Fighters, tanks, battleships, weapons... etc, The Japanese personifies everything. DeNA prepares for the mobile game that personified Japanese swords.
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The Japanese personifies everything, even samurai swords
Naturally
GREE, a rival of DeNA is opposed to them. What does GREE personify? It's castles of the Middle Ages. Yesterday, they announced that they released new mobile game "
Shirohime Quest(城姫クエスト: Castle Princess Quest)" in this summer.
Shirohime Quest is a casual RPG. Players become the lord of a castles, collect castles personified as cute girls, bring them up, and fight against castles of enemies.
It resembles sea fight simulation game
Kan-Colle(艦これ) closely. It is not accidental(and not rip off).
KADOKAWA, the operator of Kan-Colle participates in the development of this.
Well, the design of characters is the most important in this game. Some of these have been already introduced in official site and they are very interesting. For example...
She is
Aizuwakamatsu Castle(会津若松城) located in Aizuwakamatsu-shi, Fukushima. This is a restored castle, but is one of the famous tourist attractions of Fukushima.
via
Google Street View
She is
Kururi Castle(久留里城) located in Kimitsu-shi, Chiba. It was destroyed in Meiji period, It was maintained as a park, and a part was restored afterwards.
Other characters are here (Japanese)
In fact, the most of Japanese castles were lost in wars. Some were restored, but many sites of castle became parks and the schools. There are a lot of sites of castle which are not left even stone wall. This game has potential unlike other personification contents. These are tourism and "invigorating local communities". If this makes a big hit, fans will go to watch real castles and sites of castles. It leads to activation of the local economy. GREE will expect it, this game has geolocation function such as foursquare and users can get limited virtual goods by check-in.
By the way,
its Twitter account introduces comics version of this and the serialization of the novel version is begun with release, too. The cross media development is already active.