in action.
  • Then came the skins which had a few surprises. Hermione and Icarus were very recently introduced before hand as they each got a swimsuit with Hermione getting a second live 2D skin. Next was Wichita, who was in the game for a long time without a skin. Hatsushimo and Ariake also got some formal skins, with the latter getting quite a boost to certain areas, even compared to her then unrevealed retrofit skin. Another shock was the reveal of an upcoming collaboration skin of Hood (whose artist vanished early in the game's life) by Hao (Enterprise's artist who also made a Kaga skin for it)
  • The event preview dropped a couple of bombshells, with one being Kii - nameship of the cancelled battleship class - being among the obtainable ships, but the biggest shock was the reveal of the first build-able/gacha UR ship (previous examples have been from retrofits): Shinano (whose non-release in Kancolle despite being teased in 2013 is quite infamous).
• And then, for the event to cap off the year, Yostar and Manjuu announced during their Christmas stream the release of "Inverted Orthant", a new Ironblood-focused event. That wasn't totally unexpected as a "prep" event had been announced the day before. What shocked everyone, however, was who got announced:
  • First there's Peter Strasser and Weser, together, with both of the Kriegsmarine's other theoretically viable aircraft carriers being introduced right alongside each other. People had been wondering if one or the other might pop up, but very few imagined they'd both be added at a blow, and with Strasser taking the stage as the event's central character.
  • There was also a lot of shock when the light cruiser Nürnberg was introduced. After more than three years without her being added to the Ironblood side (and with her not having a slot in the old ship listing like Admiral Scheer or Blücher did), many simply assumed that Nürnberg was going to be eventually introduced in her "Admiral Makarov" form on the Northern Parliament side. That she would be introduced as an IB, and would form such a contrast with her sister Leipzig (who would emerge from years of obscurity to feature in the event alongside Nürnberg, itself more than a bit of a surprise) was absolutely out of left field and had not been hinted at whatsoever ahead of time.
  • But the one who took the cake was one of the event's central characters (and gacha chase targets): the shipgirl adapted from the planned P-class superheavy cruiser, Prinz Heinrich. While the implementation of "Plan Z" ships had been teased for almost a year, virtually everyone assumed this would begin with more of the H39 battleships along the lines of Friedrich der Grosse or maybe a D-class cruiser first or an O-class battlecruiser. Jumping straight to a P-class was very unexpected, but the far bigger shock came from the ship selected, in that "KMS Prinz Heinrich" was an invention. With Heinrich, Manjuu has fully entered Wargaming territory and is now outright inventing named ships to represent planned classes; they'd previously flirted with this with Suruga, who was the realization of one of the unnamed members of the Kii-class, but this was a step beyond even that. There had been no previous indication they would do anything like this, and people were left scrambling to figure out what Heinrich even was before Yostar clarified that she was a P-class.
    • Perhaps the single biggest shocker, though, involved the real-life creation of the character; Heinrich's artist wasn't one of the usual Chinese or Japanese artists for Azur Lane, no. Heinrich's artist is none other than prolific AL fan-artist Bach Do, aka Dishwasher1910, who had grown famous for his fan designs of ships like the Yamato sisters and USS Texas. After doing several loading screens and other art pieces for the game, it turned out that Bach was indeed invited to design a ship for the event, and Heinrich was the result. This gave him the honor of being the first AL ship artist recruited primarily from the English-speaking side of the fandom, which was met with incredible warmth and hope that other prolific artists might get the nod as well.
  • One last surprise was found once the event started running: Biloxi in the event pool, before the Chinese New Year 2020 banner ships were permanently added. This lines up with her having a New Years skin being ran during the event, but the fact she alone got the treatment supports the notion that China has a Cleveland-class cult.
• The 2021 Chinese New Year's period (Early February) had its fair share of surprises:
  • The announcement of a new log in ship and it being a Russian Destroyer as log in ships have become infrequent at best and it's usually from one of the 4 main factions.
  • Birmingham getting a skin as save for Baltimore and to a lesser degree, Cavalla (who got a free formal skin from the Chinese anniversary), the ships from Ashen Simulacrum have made no showings since it ran.
  • Ying Swei and Chao Ho's reveals came as a surprise as the last time Chinese faction ships were introduced was Chinese New Year's 2018 in China and Japan (and a year later in the English version) were the four An Shan class (formerly Gnevny-class) ships.
  • With Empyreal Tragicomedy having its rerun, people were expecting something for Formidable or Pola as the rerun introduced no new skins, with some suspecting Kincora and Yunsang were busy with something. One of the things Kincora was busy with was released: a skin for his first kansen, Glorious who unlike the bulk of his other ships, is rather obscure. Said skin was also surprising as she now has curves comparable with his other non-destroyer ships and wearing quite a showy number. It wound up being one of the noted skins of the banner, along side Bremerton and Cheshire's skins.
• Given how prolific they are in real life, fans knew it was merely a matter of time before the Iowa-class battleships were added to the game. However, the general expectation was that the first to be added would be either Iowa, being the class's namesake, or Missouri, the most famous. Thus, when the Mirror Involution event was announced, the fact that it included New Jersey threw everyone for a complete loop. There was nary a complaint, though, and the fandom wholeheartedly embraced her.
  • Above event also added Independence to the core shop, though the real shot was getting a refit that massively buffed her. Her planes were upped to 4 fighters and 4 torpedo bombers (total of 8 which is the usual number for fleet carriers, only Centaur has this number among light carriers), upped her torpedo efficiency to 150% (only Hiryuu has it that high), and gives her a version of "supporting wings" that Casablanca has (Buffs carriers in your fleet and the other fleets (at a weaker effect compared to the main fleet)
• The June 2021 livestream announced another unexpected collab event with The iDOLM@STER. Haruka, Chihaya, Ritsuko, Azusa, Iori, Ami, and Mami will be available as playable units, all of whom may be unfamiliar to players outside of Japan since they're from the original 765 cast. Instead of Oath Rings, Tiaras of Bonds can be given to them for a similar effect. Part of the surprise is how different the 765 cast is compared to modern trends in the game (which is to say, very flashy and/or sexy).
• The September 2021 livestream announced a collab event with SSSS.GRIDMAN and SSSS.DYNɅZENON. Rikka, Akane, Yume, Chise, Mujina, Namiko, and Hass will be available as playable units. Namiko and Hass are especially unusual, as they only have bit roles in Gridman as Rikka's friends and don't even have full names.
  • In the same event, we see the return of an unexpected NPC, "Purity", Purifier's amnesiac alter-ego from the Hololive collab event. The exact circumstances — Ambiguous Situation that it is — that she appears under has left certain fans wondering if this opens the door to her eventually being Promoted to Playable.
  • July 2023 held a re-run for the event, which got similar treatment to the Venus Vacation re-run (as mentioned below) as well as new content related to GRIDMAN UNIVERSE. "The 2nd" being playable was expected, but the other new playable character is Princess Hime, not exactly a bit role like Namiko and Hass, but still a rather minor character. In addition, Rikka, Akane and Yume's augment modules let them go from merely imitating their respective mecha/kaiju, to outright swaping in Universe Fighter Gridman, Alexis Kerib and Dynazenon temporarily. Running Rikka, Yume and Chise with their augment modules at the same time instead summons Rogue Kaiser Gridman.
• The end of the year event, "Tower of Transcendence" was surprising for a number of reasons.
  • No one was expecting a german event as opposed to a British one.
  • Ulrich von Hutten was the gacha Ultra Rare of this event, surprising due to being related to a Decisive Rarity ship, Friedrich der Große. The other surprise was how her design didn't continue on the rigging escalation seen in the faction with her half-sister being the main example of it.
  • Admiral Scheer and the remaining Admiral Hipper class ships were no shows among the paper or mostly paper ships in the event.
  • Last is U-1206, a sub associated with toilet troubles.
• And then we rolled into Lunar New Year 2022, and Manjuu decided to just outright flip the table.
  • Most folks expected another maid, which we got. A number of folks wondered if a post-1949 ROC ship might get slipped in again under its old name, and yup, hi USS Bristol. And a few wondered if we might get another pre-'49, WW2-era ship. And yeah... we did, after a fashion, in getting Hai Chi and Hai Tien. Which is to say... vessels built for, and commissioned by, the Imperial Chinese Navy in the 19th century. Both ships were even older than Avrora or Mikasa, having been laid down a bit earlier than her and launched much sooner, being fully completed and commissioned before Avrora touched water. Unlike the previous vessels, they actually served in the 19th century. That Manjuu and Yongshi would dip that far into history for new vessels without prior discussion was totally unexpected.
    • What made it even better is that the game does try to faithfully simulate how different their armament is compared to most other ships in the game: in real life, the ships had a fairly common gun scheme for the period, having a pair of comparatively large guns (Elswick Ordnance 203mm breech-loaders, in this case) and then a plethora of smaller guns in the 120 to 43mm range, not totally unlike the sailing ships of the line of previous centuries. Azur Lane simulates this by giving the ships a "main gun" in the heavy cruiser range... with an efficiency of 30%, to simulate how anemic this battery is compared to other ships using these weapons, but then their "secondary" armament is destroyer-scale guns with an additional gun mount (meaning they fire twice for every activation), making this their real primary armament. They also lack anti-air weaponry entirely, mounting torpedoes in their third slot instead. While somewhat questionable in practicality, there's no question it's a fun interpretation of a 19th-century protected cruiser in AL's gameplay, and many people appreciated what they represented and how they tried to change up gameplay in their own way.
    • The other element of note was Hai Tien... and specifically, how she met her end. Tien was wrecked in 1904 due to entering a heavy fog bank and mis-navigating the area around the mouth of the Yangtze River, striking a pinnacle rock in Hangzhou Bay. This resulted in her constructive total loss ten years before the outbreak of World War One. Both Avrora and Mikasa had, in some fashion, survived and actually "saw" World War II in some capacity; Hai Tien is the first ship in the game to have been built before either World War, but never seen or participated in it at all. This felt to many like the blowing open of the doors for what could get into the game; even Hai Chi made it to the early stages of the Second Sino-Japanese War which blended into WW2, but now there was precedence for a ship that had never seen action in a global conflict to join the cast. This invited all kinds of wild possibilities, including the entire Beiyang Fleet now being valid options for inclusion as Empery vessels, as well as any post-Beiyang vessel that didn't quite make it to World War II. It also seemed to open the door wide open for the WWI-era fleets of Britain, Germany and others who didn't quite see WW2 to join the cast, which would particularly help give Sardegna and the Ironblood some much needed roster depth. It was, overall, a huge step for the game and indicated that Azur Lane was ready to think big ahead of the coming fifth overall anniversary of the game.
  • An honorable mention has to go to the final Empery vessel added to the game with the update, Chen Hai; this vessel was so obscure that, at the time of her addition to the game, sources like English Wikipedia did not even note that the ship existed (and thus, many Anglophone fans struggled to figure out who she was at first). She was, in fact, China's first aircraft carrier!... being a seaplane tender converted, roughly, from the German-built cargo vessel Manila by an opportunistic warlord during the Warlord Era following the Qing collapse. The vessel was not precisely noteworthy and was handily obliterated by the Japanese once hostilities commenced, but she was in fact an aircraft tender, and thus became the Empery's first dedicated backline ship. She even had dedicated planes designed for her use included in the raid event portion of the wider LNY festivities.
  • But then it turned out that the theme of this Lunar New Year was contrasts. The oldest ships yet were added to the game... and some of the youngest, An Shan and Chang Chun, got retrofits. That is, they got their 1970s Cold War-era retrofits, complete with Silkworm anti-ship missiles. These retrofits even outright changed their ship class, as they became literal, actual Guided Missile Destroyers (or "DDG"s), complete with replacing their Torpedo slots with straight-up Missile equipment slots, and indeed losing torpedoes entirely. Chang Chun had included a comedy line about asking for her missiles since her introduction, but the idea that the An Shans would actually get DDG retrofits had long been the realm of obscure memes, with the ships seemingly forgotten by the game save for popping up every Lunar New Year. Now, the game had foreshadowed this by briefly including them in the "Tower of Transcendence" event that introduced Ulrich von Hutten and the second wave of Plan Z Ironbloods, but only the absolute wildest conspiracy theorists even entertained the idea that this was presaging the introduction of DDGs, let alone so quickly after ToT. But nope; in a number of ways, they had a starring role in the event, the items required to retrofit them being one of the major rewards of the event overall, and the ultimate reward for participation in the event's raid being a set of SY-1 missiles to equip one of the girls with. All of this was an absolute thunderbolt to the fanbase, and debuting right alongside Hai Tien, made it seemingly clear that anything was now on the table.
    • Making this even wilder was the mechanical implementation of all this. In addition to the SY-1s replacing torpedoes entirely, Azur Lane acknowledged the huge increase in range this should logically give the sisters... and thus made them the first ships who can alternate between being deployed in the vanguard or the main fleet. It costs a token fee on their retrofit screen to switch which role either girl will fill, but it was really just a push of a button to do it. In implementation, in the vanguard they played rather like normal destroyers, albeit with absolute top-tier stats and with the missiles working a bit like "super torpedoes", moving very quickly at a given target and tracking it to a degree (and doing astronomical base damage, with An Shan now also substantially buffing the "Missile"/Torpedo stat in addition to her other buffs, resulting in very respectable overall damage). In the main fleet? They act like battleships, firing their missile barrages similarly to a battleship salvo, and doing comparable damage to most battleships of their new rarity. This meant that all of a sudden, the Empery gained not one but three backline options and could now field a full fleet. This was met with incredible excitement (and slight trepidation at how powerful the sisters were), because in addition to opening who could get into the game, it signaled that Manjuu and Yongshi were ready to start getting really experimental with the game's mechanics.
• The Japanese 5th anniversary announced a collab with Atelier Ryza 2: Lost Legends & the Secret Fairy, with Ryza, Klaudia, Lila, Serri, and Patty being available as playable units. The real surprise is Kala Ideas, who is debuting in this collab ahead of the then-upcoming Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key.
• October 2022 revealed that Royal Fortune would be added to the game as the first member of the new Tempesta faction. If you can't remember a World War II ship with that name that's fine, because Royal Fortune was the ship of the pirate Bartholomew Roberts from the Golden Age of Piracy. As could be expected this came to an absolute shock to the community, as nobody expected ships from the Age of Sail to be added to the game.
• Azur Lane has had its fair share of unexpected collaborations, but what about story-focused collab reruns? April 2023 marks the announcement and release of the first-ever major collab event rerun through Vacation Lane, the collab with Dead or Alive Xtreme: Venus Vacation. Consider that the first major collab across all servers was was far back as November 2017!^note Stardust reached EN nearly a year later however, when JP and CN already had the Hyperdimension Neptunia collab. The unexpectedness goes a step further as rather than being a simple rerun, it includes a number of additions from the original November 2020 run.
  • For characters, Tamaki and Luna are additions to the roster, for a total of nine collab characters.
  • The above also receive skins, with one being dynamic (limited motion). Marie Rose gets a second skin which is Live2D.
  • Equipment augments are added to old and new collab characters, taking the character standards applied in The Alchemist and the Archipelago of Secrets collab event.
• The Japanese 6th anniversary announced a collab with Shinobi Master Senran Kagura: New Link, which went live on November 2023 and had Asuka, Ikaruga, Homura, Yumi, Fubuki, Murasaki, and Yūyaki as playable units. Their franchise's Clothing Damage mechanic is also represented here in their base skins with a simple touch swipe.