The concept of a “meet and greet” in a video game is totally beyond me, so when I heard that my favorite K-pop group LE SSERAFIM was hosting one inside of a Roblox game, I just had to see it for myself.
LE SSERAFIM is currently promoting their second full album, PUREFLOW Pt. 1, due to release on May 22, and a full-fledged map inside of the Roblox game Berry Avenue was crafted to help spread the word. This isn’t the first time Roblox has hosted something like this, but it was my first time experiencing anything like it.
In the game, players enter a portal to be transported to a recreation of Seoul, Korea, that’s fully themed around the popular group and their PUREFLOW album. It’s pretty fun to explore, featuring photos of the members along with fireworks and even shops that fit the theme. And of course, NPC versions of the members could be found dancing on stage at a stadium after a short trip down the road from where you spawn in.
When the meet and greet event was set to begin, I joined Berry Avenue and saw global chat messages from the members at the top of the screen, but they were nowhere to be found in-game for the vast majority of players. This continued for the 30-minute duration of the event, where the members were apparently in a server being coordinated by Roblox devs. I tried to find the group, as did many others posting their progress on Discord and other social media, but it was mostly to no avail.
Very few fans got a chance to actually “interact” with the group, like one member from the LE SSERAFIM Discord server who supplied screenshots of the group members in their lobby. Unfortunately, they were kicked from the server for some reason (I saw that screenshot too), after being able to see the members in their game along with their friend and a Roblox dev.
“It was honestly fine, it was just the chat was blocked so I couldn’t really see who was typing,” the fan named Haru told me. “But if it was a meet and greet, wouldn’t it be more accessible? I was just chilling in their server and got banned.”
A lot of the FEARNOT community (the chosen name of LE SSERAFIM’s fans) were confused or upset by the event, which definitely could have been planned more properly by Roblox. I don’t fault the group members at all, because they were likely just given login info and told to hop on the game. But Berry Avenue’s limitation of 30 players per server definitely made this a bit more cumbersome than it could have been.
There wasn’t much meeting or greeting involved for most players, but I still had a lot of fun watching the chat messages appear on screen and following along with other fans. One of the members, Yunjin, posted the following in the mode’s global messages, giving everyone a laugh as usual:
“BOOMPALA” is apparently the next song to be revealed from PUREFLOW Pt. 1, following up on the lead single “CELEBRATION” that can be heard blasting as the NPCs dance on stage. That info should be coming shortly today at midnight Korea time, or 10am CT in the US.
Once the 30 minutes of the event were up, the group’s leader, Kim Chaewon, said “bye,” and that was that.
In the end, the FEARNOT community grew stronger together through the struggles, and LE SSERAFIM had some fun as they tried to figure out the operation (Yunjin was thrilled with her “face card” in-game, as seen above). But as for the next meet and greet, maybe Berry Avenue is not the play. Perhaps Dress to Impress, the hugely popular fashion mode that is actually named after a song lyric from LE SSERAFIM’s “Eve, Psyche, & The Bluebeard’s wife,” could be the host.
Even if I didn’t get to “meet” LE SSERAFIM in-game today, I was still cracking up the entire time, true to their reputation as the funniest group in K-pop. You can now pre-save and pre-order PUREFLOW Pt. 1 on streaming services ahead of its release in a couple of weeks.
Update on May 7 at 10:05am CT: Here’s the teaser video for “BOOMPALA.” It’s a vibe.
