- Fukua is 'Blowfish-chan' (probably to tie in with Filia's Pig-chan, since blowfish puff-up but are more dangerous)
- Marie is 'Marie-Chan', Annie is 'Annie-Chan' and Minette is 'KAWAIIII~' (but more often then not it's just Minette-Chan too)
- It took me a while to figure out Double's, so hopefully this is right. Double's name wrote in Japanese is 'ダブル' (Da-bur-ru), while her/its nickname is 'ダボォ' - so literally 'Dabo~o (Da-boo)'. I think the 'boo~' sound can be used as a cute suffix to put at the end of names and can be a shortened word for Messy, which is normally spelt 'ボサボサ' (bosabosa). So in a sense it's a affectionate corruption of the words 'Double' and 'Messy'. I am pretty unsure on this though so if some one knows what that means it would be great!
Next up... Popularity Polls! Okay so you know when I said Marie was popular? Turns out that she is the
most popular in Japan! Both her and Peacock won by a landslide up against the other characters. Here is a link to the
poll, note that only the original 8 cast members are on here though. I'm guessing that if Squigly was included, she would have probably been third:
Marie > Peacock > Valentine > Ms. Fortune > Painwheel > Filia > Double > Parasoul > Cerebella.
Marie and Peacock did well because, not only are they loli's, but they have a close friendship together and both have favourable personality tropes in Japan. Marie is a Kawaii Maid who cares for Peacock and Peacock herself is a 'charismatic spirit' as I said in an earlier post. Valentine? Boobs. Believe me I looked in the comments as to why the people voted and that was the majority response. XD Cat-girls always do well and Filia is in a bit of a middleground limbo - she is likable enough but there is little backstory to her that you can relate with (so pretty much how most people think of Filia over here as well). Parasoul and Cerebella seemed to have suffered because their 'features' didn't particularly 'stand-out'. For example, one person said Cerebella has big boobs but then Valentine just has bigger ones. Also Cerebella's personality trope isn't as popular in Japan I believe.
Later on the site compared their results to the
worldwide one which has pretty different results. They weren’t surprised by Cerebella being placed high since she is an ‘American’ character. But they were pretty shocked by the lack of Marie and Double’s low place.
So next I looked for Indiegogo DLC opinions. And it’s pretty interesting. Early on during the end of the first vote for the first character a user made
an estimate of what characters would likely get voted into the next round with ‘American Favourites’ and ‘Japanese Favourites’. The characters they suggested appealed to western voters where Black Dahlia (for her bounty hunter-like appearance), Eliza (for her appearance/relation to Squigly and Samson), Scythana (a giant/interesting moveset) and Panzerfaust (since ‘people love the military’ XD). Japan’s list was Marie, Annie, Feng and Aeon for being ‘cute’.
The next post about is about the
finales of the first character vote. So between Annie, Eliza, Minette and Aeon. The strangest thing? Eliza was the least sought out character between them; the two favourites where Annie and Minette. As I said before Eliza’s design is more popular to western countries (older-looking, more tanned, Egyptian themed) but they expected her to win anyway because of the high amount of American voters.
This
last post regards the winner of the second DLC vote. People where pretty shocked that Beowulf won of all people, as he was lower placed in the first character vote (of course we know it’s because some old Eliza supporters/Male character supporters placed their votes to him instead). Some fans seemed disappointed that more male characters had got voted in since, from my understanding, him and Big Band are the least popular characters in the game. Even when Big Band was funded people where like ‘Huh? Is he that popular?’. The post basically says that the want for male characters is also a ‘popular foreigner’ thing. Overall people really wanted Marie the absolute most, followed by Annie and then Minette. Some people also hoped Stanley would make it higher.
Of course not everyone is like this. Just what I got generally from various sites.