I looked at and played a number of great games in the Indie Games area of the show floor. It was probably the most interesting part of the show as far as mobile games go. Square Enix put a good effort forward, but other big companies either weren’t showing their mobile line-up or just showing off their latest attempt to catch onto the tail feathers of Puzzle & Dragons (Free). I’ve written separate articles for some of the games I played in the Indie area, but the rest of the stuff I played was too early on, unlikely to leave Japan, or just not a great experience to be had on a noisy show floor. Here are some of the interesting ones.
Realm Chronicle Tactics is a strategy game that seems to be heavily inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre. I played through about three or four battles, and it was all very sound for the genre. The graphics were especially good compared to similar efforts, and it seems like it has a pretty deep story, though I couldn’t understand much because the demo was in Chinese. There were lots of dialogue scenes between characters during battles and cutscenes between fights. The only downside at the moment is that developer Sheena3D is yet to find a publisher, and can’t confirm whether or not the game would ever release in English. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one, though. What I played was quite good.
I really enjoyed Dragon Fang a lot from the bit that I played. It’s a fairly orthodox example of a Japanese rogue-like, not very far off from something like Shiren The Wanderer. The graphics are nice and you can collect monsters to help you out along the way. It seems like there is a healthy sprinkling of Puzzle And Dragons-type monetization bolted on to this free-to-play game, but the lack of stamina meters is at least encouraging. Unfortunately, I was told in fairly certain terms that an English release probably isn’t happening. It’s a shame.
Steampunker is a fairly interesting hybrid of point and click adventure and hidden object searching from a developer hailing from Poland. It kind of reminded me of those games that were big in the early PC CD-ROM days. The art style in this one is pretty cool, and for some reason, having a digitized actor in a costume on top of a computer generated background stirred up some nostalgia in me. The floor of a big, loud exhibition is a very bad place to consume a point and click game, sadly, so I didn’t spend as much time with this as I would have liked to, but I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for it.
Insecters War uses an unusual combination of side-scrolling 2D action, base defense, and MOBA elements. You can battle other players in teams of up to three players each. The sprite graphics on this one are really nice, and you can commandeer big suits of mecha armor, which adds a certain je-ne-sais-quoi to any game, if you ask me. It’s currently in development for PC and Mac, but the developer indicated they were interested in bringing it to mobile devices down the road a bit.
Sky Patrol is a fairly slow-paced vertical shoot-em-up with a colorful look. The trick here is that you don’t directly control your plane, but rather must fire shots from the bottom of the screen to protect it from incoming enemies. You can earn power-ups and new weapons that you can switch between on the fly to deal with the numerous types of threats coming at you. It’s a cute game but it’s missing a certain something in its present form.
The Adventures of Bertram Fiddle has a very unique art style to it. It’s an adventure game with lots of charm, and as with Steampunker, I’m very much looking forward to digging into it in an atmosphere more conducive to its strengths. Even in a setting not well-suited to it, the game’s bizarre sense of humor and gorgeous animation made it out to be a winner for adventure fans.
There were also a few developers showing games already released on mobile, such as GlobZ’s Mucho Party (Free), Nyamyam’s Tengami ($4.99), Amazu Media’s Light Apprentice (Free), and Team Signal’s Hyper Square ($0.99). Some of these are coming to new platforms, while others are hitting the Japanese App Store proper soon.
The Indies area of the Tokyo Game Show was a pretty great place to enjoy mobile games made by developers from all around the world. The friendly atmosphere was great to soak in, and it’s always fun to see what kinds of wacky ideas people come up with outside the relatively risk-averse culture of big, global publishers. I would have liked to have seen more games from the big Japanese publishers, but as long as the platform has smaller developers putting forward this level of quality and originality, mobile gamers are going to come out winners anyway.
