Lucien Lunaris Takes the Hero’s Side in Annihilated and Wants to See the Story Through

FIRST STAGE PRODUCTION — Lucien Lunaris played Annihilated, a roguelite JRPG card battler with a psychological-horror story told in visual-novel style, for the first time on Friday, choosing the silent hero as a companion and fighting through the opening floors of its dungeon. The streamer stopped after about two and a half hours of play and said they were hooked on the story and wanted to continue.

The game opens with the player as the lone survivor of a rescue squad who finds the hero’s party, annihilated in name only, playing a card game in the depths of the labyrinth. Lunaris talked with the mage, the priest, the warrior and the hero, who can answer only “yes” or “no”, before reasoning that the hero’s full power made the best pick for a first run. The streamer praised the artwork and music, comparing the soundtrack to the 2D Zelda games. Along the way Lunaris worked out the battle system aloud, swapping between the two attack modes, choosing weapons and watching the hero take an arrow to the head and shrug it off. A black knight boss fell more easily than expected, and the party later beat a vengeful former thief of the group, an outcast wielding a great sword.

“I’m really invested. I really want to continue and see what’s up.” — Lucien Lunaris, on ending the stream

Before the game, Lunaris spent roughly the first twenty minutes on a story about the previous day, when a maintenance worker occupied the apartment for hours over a blocked pipe that could not be found. The streamer said they could not reach their streaming room and had to reschedule. Lunaris also said they had overheard a number they took to be around 100,000 yen and worried it might be a repair bill, though they could not tell what it referred to. They then told a story about an older man exercising in a park, which drew a flood of laughing emoji.

Lunaris also said they had found two 30th anniversary Pokémon card booster boxes, one Chinese and one Japanese, among the first batch of viewer gifts, about 40 packs between them. They plan to open the packs, with a hand cam, on a birthday gift-opening stream, and said the gift window had about six days left. Four Super Chats came in, and viewers shared their own moon counts for the stream’s membership shout-outs.

Lunaris said the game could take up to 20 hours and has multiple endings and routes, and that they would likely stay on the hero’s path over a few streams. The next stream was to be a Zelda stream at the usual 6 p.m. JST, depending on whether the maintenance workers return.