There’s a new Overwatch CGI short, and no, it’s not that painfully brief Junkrat and Roadhog comedy sketch from the other day. This time around, Mei’s the star, largely because all of her friends are dead.
The new short is a re-telling of Mei’s origin story, beginning with a cryo-hibernation gone wrong while her and her team at Ecopoint Antarctica are trapped in an ice storm. When Mei comes to, she finds that everybody else’s pods malfunctioned, and she’s the only survivor. Also, she’s been in suspended animation for nine years, and she has no way of making contact with the outside world.
Mei, with the help of her drone pal Snowball, has to science her way to freedom. It’s a fraught, lonely process, and Snowball has to take one for the team. Mei, though, hangs tough.
In-game, Mei is a frozen-hearted ice demoness who stops people dead in their tracks and then jams icicles through their brains to make them even deader. Also, annoyed. After this short, though, you almost feel bad for her. Almost. Then you remember that she’s Mei.
Comments
11 responses to “New Overwatch Short Explores Mei’s Tragic Origins”
A-Mei-zing!
Blizzard should just make a mini-series already
Maybe it was just me… but did anyone else feel this short went no where?
Like Mei recovers really fast from all these tragic events , sees a message and just heads off.
It kinda felt like the short was just things happening without any point?
What did you want the five stages of grief? It’s a short.
I’m not crying! You’re crying!
seriously these keep getting better and better as far as storytelling and animation goes 🙂 im loving them!
make a damn movie already… but honestly Mei is bae
The new short is a-Mei-zing. Blizzard is killing it with all the new stuff and oh! the feels, it makes me wanna play Mei for a while and get some merch. This looks coool!
Spoilers!
Anyway, this was very well done, both visually and emotionally. Thanks Blizzard, Mai is now more Bae.
Seems like this will be an unpopular opinion, but to me the melodrama felt a bit forced. It felt like they were trying too hard to make it a very emotional experience.
I think part of my problem is the robot making sad eyes at everything. Using its own batteries when the facility’s are dead was a smart move, but then Mei cries about that too. I mean, I guess it makes sense that she wouldn’t want to lose her last friend after losing everyone else, but I dunno, I just felt like they tried too hard to make me feel.
Thinking about this; it’s a problem I have with most of the Overwatch shorts. As beautiful as they are, they largely play the emotional card too hard. The Bastion one was all “oh no, the poor little robot has PSTD!”, the Tracer one really wanted to make you feel bad for Robot Jesus, the very first cinematic you were supposed to worry about those kids*, those kids who seem to show up in all the advertisements but have nothing to do with the game, the Winston one I barely remember but there was a strong emotional thing with that one too I do recall.
Maybe I’m just a schmuck with bad tastes, but it really just doesn’t do it for me.
*it’s been a while, so I might be remembering this wrong. But those kids annoyed me, which is the main takeaway.
They’re like that because they’re not trying to tell a narrative story, they’re trying to help you understand the characters and connect with them. Relating on an emotional level helps that, so taking the viewer through the same emotional ride the character went through is a proven way to build that understanding.
I think they’re fantastic in that respect, they add relatable depth to the game’s characters.