Trivia / Azur Lane

• Acting for Two:
  • Sumire Uesaka plays Queen Elizabeth, Akashi, Saratoga, and Warspite. The Japanese third-anniversary stream actually had Uesaka show off a bit in this regard; in a segment hosted by Akashi, she fielded call-ins from Saratoga, Elizabeth, and Warspite, meaning that Uesaka was voicing four different characters conversing with each other in one segment!
• Bad Export for You:
  • Generally, this has been averted (to the surprise of many); efforts have been made to catch up newer versions to older ones and things are set up that all versions get balancing patches at close to the same time, meaning the newest version, the English one, only has to wait a week at most before getting the latest balance patch and skins. However, the quality of the translation, while serviceable, can be a little inconsistent, and early on it was downright bad; it started getting better with "Crimson Echoes" and "Ink-Stained Steel Sakura".
  • In some ways it's inverted. The "Divergent Chessboard" event for EN has a couple of ships from the rerun (Z25 and Z35), it got "Crimson Echoes" almost concurrently with the CN and JP versions (which began a tradition of "new" events arriving concurrently with CN and JP as EN caught up on past stuff), and it got "Fallen Wings" far earlier in its life compared to the other versions (even China where it first ran). "Winter's Crown" was similarly what CN & JP got as the rerun version, and featured Sirius and Victorious in the gacha at the same time. (Said event was a rough starting point for newbies, since even the early stages featured Level 40+ Sirens.) It was played a bit more straight with "Ink-Stained Steel Sakura" and "Iris of Light and Dark"; CN/JP got rerun events while EN got the original, which means EN did not get I-13, Suzuya, Le Malin, or L'Opiniâtre (although funnily, it would, where applicable, maintain parity with cosmetic skins, with EN getting things like Nagato's sleepwear skin right alongside her debut).
  • The only thing that used to really lag behind was retrofits, as these could sometimes take multiple months to hit the EN server after appearing on the CN and JP ones. While this was somewhat understandable from a balance and progression perspective, it can be aggravating in cases like Saratoga or Warspite, where their retrofits take them from "pretty good" to "hanging out near the top of the tier list" and fans of those ships were left on tenterhooks wondering when the update will drop in EN. The events also used to still lag behind a little bit despite the altered schedule, but this was more to give the translators time to work and to avoid overwhelming the EN players in "catch-up"; eventually, starting with the Kizuna Ai event, the EN server synced with Japan and China more or less entirely. And by 2020, even the retrofits were completely current with the Asian servers.
  • For some, this started to creep back in with the debut of the Polaris event on the CN and JP servers while EN got its long-anticipated rerun of "Divergent Chessboard" - appreciated by many, but compared to the surprising amount of shiny newness in Polaris, DC suddenly felt a bit lacking, especially since by November 2019 DC (originally ran in 2017) was showing its age as an event (with its un-engaging maps and sometimes infuriating drop rates). More egregious was Memphis debuting exactly one month too late for her Halloween skin to be available in EN (she became November 2019's login reward). Yostar did take the time to point out that EN absolutely would be getting Polaris in early 2020, but this still made people antsy (and not helping matters was Polaris pretty much requiring the second World of Warships collab being introduced, since one of the characters involved is the idol version of one of the crossover ships). The Memphis matter was negated by the announcement of her Halloween skin getting a special run to make up for it.
  • And rounding it all off, by September 2020, around the time of JP's third anniversary, the EN server was missing exactly one mini-event, one ship, and one (likely non-exportable) collab event compared to the JP and CN servers; in most people's eyes, that point marked effective full parity with the Asian servers.
  • The matter of event archiving is debated as Global has them slower than other areas due to the exclusive one week rate up for the ships, which seem to require a two week break period, something that is rare in the 2020s. This is debated as some would rather have the archivings faster (sooner to hit wishing wells and farming the levels for exclusive gear) while others would prefer the rate up.
  • HMS Howe, due to some reputed incidents with her artist Snow Is, is not available in the Korean server (the Aurora Noctis event in that server omitted her).
• Banned in China: As of an April 8 2021 update, 18 boat girls were indefinitely made unavailable to acquire in China: Wichita, Portland, Rodney, South Dakota, Belfast, Sirius, Exeter, Ark Royal, Illustrious, Akagi, Kaga, Yuudachi, Yuubari, Taihou, Hyuuga, Fusou, Scharnhorst, and Graf Zeppelin. No official explanation was provided, but many fans think it was due to China cracking down on “soft pornography” and “salacious” content in video games.
• Career Resurrection: While it may still be too soon to say if this is the case, this could be applied in the Latin American Spanish dub with San Diego's voice actress, Gaby Ugarte, who had quit voice acting after she moved to France. It should be noted, however, that Ugarte did the voice acting of her lines from that country, like anyone else, as a result of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• Colbert Bump:
  • The Japanese version got a boost from Kizuna AI playing it, starting with a dev-made account pre-release then moving on to her own. This started something of a mutual relationship with the Japanese Twitter promoting her and vice-versa, leading to having her announce the release of "Fallen Wings" to EN (in screaming Engrish). And as of April 2019, a collaboration with the game.
  • In English-speaking territories, the various collaborations with World of Warships has helped the latter game's visibility significantly.
  • For most players, this happens to be their first exposure to the hololive Girls in general via the collab; most people would only recognize Kizuna Ai and Kaguya Luna as virtual Youtubers. This has gotten fans to get curious about such characters as well and see what they're about.
• Defictionalization: The bike in Jamaica's Highway Star skin is actually being made by Yamaha◊ (as it was based off one of their models).
• Development Gag:
  • The three chibis of Ayanami, Glowworm, and a pink-haired rabbit-eared girl is a nod to the pre-beta starter lineup; Laffey's design there was done by Hao (and is closer design-wise to Benson◊) before it was changed to her current one by Yumesaki Kaede, and Glowworm was replaced by Javelin.
  • The tutorial screen still features the original Price of Wales' chibi in the ammo type screen.
• Distanced from Current Events: The Darkness Within Dawn event was announced on February 18, 2022. There were some concerns from fans given that the event was Northern Parliment-centric considering the rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine, and because one of the ships unveiled for the event was the Soviet Project 48 destroyer Kiev, named after the capital city of Ukraine, not to mention built in a port city currently under Ukrainian jurisdiction. In the wee hours of February 24, 2022 (CET), shortly before all of the game's regional servers went down for pre-event maintenance, the real life Russian Federation launched an invasion into the cities of Lugansk and Donetsk and Ukraine as a whole. Although not officially announced, Yostar decided to pull off the comments' sections of all Northern Parliament ships until September 23, 2022, which they returned along with a report button.
• Dueling Works:
  • Of all of the shipgirl games that were made following KanColle's success, this series became its biggest competitor (Manjuu would've been happy making it a doujin game if they were unable to secure enough funding to make something substantial).
    • It also duels against Girls' Frontline, another game made in a similar framework to Kancolle (but with guns), particularly since key figures in the two games' companies are actually rivals.
  • The Fall 2019 season presented three anime titles based on gacha games: Azur Lane, Fate/Grand Order - Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia, and the second season of Granblue Fantasy.
• Executive Meddling: The Idolmaster collab came with a number of changes not seen in any other, such as non-romantic oathing for the collab units and not showing even clones of the characters blowing up in battle. It's clear that these were things Bandai-Namco insisted on to protect the IP and to minimize outrage from Idolmaster fans.
• Fan Community Nicknames: Players of Azur Lane are called "Commanders" or "Shikikans", based on the Prestigious Player Title for the player character. And probably to distinguish its player base from "Admirals", as was used by the KanColle community.
• Fountain of Expies: Prinz Eugen's popularity has caused a number of later Ironblood ships to take a number of key traits from her (white hair, red streak, partially exposed sizable bust), such as Prinz Heinrich (despite being more related to the Deutschland-class), Talin (Sister ship), and Agir.
• Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.": A particularly odd game-internal version. Mikasa, introduced in the CN and JP versions in her own event, went on to appear in a number of other events as time went on, most notably Ink-Stained Steel Sakura and Christmas 2018. The EN server got those events relatively on-schedule... and thus saw Mikasa in other events before her obtainable debut in her own event. Similarly, Z2 Georg Thiele appeared in "Swirling Cherry Blossoms" on all servers at the end of 2019, including the EN server. Her own event, "Stars Over the Fjord", was one of the few that had not yet been "caught up" on the English server at that point, so EN players first saw Thiele outside her own event.
• Newbie Boom: Unsurprisingly, the game's seen several of them.
  • The various collaborations with World of Warships always brings in some new, interested players.
  • The worldwide simultaneous debut of the anime brought in such a huge wave of new players to all versions, the English one included, that Yostar felt compelled to comment on the phenomenon.
• No Export for You: As with all anime adaptations licensed by Funimation, as of August 2020, this anime is not available for Latin American audiences. However, it was averted with the original material (the game itself); two months after the anime's first broadcast, Yostar Games announced that the game was released for Latin America, being the first non-Asian and non-English speaking region in which the game is available. This is later subverted with the anime, which became available in Funimation's Latin American feed starting February 2021.
  • Only the Chinese server has Chinese dubbed lines for Empery ships.
• Production Posse: The English dub of the anime contains many cast members who have worked on the anime adaptation of KanColle. However, the AL and KanColle versions of certain shipgirls have different voice actresses. For example, KanColle!Akagi is voiced by Tia Ballard, but AL!Akagi is voiced by Amber Lee Connors, who voiced Ooi in KanColle. Ballard herself voices Laffey in AL.
• Promoted Fanboy: Some artists who did fanart of the game were invited to contribute official art and even shipgirl designs, and the fact that some of them (like Concord's artist Oouso) created works that shouldn't be seen in public has apparently been no obstacle; in fact, some of them, like Curacoa and Curlew's artist Monety, still do those works while working in official capacity. Some actually had their start doing loading/title screens for the game (Twinbox) or even art for an anniversary artbook which would later become costume skins (Byzzul with Fubuki and Spee's idol skins).
• Recursive Adaptation: Azur Lane: Queen's Orders has basically defined how Queen Elizabeth and Warspite look and act in the game's wider zeitgeist. Elements from it (like Liz's hatred of paperwork and Warspite's use of reading glasses) have folded back into other elements of the game and its promotional material, with the third JP anniversary movie being a prominent example.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Ai Kayano's voice work for Atago, Kaga, Graf Zeppelin, and Renown was outright removed from the Chinese client in June 2021 due to an incident involving her posting on social media about a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, a place that is rather infamous amongst non-Japanese Asian countries due to its enshrinement of war criminals. This also affected other Chinese-made games such as Arknights and Girls' Frontline. Her voice lines are still available in the Japanese and English versions of this game.
• Schedule Slip:
  • The last two episodes aired on March 13 and 20, 2020. The reason behind it is that the production team suffered a Troubled Production while doing the anime adaptation.
  • Even worse, the English dub of those episodes started releasing on August 2020, five months behind schedule, mainly due to the production problems associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• Start My Own: Out of work example: it seems that Yostar had been disappointed by the inconsistent quality and Troubled Production of the first anime; when they announced the Slow Ahead anime adaptation, they had created their own animation studio to handle not only that project but also any adaptations for their other published games such as Arknights.
• The Other Darrin: Due to the Role-Ending Misdemeanor entry above, Ai Kayano's voice roles were recast to other voice actresses starting in late July 2022, at least permanently in the Chinese servers. For the Japanese and English servers, clients have an option to toggle between whose voice work they want to hear for each of the recasted characters.
  • Yumi Uchiyama takes over the role for Graf Zeppelin and her "small" counterpart.
  • Yuka Iguchi takes over as the voice of Kaga and her Tosa-class counterpart, which doubles as a Role Reprise for her, having previously voiced the former's Kancolle counterpart.
  • Ayako Kawasumi takes over as the voice of Renown and Little Renown; which, considering one of her more famous roles, comes off as a weird case of Hilarious in Hindsight.
• Unfinished Episode: Believe it or not, the story of the main Campaign that is based on the American side of World War II does not have scripted lines beyond Chapter 3 in the EN server, after Yorktown is killed. Even the following missions in the later chapters have summaries of various units. The game's storyline began leaning much more heavily on events beginning with Visitors Dyed in Red (which follows on from the Sakura-side aftermath of Midway, and where the real fork in history begins). The CN and JP servers have scripted dialogue for Chapter 4, but no word as to when EN will get it.
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • The little shipgirl that is seen on the loading screen bars, carrying a torpedo and ultimately dropping it on herself, is rumored to be the infamous USS William D Porter, colloquially known as "Willie Dee", a Fletcher-class Destroyer known for its extremely bad luck, including almost sinking the USS Iowa and killing Franklin D. Roosevelt during a botched torpedo exercise.
  • The two unidentified girls to the side of Bismarck in the loading screen for the Scherzo of Iron and Blood event are suspected to be Blücher and Admiral Scheer, two Ironblood girls who have yet to debut in the game. There is some validity to this rumor, as Friedrich der Grosse made a cameo in a loading screen a year before her formal announcement.
• What Could Have Been:
  • One of the absolute biggest involves Nagato and Mutsu; the game launched with art for the both◊ of them handled by Jong Tu/mzt. For about a year, Manjuu seemed fine with the designs (which were present in the game in sprite form as the two appeared in world stages, with Nagato's portrait buried in the files), and they remained even when others (like the 'Kaku sisters) were revised; mzt's art and designs were even used in a few promotional banners and the like. However, as "Ink-Stained Steel Sakura" approached (to commemorate the game's first overall anniversary), Manjuu's art leads evidently decided that the designs and/or art needed refinement (and, perhaps, that mzt's more aggressive-looking Nagato didn't quite mesh with the role and temperament they were envisioning for Nagato in AL's evolving plotline). Another possible factor was the fiasco that happened with the original Colorado-class artist that caused Fallen Wings to be delayed for a long time in terms of rerunning (CN)/running(JP). What precisely happened next between mzt and Manjuu depends a bit on who you ask (and neither side is all that sanguine about discussing it in general), but the aftermath was that Alisa (one of Manjuu's permanent staff artists) took over art for the Nagato class, providing the designs◊ for the two◊ that we all know today, and mzt ended up heavily estranged from Manjuu; this had the knock-on effect of leaving Shouhou orphaned, as she was the one other ship mzt had worked on up to that point.
  • The Fallen Wings fiasco stems from having to find new designs for the three Colorado-class ships after the original artist, RailSliver (who explicitly supported Warship Girls), found his (self-admitted) half-assed art being touched up by Manjuu's art team and went into a racist rant at Manjuu and others at how they were over-pandering to Japan. The artist replacement took so long that the rerun in China took over a year (at which time Global and Japan got their only run). This had a big effect on many things like Washington and North Carolina showing some of their age with their key counter, Nagato, being in the Japanese version for some time (and the English version rather soon after). By this point the two battleships' artist, Kishiyo, had gone on a nigh-hiatus. Ships getting skins outside of event runs and before archiving was also unheard of at the time; thus, when the War Archive was implemented, even the Colorado-class ships were skinless in part due to their artist providing art for Arknights. The only ship from that event who regularly gets skins is Minneapolis. All this has given the event a reputation for being "cursed".
  • If you're looking to buy Gems, you might notice something a bit off: chibi versions of Ayanami, Glowworm, and a Laffey with pink hair. Laffey, as drawn by Benson's artist, had originally pink hair conceptually, but she looked a bit too similar to Ayanami and Benson so she was further refined to the form we know today during AL's Chinese beta and early release periods. As for Glowworm, she was originally going to be the Royal Navy starter instead of Javelin, which would explain Glowworm's status as an Elite Ship. This has the incidental effect of forcing Javelin into having a similar skillset as the other starters instead of a "zombie"-type skill that would reference how the ship was able to sustain massive damage and still float.
  • Yukikaze was also considered as a candidate for starter-hood (her base skin having a 3D-modeled Live2D element in the vein of the published starters is likely an artifact of that), with her original design being along the lines of Nowaki's but primarily white.
  • One of the most unique examples came with Tosa in the Crimson Echoes rerun of April 2020. Tosa was announced with art that most people thought was cool and nice. Well, either Liduke or some of the other Manjuu staff (or both) didn't think it was acceptable, and the very day of the update, a fairly substantial revision to Tosa's art was announced. Her eyes were most prominently affected, but adjustments were also made to her ahoge, her pose, and her chest, and the eye change had a knock-on effect on all of her expressions.
  • Similarly, when the playable FFNF Jeanne d'Arc was properly revealed, there turned out to be massive revisions compared to the teased version that appeared in the Iris of Light and Dark event, particularly with the rigging. This did have a gap of nearly two years (in China), but the difference was still stark.
  • Occasionally, the game's independent artists will post concepts for the girls that show how they evolved.
    • Mkiiiiii with Z2 Georg Thiele is a good example. Thiele's early design had her in a short hoodie-dress not terribly dissimilar to Javelin's and tall thigh-highs before gradually evolving into her jacket; she also lacked the puppet early on, and when the puppet was added it was much more obviously a puppet at first (with the reference being actual plush hand puppets) before evolving into the extension of her rigging we know today. (Mk has produced fanart of Thiele in the hoodie after the fact, with Mk's other fanart designs eventually ending up as official skins.)
    • Ibuki's anniversary skin was actually locked down conceptually from almost the start: an evening gown with a bustle, closed-toe high heels with lace straps up the shins, and some kind of feather hair decoration, with only the minor details being fussed over. It was the pose that kept changing radically; MayaG went through more than half a dozen poses that all differed substantially in position and body language before the one used in the final art was settled on.
    • Enka's early concepts for Shoukaku's anniversary dress were much more "traditional" ball gowns with a crane theme before the idea for the ballet-themed dress came up; one even had wing-like filigree from her neck to her waist.
    • Byulzzi's design drafts for Toricelli were centered on her final bottom-heavy design, with a number of outfits and poses considered. But a busty take was considered with said take's outfit being akin to Kancolle's I-26 (jacket over a swimsuit).
  • Reno's artwork was originally intended to be for the dreadnought New York and her robotic right hand still has New York's hull number BB-34 on it.