On December 19th, Chinese state media CCTV released a creative art video about the Song Dynasty masterpiece Along the River During the Qingming Festival on Bilibili. The video shows 132 cultural easter eggs in a contemporary way and includes pop culture symbols from the past 10 years.
Among them, there are many video game and anime IPs, including Genshin Impact, Pokémon, Onmyoji, Eastward, etc. See how many you can recognize.
Genshin Impact
The first game easter egg is Keqing from HoYoverse’s Genshin Impact. She was depicted selling ngau zap (beef offal) in the picture, which references a meme related to her Chinese voiceover. The Electro character’s powerful skill Starward Sword sounds like the dish instead when she speaks her line fast.
Psyduck and Travel Frog
This year, before Children’s Day, KFC China introduced three brand new Pokémon toys for kids’ meals to celebrate the festival. Surprisingly, Psyduck became a viral sensation on social media during that time.
Travel Frog is a free-to-play mobile game developed by Hit-Point Co., Ltd. that operates in Japan, released in November 2017. In the same year, Chinese developer Lingxi Games won the IP authorization for the game and launched a version of the game in China.
Onmyoji and Honor of Kings
Onmyoji is a turn-based RPG mobile game developed by NetEase Games. It was launched in June 2016. The MOBA Game Honor of Kings was developed by TiMi Studio Group and published by Tencent Games. Zhuang Zhou, the champion shown in the picture on the right, is a support tank hero in Honor of Kings.
These easter eggs also include Eastward and F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch, which are shown in the picture above.
There was also an image showing the League of Legends team EDG winning the World Championship in 2021 and so on.
Check out the full video on Bilibili.