Not long ago, Tower of Fantasy was accused by many Chinese players of stealing 5-star reviews from Genshin Impact, in order to increase ratings on various platforms. Not only that, many Reddit users also accused this game of stealing, plagiarizing ideas and other game resources.
Tower of Fantasy (ToF) has launched Chinese players since December 16, has a lot of potential because of beautiful graphics and engaging action gameplay; similar gameplay to Genshin Impact or Honkai Impact 3rd. But instead of “exploding” like the two games above, Tower of Fantasy dropped its rating continuously because of negative player reviews. Initially it was just because of a bug, but now it is also because of the suspicion of blatant plagiarism of this game.
Specifically, one of the ToF promotional videos was accused of plagiarizing a short anime belonging to the Hurray production team. This group of authors also spoke out against this behavior of ToF in a post on Twitter, but ToF has not yet responded.
Summary: “Reporter of a big game company in China who made the game Perfect World. I was told that it is very similar to Hurray’s concept video! We are very small and can’t do anything with this company. I compared the two videos so that at least more people know more about them.”
In the original video, the main character is a girl running and jumping and performing various actions from jumping, falling to climbing. In the promotional video of ToF, the character in the game also did the same actions, to the point of matching the time when playing 2 videos at the same time. The camera angles and sometimes the background are also similar.
Besides, many players also accused ToF of stealing the resources (assets) of Honkai Impact 3rd, then blamed their outsourced 3rd studio. Specifically, in a promotional video, many players discovered that ToF used the Holy Relic 3 sword in Honkai Impact without changing any details. This video has been taken down, re-posted but this sword is no longer available.
The team behind ToF also had to apologize for this action.
When it was released, Tower of Fantasy promised that the gacha game would “crush” Genshin Impact. In the Chinese market, Genshin is still the most popular gacha game, so this is no small dream. Many people think that Tower of Fantasy has so much potential that miHoYo will be under great pressure to “generously” give away a free 5-star character to retain players. However, ToF was the game that was under pressure and had to give away a free SSR character.
After the incident, ToF’s rating is decreasing steadily. On the game’s Bilibili page, ToF has lost about 30,000 followers, even though the game hasn’t been released for a month. Numbers that should have gone up in the first few months of a new game open, fell rapidly for ToF.
No one denies that ToF is a game with a lot of potential. But the unethical actions of the dev team ruined this game in the eyes of players. It can be seen that Tower of Fantasy was launched when it was too early, incomplete and not oriented to the future, but just wanted to follow the gacha fever that is stirring the game village. If it can’t develop in a healthier way, the title “Genshin Killer” will forever be just a pipe dream of Hotta Studio.
