Today, Overwatch announced the PachiMarchi Challenge, the newest event celebrating the game’s weird half-onion, half-octopus mascot Pachimari. Starting today, players who win games in Quick Play, Arcade, or Competitive mode can win Pachimari-themed cosmetics, including a Pachimari Roadhog skin that is, depending on your inclination, either very cute or extremely unsettling.
Watching the trailer feels like you’re being held hostage in a primary-colored fever dream. It is wholesomely chaotic as Roadhog and his partner (Romantic, platonic, who can say? They’ll never tell) Junkrat take turns showing off their Pachimari prizes while bantering in Japanese. It’s very big “Never Give Up” energy.
Pachimari is a fan favorite. Whenever my friends and I played Overwatch together, we had an unspoken rule that your player icon had to be some flavor of Pachimari. I even have a Pachimari plushie. It sits by my bed watching me with its beady, black eyes, mouth open either to devour me or let loose a scream of agony *ahem*.
It makes sense that Roadhog was chosen to be the face of the PachiMarchi Challenge. He has an emote called “secret friend” in which the imposing tank character, who never speaks more than five words at a time, surreptitiously pulls out a Pachimari toy and squeaks it before secreting it away again. I’m still not sure which camp I fall into between “cute” or “nightmare-inducing,” but I can say this: I want a real version of that hat.