One Writer Hunted PS5 Game Merch in Chengdu's Massive Anime Mall

A Side Quest in Chengdu

Most visitors to Chengdu are there for the giant stone Buddha, the historical temples, and the famously relaxed pace of life in Sichuan province. Push Square editor Sammy Barker had a slightly different agenda. According to his feature published on the site, once his coverage obligations around upcoming PS5 action game Tides of Annihilation were wrapped up, he made a beeline for the multi-storey anime mall sitting right next to Tianfu Square. The detour, as he frames it, was a bonus look at local otaku culture from someone who spends a lot of time tracking gaming and anime merchandise trends across Asia.

Barker has previously documented similar shopping expeditions in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea, always with an eye toward which franchises are dominating retail floor space. China, as the domestic home of HoYoverse, the studio behind Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, felt like it should have been the motherlode.

The HoYoverse Surprise

It wasn’t, quite. As reported by Push Square, Barker found the presence of HoYoverse titles noticeably thinner than he anticipated. Outside of an Infinity Nikki pizza promotion and a note that Arknights: Endfield had apparently partnered with Domino’s, the games that feel inescapable in Tokyo and Seoul were surprisingly understated on Chengdu retail shelves. A few scattered pieces in a small independent shop, where staff assumed he was there for Pokemon cards, was closer to the reality.

His first real Genshin Impact sighting came at Winshare, a bookstore about twenty minutes from his hotel that he visited on the evening of a panda tour. The store carried the trio of official Genshin art books released so far. Barker noted he is aware that Volumes 1 and 2 are available in western markets, but was uncertain whether a third volume had made it over yet.

What Actually Filled the Shelves

The more revealing part of the trip, at least for readers interested in what Chinese consumers are actually buying, was which titles were prominently featured when HoYoverse was not.

Barker had recently gotten into Link Click, a Chinese animation about two people who can enter memories through photographs. He found a healthy amount of Link Click merchandise and print editions in stores, which matched his expectations. But the title that genuinely caught his eye was one most western readers probably have not encountered: Biao Ren, translated as Blades of the Guardians, a manhua series that began serialization in 2015. According to Barker’s account, multiple shops had all 13 volumes in stock, and a movie adaptation featuring Jet Li had released earlier this year, which likely explains why it was being pushed so visibly. He also noted that the artist behind the series had no formal art training before conceiving it, spending four years learning to draw before beginning work in earnest.

Before actually entering the anime mall, Barker also stopped at a general shopping center housing an official Pokemon store, which carried China-exclusive items including a Pikachu plush dressed in traditional Chinese garb, available in both male and female versions. He acknowledged the digression, given that Push Square is a PlayStation-focused outlet, but the stop illustrated how thoroughly Pokemon has worked its way into every corner of Asian retail.

Gaming Merch as Cultural Fieldwork

The full anime mall visit is the centerpiece of the piece, and Barker frames the entire Chengdu excursion as a kind of informal field research into which gaming and animation properties are resonating where, and how that maps onto what western audiences assume about global fanbases. The gap between HoYoverse’s massive international profile and its comparatively quiet domestic retail footprint in this particular city is exactly the kind of ground-level observation that rarely surfaces in standard coverage. Whether that reflects regional retail quirks in Chengdu specifically, or something broader about how Chinese consumers engage with homegrown franchises, is a question the piece leaves pleasantly open.