By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Japan’s top messenger app LINE (160 million users worldwide and counting) is taking it very slow with its in-app gaming platform. Even though the first LINE-powered titles were rolled out in summer last year, the total number of such games available is still below 30. LINE Corp. CEO Morikawa...
Square Enix’ Mana series of RPGs, which started in 1991, is getting its first social version. “Seiken Densetsu – Circle Of Mana” will be exclusively available on GREE sometime next year (in the form of an app for iOS or Android). Players can already pre-register for the...
Square Enix announced “Chocobo No Chocotto Nouen”, a farming simulation that will be available on GREE for feature phones and smartphones by year-end. The biggest bullet point here is that the game uses Chocobo, a large bird that regularly appears in Final Fantasy RPGs (since the 1980s)...
Square Enix took a long time to finish for their latest social RPG, but at long last, Emperors Saga is now live on GREE for smartphones and feature phones. The game was announced exactly a year ago (even pre-registration started), but reportedly Square Enix wasn’t happy with the quality of...
In recent months, Square Enix has seen great success with “Diffusion Million Arthur”, a social card battle game the company launched in April in the Japanese App Store. Fast forward to today, and said title is still sitting firmly in the top 10 of the top grossing iPhone apps in Japan. It was the...
Lord Of Vermillion, a collectible card game franchise launched by Square Enix in Japanese arcades in 2008, is going social. Square Enix is currently seeing good sales with “Diffusion Million Arthur”, a social game that’s not embedded in a social network. Like Diffusion, Lord Of Vermillion is...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry