Collaborations in Games

[Moonface]

I just saw the above trailer in my YouTube feed, and my immediate thought was that it certainly wasn't a collaboration I expected to see for Resident Evil. However, I don't know if it's the weirdest one I've ever seen as there are others that come to my mind, such as Uncharted 3 x Subway which had Nathan Drake holding a fountain drink cup in actual game footage such as the iconic plane sequence and an escape from a sinking cruise ship..


So what are the best, worst, strangest, or just simply unexpected collaborations you've seen games doing?

[shadow]

Animal Crossing New Leaf and adding in characters from twilight princess with wolf link, the splatoon series with the squirrel sisters & so forth. The hello kitty cards are also interesting but wish we could have gotten hello kitty as a cat in the game as a villager.

[Dragon Lord]

Being a big gacha game player, I experience collaborations all of the time.

Azur Lane - Hyperdimension Neptunia, Hololive, Atelier, Dead or Alive, SSSS.Gridman, Senran Kagura, The Idolm@ster, Kizuna AI, To LOVE-Ru, Black Rock Shooter, DanMachi (Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?) and another upcoming collab with Date A Live in the near future. They also did a collaboration with one of my favorite game series, Utawarerumono, but sadly that one never came to the Global server for some reason.

Arknights - Rainbow Six Siege x2, Monster Hunter, Delicious in Dungeon and will have an upcoming collaboration with BanG Dream! Ave Mujica.

Genshin Impact - Horizon Zero Dawn (Aloy added as a character in the game, no events or story content)

Honkai Star Rail - Currently ongoing collaboration with Fate/Stay Night (event story is over, character banners are still in the game).

Wuthering Waves - Will have a collaboration with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners in 2026.

Now, I kept these strictly to collaborations that added characters and events/story to the games (except in the case of Genshin, in which there was no story added). There's many more collabs for each of these games for things like clothing, music, irl events and such as well (especially for Genshin, which has a novel for a list).

The ones that I think were the best... well, the Arknights Monster Hunter collab was a lot better than I expected, and one of the units in the collab is one of my favorite units in the game (not only because she's OP still, but her design is *chef's kiss*). They made the story work really well within the world of Arknights and fighting a Rathalos as the boss of the event in a tower defense game was cool as hell. I'd have to say the same about the Rainbow Six Siege events too. They sounded really weird to me at first and I was like, "How the hell is this going to fit into this world and make sense?", but they did a really exceptional job with the collabs. I wasn't as big on the Delicious in Dungeon event and we'll see how the upcoming BanG Dream! collab turns out.

Azur Lane mainly collaborates with anime series and anime-styled games, which works well since of course Azur Lane's biggest selling point is the sexy girls and fanservice. The Hololive collab was probably my favorite of them (the Neptunia one too, but I started right at the end of that collab and only managed to get one character. They've never re-run the collab, despite having re-run multiple other ones since).

Genshin's lack of meaningful collabs has been one of my biggest disappointments with the game, and I really wish they'd be more willing to bring characters from other franchises in the game. I'm assuming they don't want to because they want the story/world of Genshin to be focused on itself and coming up with reasons for these other characters being there would be too tedious to them. Aloy was literally just dropped in the game with no explanation, no story relevance, no dialogue of any kind and to this day she still doesn't even have constellations. Literally the lowest effort possible putting her into the game made even more obvious by the fact that she is by far the worst character in the game. You have to really stretch to make any good use out of her, and any use you can find in her, you can find in another Cryo character for ten times less effort.

The Fate collab in HSR was meh to me, didn't even do the event story. I pulled Saber just to have her, but haven't done anything with her. I have absolutely zero interest in the Edgerunners collab for WuWa next year and there's a very good chance I might not even be playing the game any more by the time that rolls around.

As for collabs that don't happen in the games, I don't really pay too much attention to those unless it's something that would really hit my interests. When it comes to video games doing collaboration content, I'm much more interested in content being added INTO the games.