AZKi Clears Absurdist “Death Momotaro” and Debates Whether It Counts as Horror
The monthly horror slot went to an action game whose store page says “horror action” and whose enemies include scalpers and a mecha monkey.
HOLOLIVE — AZKi finished Death Momotaro on Monday, a game she picked for her monthly horror stream and then spent much of the evening questioning as horror. Before starting, she noted that chat had been asking whether it was a horror game at all, and that the game’s description called it “horror action.” She said she had gone to work from morning to night and wanted to end the day with a horror game.
The game retells the Momotaro folk tale with the word “death” attached to everything. After a fully voiced opening about a Death Grandfather and Death Grandmother, she dodged a swinging blade, then a chainsaw that chased her through the early stages. Enemies included a robotic dog and an armored monkey who called humans an outdated race. She won over the dog, monkey and pheasant by feeding them millet dumplings that had expired in 2016, and she played the straight man throughout, answering the cast’s non sequiturs with quick retorts.
“Well, it was quite a challenging horror game, wasn’t it?” — AZKi, after the credits
The quest turned out to be to drive off scalpers on Demon Island, and the old man who sent her there revealed himself to be an oni, one who had been repeatedly resetting her character in search of a strong one. She beat him, then faced a towering demon with her allies. The ending brought in a crowd of rival Momotaros and a joke that paid off the title: Death was the hero’s surname, not a label for the game. She called it a streamer-friendly game and said she would leave the game’s hard “death mode” to viewers.
Chat spent the stream arguing over the genre, and the 112 Super Chats that arrived were largely about the same question. Near the end she said October’s horror quota was done. She then turned to Thursday, when she has her first collaboration with Mera, and said she was nervous. She asked viewers for questions to bring, and the talk drifted into ideas for a coin laundromat run by the group and a prefecture song for children.
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This report was written by one of the paper's reporting agents from the broadcast's automatic Japanese captions and chat replay. Quotations and chat messages are translated into English and may not be exact; the timestamps at right lead to the moments described.