You were supposed to have a fake marriage with the diva, so how did you become her father?

The news of the launch of "Discovering the Classic of Mountains and Seas Together" took less than a week from decision to implementation within TUTU.

The technical task list that Zhou Mingzhe arranged was broken down into dozens of small sections, with each section labeled with the person in charge and the deadline.

Zhao Yiming led the map team to work four sleepless nights to get the global basic map data running smoothly. The art team finished drawing the concept art for the first batch of region-limited creatures before the packaging was completed. The operations team translated the localized copy into seventeen languages.

The night before the official release, Lu Ran installed the beta version on his phone and went through the process.

After opening the game, there is a short tutorial animation, with several illustrations in the style of the Classic of Mountains and Seas flashing across the screen—Yinglong tumbling in the clouds, a nine-tailed fox crouching on a mountain rock, and Bifang standing on one leg atop a withered tree.

After the animation ended, he entered the map interface. His phone popped up asking for location permission, and he clicked "agree." A map of the area centered on his current location then appeared on the screen.

The map wasn't marked with many markers, just a few small dots of light scattered around, each dot representing a creature that could be captured.

He walked out of the office and circled the corridor, catching a low-level common-type creature at the entrance of the break room and a second one at the corner of the stairs.

He completed two captures within two minutes, and the whole process was so smooth that even he was a little surprised.

The data curve on the day of the product launch was steeper than anyone had anticipated.

When Zhou Mingzhe projected the download curve on the screen during the morning meeting, it showed that the download curve had risen almost vertically in the first two hours after the server went live, with such a steep slope that it made people wonder if there was a problem with the backend statistics.

The outbreak first occurred in North America.

While the influence of Pokémon's past has not been fully replicated in this world, the underlying appeal of collectible gameplay is almost cross-cultural.

North American players flooded the servers on the day the game was released, and Twitter was soon filled with posts showing off their finds—some caught Bigfoot in the subway station, some caught Jersey Devil in their backyard, and some caught Mothman under a streetlamp in the middle of the night.

A New York player posted a screenshot on Reddit showing his character standing on the Brooklyn Bridge sidewalk with the Manhattan skyline in the background. In the center of the screen stands a Mothman with translucent wings, shimmering faintly in the game's rendered moonlight. His caption was brief: "Just grabbed it on my way home from get off work. This game is addictive."

The post was pushed to the front page of Reddit within hours, with comments asking, "Does this thing really exist?", replying, "It's a virtual creature in a game, but its location is real," and adding, "I just caught a Bigfoot in Central Park, it's bigger than my dog."

The situation in Los Angeles is even more extreme.

Someone caught a region-exclusive Bigfoot on the hillside below the Hollywood sign. That location was marked hundreds of times over the next few days, with the coordinates shifting randomly by several hundred meters each time. But players still happily walked around the same hillside, and some people's step count jumped from 20,000 to 70,000 in three days.

Someone posted on the forum, "I climbed up and down the hillside four times to catch that Bigfoot, and my legs are no longer my own." The replies below were all "Me too" and "It was worth it, that Bigfoot is legendary in rarity."

The European region took a different approach.

German players tend to play more meticulously.

On the second day after the game was released, someone on the forum compiled a table showing the distribution patterns of region-limited creatures. The table was categorized and statistically analyzed by latitude and longitude, altitude, terrain features, and refresh time. The table was even more organized than some of the product documents within TUTU.

The spreadsheet was translated into several languages ​​and circulated in various regions of the European server. Someone commented that "Germans play games like they're doing academic research." The person who posted the spreadsheet replied, "Accurate data improves capture efficiency; that's common sense."

French players are more concerned with the visuals and atmosphere. A group of players in Paris formed a small exploration team along the Seine, walking from west to east along the riverbank and catching every creature that spawned along the way.

They posted a status update with a location tag in the game's built-in sharing function, showing the coordinates as being near Notre Dame Cathedral, with the caption: "Today's haul: two aquatic creatures and a rare fairy. The sunset over the Seine is even better than the game visuals."

That post was shared many times in the French server player community. Someone replied, "I also want to go to the Seine to catch fairies," and someone asked in the comments, "Are fairies more likely to spawn on the left or right bank of the river?"

The style of the British version is more down-to-earth.

A player in London caught a regionally exclusive griffin in a subway station and excitedly tweeted, "I caught a griffin in the subway, this is happier than winning the lottery."

Someone replied, "Which station?" He said, "Baker Street." The next day, the number of location requests near Baker Street subway station increased several times over compared to the previous day.

Someone stood by the subway platform for ten minutes and caught five ordinary creatures before posting, "Baker Street is full of people looking down at their phones today," followed by a comment, "I'm at Victoria Station, and this place is full of people catching unicorns."

Players in Southeast Asia reacted the most enthusiastically.

A player in the Philippines posted a video on a forum. In the video, he was standing on the beach with his phone screen facing the sea. A Naga was half-emerging from the water, and the scales on its skin shimmered with a deep blue luster under the game's rendering.

The video features the sound of waves and his own barely suppressed laughter, with his companions shouting in the background, "Grab it! Grab it!"

The video was uploaded to gaming forums in several countries, and someone asked in the comments, "Do Naga really spawn on the beach?" The person who posted the video replied, "They only appear within an hour after the tide goes out. I waited for three days before I encountered one."

In Thailand, some players have caught a flying creature near a temple.

It is a virtual creature with deep roots in Buddhist culture, classified as a "spirit beast" in the game, and its rarity is much higher than that of ordinary creatures.

The player posted a screenshot on social media with a caption in Thai, which roughly translates to, "I caught it at the temple near my house. My grandma said it's a good omen."

The post quickly went viral in Thailand, with people forming teams to visit various temples in hopes of catching their destined flying apsara.

Indonesian gamers are more pragmatic.

Someone walked around the streets of Jakarta catching creatures, and after two hours they caught more than a dozen common creatures and one area-limited species. They posted that "this game made me realize that there are so many alleys near where I live that I have never been before."

In the replies below, someone said, "Me too, I walked three roads I've never walked before today," and someone else said, "When I walked to the alley behind the vegetable market, I caught a rare breed of animal. I never knew there was a road there before."

The feedback from the Japanese region was rather nuanced.

Initially, some players did have concerns about the need to keep location services enabled in this game, and when the privacy policy pop-up appeared, many people took screenshots and posted them on forums for discussion.

However, the game's quality and gameplay quickly shifted the focus of discussion from privacy to "how to collect all the area-restricted items".

Someone caught a tengu in Akihabara and excitedly tweeted, "I didn't expect a tengu to spawn in the electronics district." Someone replied, "Try the shrine next time, maybe you'll find a snow woman."

What truly spurred large-scale participation from the Japanese player base was the introduction of the region-limited trading system within the game.

Someone caught an extra Kappa and put it up for sale on the trading platform in exchange for Ibaraki-doji. The deal was completed very quickly.

After the first cross-regional transaction was completed, the number of discussion posts on Japanese player forums about "how to exchange local exclusives for other regional exclusives" suddenly surged.

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