Nintendo and Japanese video game developer Cygames are working on a new mobile role-playing game meant to hit Android devices this summer, the companies said Friday. Called Dragalia Lost, the title appears to be a thematically traditional JRPG featuring knights, princesses, and an end-of-the-world scenario that players are tasked with preventing at all costs. As part of the same collaboration, Nintendo will be acquiring a five-percent stake in Cygames, even though it recently signaled it will stop investing in mobile developers after seeing mixed results with its financial commitment to Japanese entertainment giant DeNA.
Cygames isn’t a mobile-only developer but has so far found the most success in the smartphone segment, having delivered hits such as Dragon Quest Monsters Super Light, Granblue Fantasy, and The Idolmaster: Cinderella Girls Starlight Stage. The company also has a dedicated animation division which works on its own projects, in addition to supporting its gaming endeavors. Dragalia Lost is expected to launch via the Google Play Store and Apple’s iOS App Store before Mario Kart Tour does, whereas the fate of Nintendo’s mobile Zelda project is presently unclear, with the highly anticipated game being delayed yet again late last year. Dragalia Lost will be designed as an action RPG, meaning it won’t feature turn-based combat and should instead offer real-time action, though it remains to be seen whether the game will have a multiplayer component and what its business model is going to be. A free app with optional microtransactions is the most likely scenario in light of Nintendo’s recent financial releases which directly pointed to that product strategy as more commercially successful than what the company so far managed to accomplish with its only premium experiment to date – Super Mario Run.
The summer launch window attached to Dragalia Lost only pertains to Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau, with neither Nintendo nor Cygames yet hinting at a potential Western release of the newly announced title. All of Nintendo’s mobile games and apps to date were eventually made available on a global level, with the majority of them being co-developed with DeNA, hence not being conceptually different than Dragalia Lost that’s also coming to life as a joint project of Nintendo and Cygames, though the former is expected to act as the only official publisher of the JRPG.