Trivia / Arknights

• Acting for Two: Up to eleven. Like most gacha-based games with Japanese audio, Arknights has many sets of two or more Operators all voiced by the same voice actor or actress. It's almost harder to find characters that do not share their voice with another.
  • Some of them even has stark difference between each characters of the same actor, like the case between Texas and Kroos, or Hibiscus and Saria.
  • Aoi Yūki even brings the number of characters she voices up to three, with Earthspirit, Istina, and Nian.
  • Ayaka Suwa also voices three characters: Manticore, Cuora, and Gavial.
  • Eri Kitamura voices Beeswax as well as her sister Carnelian. Notably, the difference between the two voices shows her range.
  • For the English voice over, Emma Ballantine voices Amiya, Swire, and Durin.
  • Allegra Clark voices Dorothy, Penance, and Proviso in the English dub.
  • Cristina Vee voices Skadi, Gummy, and Blaze in the English dub.
• All-Star Cast:
  • In the Japanese dub, it is to be expected, where some Operators being voiced by well-known seiyuus in the anime industry, including, but not limited to, Saori Hayami, Sanae Kobayashi, Hikaru Midorikawa, and many more.
  • Initially downplayed with the English dub. Prior to Ideal City (and to a lesser extent Lingering Echoes), all of the voice actors (not including the voice actors voicing Rainbow Six Siege crossover characters) hired for Arknights English voicework are primarily voice actors based in the United Kingdom, as opposed to those based in the United States. As a result, no renowned or big-name English anime voice actors are seen among them since the implementation of English voices from the Break the Ice event. With the arrival of Ideal City in Global servers six months later, some United States-based voice actors renowned in anime voicework, such as Alyson Leigh Rosenfeld, Caleb Yen, Anjali Kunapaneni, and Risa Mei (with the latter two notably being the first Genshin Impact EN voice actors to voice Arknights characters^note Caleb Yen would not voice any Genshin Impact characters until September 2023 (or a playable character, namely Gaming, until January 2024), even though he voices Caelus in Honkai: Star Rail, another Hoyoverse game, months prior), join the cast, opening the way for popular English anime voice actors voicing Operators later on, such as Monica Rial, Kayli Mills, Allegra Clark, Khoi Dao, Erica Lindbeck, and Cristina Vee.
  • When it comes to music, it already started with them using Starset's songs for their trailers, and it's even gotten to the point that Starset actively acknowledges them, having already written a song for them and performing at Ambience Synesthesia.
• Ascended Fan Nickname:
  • "Kevin" is the nickname given by the fandom to a lone Reunion Airborne Soldier who frequently appears on maps with precarious terrain, only to die silly deaths every time shortly after landing. Lo and behold, the operator dossier updates released alongside Originium Dust has seemingly canonized his existence, with him being one of the few Reunion troops who were friends with Ethan before his defection.
  • The "dragon bubbles" (龙泡泡), round Cartoon Creatures based on Nian and her siblings, didn't have an official localized name due to originating as a China-only line of plush toys, but the Western fandom took a liking to them and dubbed them "beans" due to their body shape. This name was then used in the official English 3.5th Anniversary Livestream in which they were causing mischief in the background, with Amiya referring to them as "dragon beans".
• Author's Saving Throw:
  • For the Global server's first anniversary celebration, Hypergryph announced that even though W would still be a limited banner character, they will be adding a pity system that will guarantee her after 300 pulls. This system has since been used for every subsequent limited banner (with the exception of collab banners).
  • The more literal translation of Thorns' third skill as "Supreme Arts" in the Global build didn't sit well with many fans, as many found the original CN name "Destreza" more fanciful^note roughly translating to "dexterity/skill" in Spanish, as well as being the name of a historical Spanish fencing technique, both matching Iberia's parallels to Spain, not helped by the fact that Thorns says it by name in his voice lines. The name of the skill was quickly changed to Destreza in the next patch.
  • As more operators are added to the game, the Network Archives gradually became a cluttered mess. For fans who are fond of the lore of Arknights, this can come off as an annoyance to some for the reasons stated below:
    • In regards to operator faction, while all of the playable operators in the game are obviously employed at Rhodes Island, their profile would include a faction logo of a particular nation or group to represent where the operator in question came from before they are hired at Rhodes Island, whereas the Rhodes Island logo itself is reserved for characters that are already under the employ of Rhodes Island for a long time, which helps add some diversity among the playable characters, lore-wise. However, the game seems to be rather inconsistent in determining whether an operator's displayed faction in their profile is their home nation or Rhodes Island, with the game arbitrarily grouping many operators with the latter. For example, some Victorian operators recruited to Rhodes Island, such as Bagpipe, Grani, and Mint, have Victoria displayed as their faction, while other Victorian operators such as Phantom and Skyfire don't, for unknown reasons, instead having their displayed faction as Rhodes Island. Details from a character's lore or design, such as being Infected or their CG showing them wearing Rhodes Island equipment, also don't factor in determining an operator's faction. This had the side effect of leaving many nation logos unrevealed and confusion in regards to talents affected by faction (explained in detail under the Guide Dang It! entry here). Notably (on CN servers only), the Columbia logo was first seen during the Mansfield Break event, but wasn't used as an faction logo for any operators at the time since all of the Columbian characters (including the four who were introduced during the event) who aren't affiliated with any other factions are grouped with Rhodes Island. It got to a point where the number of operators with Rhodes Island as their faction logo greatly outnumber the operators that have a unique non-Rhodes Island faction logo, which pretty much defeats the purpose of operators having faction logos to begin with.
    • To add further ire to some, new operators seem to be carelessly dumped all over the Archive page, special mention goes to the upper-left portion of the page, having mostly Rhodes Island operators with a bit of RIM Billton and Laterano operators mixed in. Scattering operators all over the place makes it harder to discern relationships between different operators, which is represented by a yellow line connecting operator pictures together. However, this was only feasible if the operator pictures are close enough to each other in the Network Archives; a rather strange case of this is the relationship between Texas and Lappland, in which the relationship line connecting them awkwardly cuts through the relationship lines connecting Amiya with Dobermann and Ch'en.
    • Hypergryph seems to be made aware of this, so by release of the "Who is Real" (for CN servers) and "Mansfield Break" (for Global/EN servers) event, the Network Archives was significantly revamped to regroup all current and upcoming operators into their proper faction; in other words, most of the operators whose displayed faction was Rhodes Island will be changed to display their home nation, while other operators become part of a sub-faction of an existing faction. This also had the beneficial effect of revealing the official logo of several nations and factions that were unknown prior, such as Columbia, Siracusa, Glasgow, U.S.S.G., Elite Op, and many more.
    • In general, for all new operators introduced to the game during and after the Archives update, their displayed faction will be shown as Rhodes Island only if the story and lore implies that the character is already employed at Rhodes Island for at least some time before the start of the story (ie. Kal'tsit and Heavyrain, two operators introduced after the Who Is Real event, are affiliated with Rhodes Island), otherwise their displayed faction will be their home nation. The Rhodes Island logo is also used for characters that have cut off their ties with their previous faction, such as Mudrock and Ch'en the Holungday, or those who do not have a known birthplace or faction prior to joining Rhodes Island, such as Surtr. Some operators can be subject to a faction change even after the Archive update, such as some of the Iberian operators (ie. Thorns, Whisperain, Blue Poison, etc.), who had their faction changed to their home nation, Iberia.
  • It is common for fans to slot operators into 'archetypes' within their own class (such as those that our own character pages work with). However, as time went on, more and more operators were introduced that all worked slightly differently and the question of whether this is a new archetype or not started to pop up more often. Whereas some fans tend to create a new archetype for every operator that works differently and is thus far unique in their kit (i.e an archetype for Bena, an archetype for Beanstalk, etc.), others tend to have more loose criteria; for example, slotting Ifrit in the same AoE Caster archetype despite having a completely unique attack range and different targetting behavior for her attacks. Thus, Hypergryph announced canon archetypes as per their second anniversary livestream, possibly making an end at confusion.
  • In the CN servers, Dossoles Holiday was hit with a big controversy, mostly in regards to the introduction of the alter operator Ch'en the Holungday. In particular, she was a limited Operator who was unpredictably introduced into the game without any prior notice or announcement, to the surprise and frustration of many players (many of whom were still recovering from the Deep Drown Lament banner three months earlier), especially since the previous two summer events had no limited Headhunting banners at all. In addition, many players agreed that Ch'en the Holungday moveset is heavily unbalanced in her favor, being able to deal massive ATK steroids and movement/DEF debuffs over a wide AoE area, with her main disadvantages (high DP cost and slow attack speed) being easily circumvented via Vanguards or her skills. All in all, this makes her considered way too powerful for a limited Operator, being very comparable (possibly even surpassing) to that of the high-end meta Operators such as SilverAsh, Eyjafjalla, Thorns, and Surtr (none of whom are limited and have notable weaknesses of their own), which is pretty dangerous boon to bestow for an Operator who cannot be obtained outside of her banner. And on the same banner, she is disproportionally powerful compared to the other 6-star on the banner, Mizuki, who has drawbacks to his kit that makes him teeter close to being a Low-Tier Letdown^note In contrast, many of the non-limited 6-stars on a limited banner can find themselves in high meta usage, most of the time even moreso than the limited 6-star debuting alongside them; Operators such as Weedy and Mudrock are some of the best examples of this. To ensure that the same controversy was not repeated when DH arrives on Global/EN servers, Hypergryph and Yostar go the extra mile to make sure the event is something to be truly hyped up for as the 2nd Anniversary event. They hosted many community events that offer rewards to all players who participated. It also helps that the 6 month gap between CN and Global/EN allows players to prepare ahead of time in building their Headhunting plans, which does help mitigates the feelings towards Ch'en the Holungday's high-meta gameplay for her limited status. It also helps that Hypergryph learned their lesson come the next summer event, Ideal City, where the new limited Operator, Gavial the Invincible, is far better balanced as a solid and strong fighter (much like all other limited Operators), but not ridiculously broken strong.
  • The first season of Integrated Strategies was well received, but something players widely disliked was the random generation of class tickets, which can give you a very skewed initial team setup. While this mechanic is to encourage a player's ability to make things up on the fly and to make even common lower-tiered operators work, the measure of uncertainty was enough to kill some players' patience. When the developers made the mode permanent, they alleviated this by now giving four sets of three class tickets each. For the players who did enjoy the randomness, the fourth of these is a set of randomly generated tickets, with the guarantee that one of them is a free 4-star.
  • After months of even the nerfed version of SSS being considered a tedious slog by a huge portion of the playerbase, Hypergryph reworked the mode to mitigate many of the core complaints - making it shorter, reducing the enemy scaling, adding a larger starting squad to reduce RNG-dependency, including starting items to allow for more diverse teambuilding and synergies, and more. On top of that, they also made the rewards monthly instead of biweekly (resulting in less grinding overall), as well as the option to take on a challenge mode version of the map to further reduce the grind.
• Bad Export for You:
  • True to form, and taking lessons learned from Azur Lane, Yostar (the game's international publisher) is trying their damnedest to avert this; instead of a staggered launch across multiple regions, the game launched first in China (where it was published by Hypergryph themselves) and all international versions, in Japanese, English and Korean, launched and will be updated simultaneously so that the various regions are in sync and share an overall gameplay experience, with an eye toward the combined global version achieving content parity with the Chinese version.
  • There was one notable exception, compared especially to AL: while AL (and competitor Girls' Frontline) are both readily available on app stores in Southeast Asia, the English version of Arknights, bafflingly, was not at launch. The game ended up officially launching in the SEA region two weeks after the English server was up and running.
• The Cast Showoff:
  • Allegra Clark, Dorothy's English voice actor, shows off her vocals for a brief cover of Dorothy's Image Song.
  • English voice actresses Emma Ballantine (Amiya, Swire, and Durin) and Heather Nicol (Goldenglow and Pitlopsis) sang an entirely original duet song together, "Unbreakable", commissioned for the global server's 4th anniversary.
• Colbert Bump: The promotional videos for Arknights introduced anime/gacha fans to the music of Starset, specifically "Monster", "Unbecoming", and "INFECTED".
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: The Qooapp article summarizing the story in light of its anime adaptation not only mistranslates 'Originium' as 'Source' ^note  the original Chinese name for the mineral translates to 'source/origin stone' , it also blatantly assumes that Rhodes Island's search for a cure is mainly a guise for creating weapons using Originium in the war. Not only is this a very wild take (Rhodes does provide treatment and its goal has just forced it to take on military measures similarly to the Knights Hospitaller they're named for) highly expanding on mere overtones, this description would be way more fitting for Rhine Lab instead, a faction that is genuinely implied to be specializing in Originium weaponry despite what their facade claims.
• Creator's Favorite:
  • Although Skade is responsible for illustrating a whole bunch of characters, the Ursus Students seem to receive the most love, with significantly more personal artwork and retweets of other fanart about them on her social media.
  • While NoriZC has done a number of characters for the game (mostly Rhine Lab characters), NoriZC's Twitter makes it fairly clear that there's a special place in Nori's heart for Ifrit, Saria and Silence, going all the way back to 2018 and the game's initial development cycle.
  • According to an interview, Lowlight's favorite operators are Amiya, Gavial, Angelina, and the Shift Specialist operators. This is likely the reason why Gavial is fairly easily to obtain, has many references in the story and profiles, and has an event that basically shows how awesome she is.
  • Liduke has a huge soft spot for Hellagur and considers him the "bridge" that connects her with Arknights, even going as far as saying that if she ever cuts ties with Hypergryph, her love for Hellagur will still remain infinite.
  • RAN (bukeranwu) Is quite fond of FEater, often retweeting art of her and other Arknights art.
  • Despite her tendency to hijack almost any banner her artist tries to roll on, alchemaniac loves Skadi as much ad his love for Grani and Archetto.
  • Namie dotes a great deal on both Goldenglow and Mizuki, going so far as to jokingly threaten to sic Mizuki on anyone who called Goldenglow a dog.
  • Composer Obadiah Brown-Beach's favorite character he wrote a theme song for is Patriot, even featuring him in his music studio as his computer background.
• Cross-Regional Voice Acting: The English dub features voice actors from the United States (mostly the ones based in Los Angeles and now Texas with the additions of Monica Rial [Absinthe] and Elizabeth Maxwell [Rosa]), the United Kingdom, and Canada (with Vancouver-based Caitlyn Bairstow [W]).
• Dawson Casting:
  • Among the Blacksteel crew, Jessica is widely considered to be the youngest and least experienced, and is heavily implied to be in her late-teens at best. Meanwhile, Ryō Hirohashi is at least a decade older than the voice actresses who play the other team members, being in her early 40s, while the second-oldest among them, Ai Kakuma, who voices Franka, is only 32.
  • Of the two Nearl sisters, Kana Hanazawa is cast as the younger Maria/Blemishine, despite the fact that she's significantly older than Ayane Sakura, who voices Margaret. In fact, she's even older than Minami Takahashi by a considerable margin, who voices their aunt, Whislash.
• Darkhorse Casting: For the English dub, a good portion of the cast before Ideal City first went live in the Global servers are primarily voice actors based in the United Kingdom instead of the United States, with a handful being fairly new names to the industry such as Emma Ballantine (Amiya), James Day (Silverash) and Ben Cura (Phantom).
• Dueling Games: Arknights was one of the three gacha games nominated for Google's "Users' Choice Game of 2020" award alongside Genshin Impact and Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross, so in the gacha communities, there were debates on which of the three would deserve the award. However, all of them lost against Spongebob: Krusty Cook-Off.
• Dummied Out:
  • Conviction was fully playable during the open beta, where their moveset basically made them an alternative version of Shaw or FEater (ie a Push-type Specialist). They were eventually introduced into the full release for April Fools 2020 as a single-target Guard. Remnants of their original role is still seen in their skill animations being a large fist, and their lore. They also still boost EXP tape-creation in the Factory, as per the name 'Boxing Guidance video'.
  • Tokens that are used to raise the Potential of characters (in lieu of pulling duplicates of the character in question) can be purchased for 4* and higher characters. Full sets of class tokens for 1*, 2*, and 3* characters are also present in game data (in spite of some rarity/class combinations not even existing in-game yet), but unobtainable.
  • Exclusive for the JP and EN voices. Rangers, and the Reserve Team A1 and A4 Operators had an unused voiceline that can only be accessed through the game files, as opposed to the Starter and Robot Operators, where their similarly unused In-Battle lines can be accessed inside their voice options.
  • Beagle has an unused skill activation animation where she raises her sword upwards.
  • The PRTS has an unused voicelines, some of which that wouldn't be out of place in a Command & Conquer game (specifically, Red Alert 2/Yuri's Revenge).
• Fan Community Nicknames: Players of Arknights are called "Doctors", based on the Prestigious Player Title for the player character. "Dokutahs" is also another community nickname, based on how the characters pronounce "doctor" in Japanese.
• Fake Brit: Puzzle, an Operator from Victoria as the Fantasy Counterpart Culture to Great Britain, has a British accent provided by Vietnamese-American Khoi Dao.
• Follow the Leader: The Japanese livestreams seem to have followed the VTuber trend popularized by Kizuna Ai, wherein a 3D model on the screen reacts to or narrates the announcements. Arknights has a model of Amiya made for this purpose, as seen on this video.
• Inspiration for the Work: It was stated in an interview with the producer that Hypergryph used Shutter Island and Alcatraz as their conceptual basis for how their prison story in "Mansfield Break" would look and play out.
• Late Export for You: Originally available in Chinese since May 2019, a trio of international servers (in English, Japanese and Korean, with the English version available in most Anglophone countries, much of Europe, and southeast Asia) were opened to the public on January 16, 2020. The game was made available in Taiwan on June 29, 2020.
• No Dub for You:
  • Initially played straight for the first two years in almost all regions as though the game is developed in China, it exclusively featured Japanese voice acting across all five servers. It was announced for the Chinese server in Summer 2021 that they'd slowly implement Chinese dubbing, with the Korean and English servers following suit in June 2022 for implementing Korean and English dubs. Italian dubbing was later added for the launch of "Il Siracusano" in each server.
  • Mostly played straight for crossover operators to reflect their source material; they will be voiced in certain languages exclusively regardless of the one chosen by the player for other characters. The Nine-Colored Deer is exclusively voiced in Chinese and Team Rainbow are exclusively voiced in English across all versions with no language toggles. The only exception, so far, is Luo Xiaohei, who has both Chinese and Japanese voices sourced from preexisting dubs in both languages.
• Orphaned Reference: Before it was removed in a UI overhaul, tokens would show their success rate of raising an operator's Potential, which was permanently fixed at 100%. Presumably, in earlier builds of the game the tokens had a chance of failing, which had been removed by the final version.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Due to a controversy involving Ai Kayano visiting the Yasakuni Shrine, Platinum's Seiyuu was replaced by Mizuki Kitajima.
  • From A Flurry to the Flame (Monster Hunter collab) in the global server and Come Catastrophes or Wakes of Vultures in the Chinese server, Jessica's English voice actress Rebecca LaChance was replaced by Yuuki Luna (who also voiced Hibiscus in the English dub), likely due to scheduling conflicts for the former as she was busy doing voicework for PAYDAY 3.
  • Due to Ayumi Fujimura's indefinite hiatus since she recorded her voice acting of Savage and Rope, she is replaced and her roles are recasted by Sachie Hirai and Chiyuki Miura respectively for the 5th Anniversary of the Chinese launch of Arknights.
• Playing Against Type:
  • Yuka Iguchi voices Saria, the dour, stoic Defender who is part of the Rhine Lab Cast Herd and storyline. Iguchi is far more famous for roles like Mea Kurosaki, Index and Lily in various Cygames titles. Saria is a good full octave lower than the voice register she usually uses, among other things especially compared to her other in-game character, Hibiscus. Although, this is not the first time Iguchi played such role^note She played the similarly deep voiced Crusch of Re:Zero as well as Shem-ha in Symphogear.
  • Show Hayami is almost infamous for his villainous roles, probably best known for his role as Sousuke Aizen of Bleach. Here, he voices Hellagur, an undeniably noble and heroic Defector from Decadence; this takes Hayami waaaaaaaay back to something more like his days as Max Jenius, a good thirty years before Arknights launched.
  • Ryō Hirohashi is mainly known for her Genki Girl roles, like Aoi Yamada from Wagnaria!!, or Kyou Fujibayashi from CLANNAD. Failing that, she would mostly voice naive young boys. As such, her voicing the incredibly depressed and shy Jessica comes across as very strange, and the Motor Mouth Shaw not far from that.
  • Kiyono Yasuno is typically typecast as soft, Girly Girl-type characters with a bit of smarts and quirky personality, like Mayuko Inoue in Ushio and Tora, or Megumi Katou in How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend, basically the type of girl that would be a Love Interest or Childhood Friend to the protagonist. Instead, she lends her voice to the brutish (and huge!) Lady Drunk Tomboy that is Hoshiguma.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Fan musician Lappy who composed numerous fanmade themes for the cast of Arknights was hired by Hypergryph to do music for the "Zwillingstürme im Herbst" event, stating on their Youtube channel how overjoyed they were to do work for the game on an official basis.
  • Harlequin Wheels, creator of many popular, memetic fan animations, has also done segments for the official English livestreams, including short animations for Invitation to Wine and Ideal City and longer sequences explaining the mechanics of Where Vernal Winds Will Never Blow and So Long, Adele.
• Reality Subtext:
  • The international versions of the game had the unbelievably bad fortune of releasing just as the Covid-19 novel coronavirus outbreak began to blow up and become international news (the game's Jan. 16, 2020 release, in fact, was bracketed by the first Japanese case on the 15th and the second reported death on the 17th). Needless to say, the game's story of an illness causing civil unrest felt very strangely apropos to many, and in a way Hypergryph never intended.
  • Eyjafjalla the Hvít Aska's voice, compared to her normal self, sounds more strained and slurs her words more. In-universe, this is caused by Eyjafjalla's own oripathy having advanced to the point that she is entirely deaf and cannot verify how her own voice sounds anymore, combined with the illness having starting to build up in her own throat. However, in real life, her voice actor Risa Taneda was afflicted with an actual throat infection and had to take treatments for it, which changed her voice to become how she voiced Eyjafjalla the Hvít Aska, all coincidentally fitting together in-universe.
• Real Song Theme Tune:
  • The first trailer for the global server uses "Monster" by Starset, while the second PV has "Unbecoming" from the same band. The fans have latched on to it so largely that they prefer those songs above songs specifically made for Arknights, like "Save us from ourselves" (with a notable exception for the DJ Okawari collab).
    • Come the game's 2nd anniversary, Starset released "INFECTED" as part of the celebration; said song is presented in the third concept PV.
  • The game also has its rendition of "Requiem", based on the eponymous Russian poem by Anna Ahkmatova.
• The Red Stapler: After the announcement of Skadi's summer skin where she beats enemies to death with a red orca plushie, players have been scrambling for actual ones as well. In one anecdote, a stuffed toy manufacturer was contacted by Chinese players looking for said plushie, and they complied to the demand without knowing as to why it's so suddenly popular. Cue at least five thousand units sold on the first day of sale a while later.
• Role Reprise: Patricia Summersett, Christopher J. Domig, Julie Tamiko Manning and Vlado Stokanic return from Rainbow Six Siege to reprise their roles as Ash, Blitz, Frost and Tachanka respectively. This also makes them the first characters in the game to have proper English voice acting, and in keeping with their appearances in Siege, remain entirely undubbed in other languages.
• She Also Did: Cristina Vee is the singer in "Boiling Blood", Blaze's Image Song. Note that this was years before she officially became Blaze's English VA!
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Faction Motto of Rhodes Island was something along the lines of "Bitter things may have wholesome effects / The last stand against the originium". It was changed in the final version to reference the Hippocratic Oath instead.
  • There's a couple around Silence — for starters, as noted on her own character page, her initial reveal name was rather famously and unambiguously "Silent" before the translation process for the game favored "Silence" instead, which was integrated back into the CN client in time. More notably, though, is that early teaser images by her artist, NoriZC, suggest that her proper name was going to be "Olivia Hermer", with Silent/Silence being a full Red Baron code name. In the game as released, she gives her name as "Olivia Silence", with Silence appearing to be her proper surname and her simply using her surname for a callsign.
    • Related to this, one might notice her ankles: unlike her final art, in the original promo Silence did not have the now-standard "oripathy monitor" anklet and instead has a much simpler anklet made of seemingly the same material as her thigh-high. At this stage of development, the standard anklet may not have existed yet.
  • In some of the absolute earliest promotional material for the game from 2017, Ptilopsis was teased as a Supporter, not a Medic. By the time the game was entering its first Chinese beta (as seen in the Rhine Lab character teaser), she was already decidedly a Medic. It's unclear what her Supporter skill set would have looked like.
  • Similarly, when he was first revealed, "Silverash" was spelled with only one capital letter. The "SilverAsh" spelling was a convention that came up later in development.
  • The first Alpha preview of the home screen reveals a couple interesting differences: first, the background was a much airier, open construction area; one of the Lungmen chapters was called "Eye for an Eye" (none of the extant chapters are called that in the released game, though this would make a lot of sense for an alternate title to chapter 3, and in the English translation, at one point Skullshatterer says the phrase word-for-word); there is a timer of some sort over Operator Management; the Store was actually Penguin Logistics-themed (which might've meant that either Closure was originally a PL member or one of the other PL girls was going to be the "Store Girl"); there are two other unknown icons next to the friend list; and the depot seems to have an item storage limit (something mercifully missing in the final game).
  • The debut trailer used a slightly different design for the character who is seemingly Talulah; this character has somewhat straighter, longer hair, a more obvious side-tail, her hair color is more obviously white or platinum blonde, she also has bright grey eyes and an overall very aristocratic feel to her. Talulah in the released iteration of the game◊, has shorter hair than in the promo, a somewhat more "scorched"-looking dress, her hair is a bit smokier in color, and has eyes that are either a darker grey or literally burn with embers in them◊; it's difficult to tell. Curiously, though, the original image from the promo is still in the data files◊ for the game. This also presumes that the "Talulah" we see in Evil Time and Separated Hearts is not actually meant to be a separate character from the one in the trailer, as she makes a comment during Separated Hearts that seems addressed at another Talulah who is not herself.
  • There were a lot of gameplay-related concepts during the development phase, alpha and beta tests that turned out to be different from the released version.
    • Perhaps the biggest from the game's earlier beta phases in China, though, was that Dr. Kal'tsit was playable, rather than just a background character. She was more than a bit bonkers, being a combination Medic/Summoner with an incredibly powerful summon entity that could be re-summoned infinitely. It's unclear if the playable character was pulled simply for being too powerful for launch (and Hypergryph not wanting to nerf her too heavily so as not to dilute her character concept) or if the nature of her playability felt too much like tipping the hand of the story too early. Or both. It's worth noting that much like that one shot of "old" Talulah, an image file◊ for Kal'tsit's summon can still be found in the game's files.
    • The closed Beta used to be quite different from the later game in fact. To start, it had one unit that was removed later (Kal'tsit), two that were removed but put back in later (May and Conviction), and everyone was a star downgraded (i.e Noir Corne was 1 star, something now only reserved for the robots). Skyfire had infinite meteors that stunned on attack ^note  it seemingly functioning similar to Mountain's S2 , and similarly, Silence had 3 drones instead of one, but the enemies were stronger as well. The sprites of in particularly Fang, Beagle and Gitano were quite different-looking as well. The enemies being stronger resulted it in the game being badly reviewed during beta.
    • The now notorious Human Resources bag was a rather late addition. Even into the later stages of beta when the rest of the UI was mostly final, the animation for gacha was a contract under a blister wrapper being cut open by several lasers on the four angles, as it was during alpha. There is somewhat a remnant of this visual, as the label "Authority Level: 6" that was present on the blister is seen identical on some document in the background of the Contigency Contract's contract selection menu.
    • Apart from some major UI changes, the main difference in early alpha was the treatment of dupes like any other game, and a player could bring more than one of a given operator into a map and deploy as many of them at once as they please.
    • RIIC base skills appeared quite late, as the beta stage didn't seem to have any of them, with operators just working in any facility they were put into.
    • Similarly, the Trading Post functioned quite differently; there were three operator slots, and each operator was trading one object at a time, meaning you could trade gold bricks and artificial originum all at once. There were different tiers of gold, and base building material could be traded as well.
    • The distinction between Guards and Vanguards did not exist in early alpha. Vanguards were simply Guards with DP-generation skills. Notably, Dobermann then used Charge β, the same skill as Courier, while her whip attack had the same range.
    • Operators unlocked their current Elite 2 artwork as early as Elite 1. Whether Elite 1 was the last level of promotion or not is unknown, but the artwork was unlocked before E2.
    • Early in development, while the geometry of stages such as LS-4 was mostly final, the aesthetic of the maps was much cleaner, resembling somewhat Mirror's Edge or Portal — although these could have been temp assets. In a later beta stage, however, 4-10 used a rather cleaner and brighter version of the Chernobog aesthetic, rather than the stage's current frostbitten theme.
    • Saria would have been a Defender with a ranged attack◊, similar to Liskarm, but this was changed during development. Her curious "gun-shaped syringe" weapon is an artifact of this idea (as it was originally just a firearm, or an actual syringe gun).
    • Conviction, who was present in the beta as a Push-type Specialist, was later removed and eventually re-added for April Fools 2020 as a single-target Guard.
    • May was also present in the beta, but was cut and re-added for the "Code of Brawl" event. Her skillsket from the beta was different than her final version as well - She had lower stats, one of her potential bonuses are changed, her talent was supposed to be Fast Cartridge (just like Exusiai), her first skill was supposed to be "Power Strike γ" (just like SilverAsh, and her second skill would increase her attack stat, attack interval and adds a slow debuff to enemies hit.
  • In the closed beta test, Blue Poison was classified as one of the Abyssal Hunters, but this was somewhat retconned upon the final release; she still seems to have something to do with them, but the connection is no longer explicit.
  • Shirayuki had a different pose and costume during the 2017 gameplay showcase, sporting a much more revealing outfit with an exposed belly, a tube top, asymmetrical fishnet legging and sleeves, and long tassels that wouldn't look out of place in the Dead or Alive series. The Shirayuki we have now has a much more conservative and arguably more Ninja-like outfit, whereas her original design was more in line with that of Mai Shiranui's.
    • From the same beta screenshots, it can be observed that there's a lock button, meaning that Arknights likely had a limited roster system like in other gacha games in its earlier stages, where the player is forced to consider keeping certain operators, before being reworked into the one we have now.
  • The final two members of the Ursus students used to have a much more standardized character design than they do now, along with distinctly different classes. Rosa in particular used to be of an ambiguous class, with the only clue at all to her kit being a fire extinguisher, before being turned into a Sniper for the final release. The fifth member, Leto, originally used a small crossbow, thus suggesting her to be a Sniper in early concepts, whereas she uses a halberd now, hinting at her being either a Vanguard or a Guard of some kind.
  • There exists an unused "Elite 3" sprite in the files, that looks exactly like one might expect: identical to the Elite 1 and 2 icon, but with three of the medal elements stacked together.
  • Another unused icon: prior to the UI rework of many aspects of character upgrade with the release of Lingering Echoes, the interface for raising an Operator's potential displayed a Success rate, however it was not possible to get any other number than 100%, making this information redundant; hence its later removal. Datamining the game files shows the existence of an unused sprite named "icon_potential_fail", displaying the silhouette of a person tripping off a staircase and falling. It is most likely that these elements are residual of a previous intent for raising potential to be able to fail. When one remembers that 4 generic class tokens are required no matter what to raise a unit's potential, it is safe to assume that it was previously possible to use less than 4 at once, but with a diminished rate of success.
  • Composer Obadiah Brown-Beach stated in an interview that Goldenglow's Leitmotif, "Spark for Dream", was originally commissioned for an undisclosed and now scrapped character. After Hypergryph had the character removed from development, they held onto the song until eventually requesting it be rewritten for Goldenglow's release.
• Word of Saint Paul:
  • Despite Hypergryph's ambiguous status quo on the actual relationship between the main Rhine Labs trio, their official artist, NoriZC, seems to agree with the fandom's interpretation of them being an actual family unit (or was a family unit at any rate), and apparently also subscribes to the idea that Saria and Silence "created" Ifrit somehow, as he frequently draws his own fanart of them together in that fashion, while also sharing similar ones from other illustrators on his social media. Really, the only thing Nori doesn't seem to be on the same page with the fandom is Saria's memetic Bumbling Dad persona, since his own artwork almost always depict her professionally, though he does find them funny, judging by the amount of stuff he frequently retweets on his personal Twitter.
  • Namie, the artist who designed Mizuki and Goldenglow, is known for acting like a proud mother towards the characters she helped create, showering them with love and referring to them as her children. Even though the two of them are largely unrelated as far as canon is concerned, she talks about them as if they're siblings, with Mizuki as the older brother due to being added first. As a result, it became a popular trend in fan works to show them acting Like Brother and Sister; a trend that Namie herself wholeheartedly endorses.

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