On April 12, Perfect World launched “Persona 5: Phantom of the Night”. Judging from the intensity of the promotion, it should be that it has high expectations for this product. At the same time, NetEase’s “Walker on the Cross Road: Overlord of the Mainland” will also start paid testing next week. Considering that the game was launched overseas relatively early and is relatively mature in production, it is expected to be officially launched soon.
The former can be regarded to a large extent as the integration of the lightweight transformation of the “P5” architecture and the mobile game business model. The game has restored the music, character design and UI art style to the greatest extent. The development elements such as character relationship development and mask synthesis in the original work have been retained one by one. Mechanisms such as weakness-breaking pursuit, hand-changing and total attack in battle have also been retained. All come back. Of course, the business model of card drawing around characters and masks has not been left behind, so whether you are an IP fan or a player interested in second games, this product is probably the most familiar one.
Currently, “P5X” has reached the top 10 best-selling list on iOS.
Judging from the initial community evaluation of the public beta, in addition to IP fans’ affirmation of the restoration, players are more concerned about the clichéd issues of optimization and card draw fatigue.
It is also worth noting that there are many actions on the marketing side of the game, linking with e-commerce, snack brands and lifestyle apps, and also trying the form of advertising cooperation in the game map scene.
The mobile game products of two well-known Japanese IPs have successively appeared in China through the channels of major manufacturers, which has greatly increased the “JRPG content” of the mobile game market. We might as well take this opportunity to re-examine this controversial category and its performance in the field of mobile games.
First of all, we have to admit that the domestic market of JRPG has not been underestimated, and the audience is likely to grow.
JRPGs represented by IPs such as the Legend of Heroes Trail series, Ys series, Legend series, DQ series and Final Fantasy series have always had a loyal audience in China. In the past 10 years, another batch of Japanese high-quality IPs have also become famous in China, whether it is “Persona” and “Walker”, which have produced derivative mobile game products, or the housekeeping of Monolith Soft, a studio owned by Nintendo. The JRPG “Xenoblade Chronicles” series enjoys high popularity in China.
And not only well-known IPs produced by major manufacturers can be recognized by domestic players. The 2022 dark horse independent game “The Balance of Gods” is a retro JRPG produced by a single player. According to the language ratio of Steam reviews, at least 70% to 80% of the players are from China. Even the developer himself seems to be surprised. this. In fact, judging from the appearance, it was rare for such a remake of a game with an ancient style and relatively crude production to receive such high attention at the time.
JRPG has attracted much attention in the domestic market in recent years, and the reasons are also very diverse. First of all, many products themselves are constantly improving, and some old-fashioned “dross designs” are being “difficultly” abandoned. Modern innovations in design will naturally make the game audience wider.
The successful transformation of JRPG into mobile games, the test is how manufacturers invite players to “watch dramas”?
But in the mobile game market, it’s a different story.
Although there are quite successful cases of mobile games with strong JRPG attributes on the market – from Zilong’s “Dream Simulation Battle Mobile Game” in 2018 to MiHoYo’s “Honkai: Star Railroad” last year – but The former stood out in the war chess category that had not yet opened up the market at that time, and the latter had a strong brand effect. These are factors that are difficult to ignore behind its success. In comparison, the identity of JRPG does not seem so important. . In fact, in the domestic market where every category is crowded with contestants, there are not as many popular products with “JRPG” as the selling point as imagined.
JRPGs, which have always had the advantage of intense plots, gorgeous and outstanding character settings, and deep combat strategies, are difficult to gain popularity in the mobile game market. A large part of the reason is that the continuous operation characteristics of mobile games have certain inherent characteristics. Sexual conflict: Mobile users’ lightweight gameplay preferences, characters packaged around fixed-cycle commercial needs, and fragmented game experience have largely diluted the original features of this type of game.
Even Japanese companies that have produced some well-known IPs don’t seem to be able to make JRPG mobile games with ease. Last year, the Japanese studio Gumi, which developed “For Whom Alchemy”, cooperated with the famous animation company Aniplex to launch the 3D SRPG mobile game product “Aster Tatariqus”, which is known as “the largest project in the history of the studio”, but the market response was relatively poor. This ambitious propaganda slogan can only be said to be unsatisfactory.
However, some manufacturers have also come up with some new ideas despite several setbacks. SE, nicknamed the “Mobile Game Graveyard”, launched the derivative mobile game “Final Fantasy 7: Eternal Crisis” in 2023. This product not only received more than 7.7 million downloads, but its first-month revenue is estimated to exceed 100 million yuan ( RMB), it has also avoided the fate of diving out of the list, and is currently stable in the middle of the Japanese iOS list.
There is also a JRPG mobile game that was also launched in the second half of last year and has a good return rate. It is “Atelier Les Leliana” developed by GUST Studio, a subsidiary of Koei Tecmo. As a derivative mobile game product of a relatively niche IP, the game has been at the top of the iOS best-selling list for a long time after its launch, with revenue increasing by approximately 10 million US dollars on the 20th.
In fact, the high unit price of the gashapon of this product, which is known as the “legendary IP sequel”, has attracted many players to complain, but what makes fans feel bright is that its character graphics are not inferior to those of the original series on the console. Compared with the derivative mobile games previously launched by this IP, it has been greatly improved and can better unleash the charm of girl characters. In addition, the game also incorporates an advertising incentive revenue method that is rare in such products.
Perhaps for JRPG mobile games, especially those with IP blessings, instead of directly copying the cultivation and commercialization templates that have already been formed in the market, we can turn to thinking about how to draw nutrients from the original IP and art assets and use them more It is more important to further expand the experience of mobile game players in an efficient way. Only by breaking the inherent and path-dependent thinking can we break the various constraints that JRPG has suffered on the road to mobile gaming.
IP war can open a new era of “watching dramas”?
Looking back at the domestic market, we can actually capture some new changes.
Last year, “The Sword of Suzuliana: For Peace in this World”, which Xindong used as its “original SRPG”, had a relatively complete set of stand-alone gameplay built-in. Although it is difficult to assess how much it helped the game’s retention and revenue, there were many improvements last year. Products whose experiences tend to be homogeneous show better uniqueness and differentiation.
It is worth mentioning that “Another Eden: Cat Beyond Time and Space”, which is represented by Xindong in China and is still in operation, is actually a rare long-lived JRPG mobile game in Japan. The product was developed by Wright Flyer Studios , launched in 2017, its uniqueness also comes from the retro gaming experience similar to stand-alone JRPG. Even in the past year, it has been able to return to the top 20 best-selling list in the Japanese server from time to time.
However, in the Chinese server, due to the impact of many products with more distinctive personalities represented by second games in the market in recent years, the game has now “relegated to the second line.” And generally speaking, domestic players still have a lower tolerance for “retro elements” in games such as hidden mines.
Nowadays, big companies like NetEase are also brewing some ideas about JRPG. In addition to the early agent operation of the Taiwanese server “Walker on the Cross Road: Overlord of the Mainland” and the now online Chinese server, NetEase also quietly launched a test overseas last year of a product “Knightingale” with a graphics style similar to HD-2D. Not long ago, SE released a new trailer for the JRPG stand-alone product “Visions of Mana” and revealed that the game was jointly developed with Sakura Studio, a subsidiary of NetEase, and this IP has previously launched related mobile games.
Considering that NetEase has been active in the game payment model and new attempts in the category in recent years, perhaps starting with some IP of the console-side JRPG will also be helpful for its future exploration and practice of mobile games in this category.
Nowadays, “Persona 5: Phantom of the Night” and “Wanderer: Overlord of the Continent” are both IP products with great potential. The former is a new derivative work of the P5 series and is deeply supervised by Atlus; the latter benefits from The sequel to the IP console version was released last year, and it still maintains reasonable popularity since it was launched on the Japanese bestseller list. As for whether the entry of new products will bring some new impact to the domestic JRPG mobile game market, we will wait and see.
