BODY: Walk the third-party peripheral aisles at Tokyo Game Show and you'll find the usual suspects โ but this year one of the longer queues formed at Flydigi's booth, where a Rei Ayanami-liveried gamepad sat under the lights next to a Zenless Zone Zero edition.
The hardware behind the paint job is the APEX 6 line, announced for overseas markets in mid-September and making its Japanese show-floor debut at TGS 2026. Flydigi brought both the standard APEX 6 and the step-up APEX 6 Pro, with the Pro getting most of the hands-on attention from press working through what separates it from the previous generation.
Flydigi has spent the last several Apex generations building a reputation on the things first-party controllers are slow to offer: drift-resistant magnetic stick sensors, rear paddles, swappable components, and deep per-game remapping through its companion app. That feature-stacking approach is what got the brand noticed outside China, and the APEX 6 refresh continues the pattern rather than reinventing it.
The collaboration models are the more revealing part of the booth. Licensing Rei Ayanami โ one of the most recognizable characters in Japanese pop culture โ is not a cheap or casual move for a peripheral maker, and pairing it with HoYoverse's Zenless Zone Zero covers both the legacy-anime and current-gacha audiences in one stroke.
The insider take
Japan's controller market is unusually conservative: shoppers here default to first-party pads or Hori, a domestic brand with decades of trust and shelf space in Yodobashi and Bic Camera. Breaking in on specs alone almost never works. What does work is exactly what Flydigi is attempting โ an IP tie-in that turns a peripheral into merchandise, so the purchase gets justified as fandom rather than as a bet on an unfamiliar overseas brand. TGS is the right stage for it, but the real test is whether those collab units land in Akihabara storefronts or stay stuck in import-only limbo.
Originally reported by 4Gamer.net โ ๆๆฐ่จไบ (Japanese).