If there’s one thing that can be relied upon in our increasingly confusing digital age, it’s the jiggly opiate of the masses that games like Zenless Zone Zero provide. Gachas ostensibly make their money peddling cute anime girls (and boys, to be fair) to the average consumer. This isn’t an assertion I’m making so much as it is a basic statement of fact. There’s real, 4D-chess level market research that goes into this sort of thing.
And with… aesthetic appeal comes the technology required to back it up. miHoYo is perhaps, statistically-speaking, the best at this—given it’s released three games along this line, carving itself out a comfortable little empire, it knows a thing or two about jiggle physics. So much, in fact, that it’s made a move I can only describe as ‘something you do when you’ve gone mad with power’.
They added jiggle physics to cat’s balls 🌚 from r/ZZZ_Official
As noticed by users on the ZZZ subreddit (thanks, Eurogamer), cats—who are rendered in Zenless Zone Zero with little sphincters and a coinpurse, for some reason—now have jiggle physics on their testes. Which is a sentence I resent having to write as part of my professional career.
If you’re wondering why? Well, doing some googling that’s sure to result in some very awkward conversations with our IT department, it does seem like cat sacks are indeed a running joke in Japan. miHoYo’s a Chinese developer, sure, but ZZZ plays with a lot of anime tropes. I won’t presume to know for certain, having just found out about this phenomenon, but I’d imagine the bit is at least tangentially related to Tanuki, racoon-like Yokai with… erm, endowed nuts that are meant to bring good luck.
I have to wonder which developer was saddled with this responsibility—at what point did some poor animator at miHoYo come into work one day, open whatever platform they use to assign tasks, and see ‘make the cat’s nuts jiggle’ as part of their duties. I wonder, in the same way I’m wondering how I got here writing this article, if they pondered the life choices they made that led them up to that point.
Clearly the madcap jiggle physics scientists at the studio have been given too much power, but who could possibly stop them? I certainly won’t try, lest I be turned into a wobbly mass of shockingly-well rendered flesh. Besides, if Baldur’s Gate 3 can do it, ZZZ can have a little ball physics. As a treat.
