Studio Emiko Reportedly Back on Discord, Albeit Under Roleplay Account

Over the American Independence Day holiday weekend, on the day after such holiday on July 5, 2025, the Prophet Driller was working on a future PC-98 remix scheduled to be released this incoming Saturday when he received a notification for a friend request. At first, he didn’t recognize the username until he checked Discord, and it only took him seconds to realize that it was Ciel Chandelleur – the VTuber avatar created by Studio Emiko who is scheduled to debut later this month.

Nearly three months after a hacking incident, Emiko Hosokawa finally returned to Discord. The hacked account was unable to be recovered, leading to Hosokawa having to start fresh with a new account, albeit under the guise of Ciel Chandelleur.

There is a trend of social media accounts being hacked, including on Discord. When an account is compromised, the hacker(s) will usually do something suspicious, such as spread malware or steal data. Earlier this year in mid-April, Drillimation Systems and Studio Emiko were both in pain when the latter fell victim to this problem. When this happened, Drillimation hoped to reassure fans that they would be working with Discord to recover the account, but after several weeks of troubleshooting, they were unable to rectify the problem.

Studio Emiko is a Vietnamese design studio that has worked with Drillimation Systems on multiple projects, including the Touhou Project NES Demakes, Chuhou Joutai, and Mythos of Phantasmagoria, and its chairwoman also directed the standalone game Touhou Meijinka ~ Song of Divine Tempest. Unfortunately, the relationship between the two studios is currently in a difficult position after Drillimation released Touhou Chouhatsuyou ~ Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity – a game that became a laughingstock for its plot. The critical failure of Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity led to the two studios getting into a feud, which is still ongoing as of this article’s writing. In the meantime, Drillimation is using the feud to assess the marketplace to prevent something like this from happening again in a future title.

It is still unknown on how her account was hacked. Drillimation disregards suspicious links and attachments from unsolicited emails. According to an FBI report around the time of her hacking, cybercrime damage reached an all-time high of $9.5 trillion last year. The rest of this year will be focused on cybersecurity improvements, and Drillimation Systems has made all assurances that her email address is not posted publicly anywhere, which apparently happened in December 2023. That said, Drillimation is using all of their efforts to ensure this does not happen again.