New Japanese studio Kreation Verse, led by CEO Tomoya Ogawa and game director Karin, unveiled its first game, TAT Rumble, during GDC last month.

Kreation Verse was founded in 2021 and its first release will be a free-to-play mobile game based around collecting, trading and fighting with character cards. The anime-style title will be themed around a martial arts competition (the “Twelve Anonymous Tournament”) using 2D characters drawn and animated by legendary artist Tatsuro Iwamoto, who is famous to gamers from Capcom’s Ace Attorney series.

GDC took place in San Francisco in March and welcomed nearly 30,000 attendees. PocketGamer.biz and our partner site BlockchainGamer.biz met with Tomoya Ogawa during the event to discuss his vision for the new game, which will be available for download in the US and Canada on iOS and Android this summer.

Connecting Japanese IP holders with global gamers

Speaking about the formation of gaming startup Kreation Verse, Ogawa-san said, “Our vision is to be the destination for Japanese creators to go global. Anime or Japanese games are becoming more popular. But there’s a huge gap between Japanese IP holders or creators and the global audience. There’s a big language barrier or culture gap, or they don’t have enough expertise in how to go to market in the US. We will start with our original titles but the vision is to be a publisher for companies to enter the global market. And NFTs can be a new type of digital IP business or digital IP service. Right now, we will focus on NFT gaming to drive more IP worth for our creators. This is the high-level concept!”

Ogawa-san himself is based in Tokyo and has worked in management in the games industry for many years, including the mobile games studio Akatsuki. He developed and operated the Dragonball Z mobile game, along with Karin.

The cards in your TAT Rumble deck will be tradable NFTs. “We started the NFT collection one and a half years ago with Tatsuro Iwamoto, who is an ex-Capcom artist,” explains Ogawa-san. “These are our original characters, drawn by Tatsuro. Our game concept is a collectible art game. It blends fighting-strategy mechanics and slot machine mechanics too.”

With his background on Dragonball Z, Tomoya Ogawa understands what makes captivating gameplay based on card decks. TAT Rumble features gacha mechanics for daily rewards and collectible art, as well as a technology called Martial Byte, which uses slot spins for moves, intended to be an innovative way to combine skill and luck. Gamers won’t need to create a wallet or prepare any crypto first.

Mobile free-to-play first, NFT second

“This is mostly a web2 free-to-play mobile game,” explains Ogawa-san. “And then you can get the NFT conversion item. And then, you can convert your characters into NFTs. And if the user [does that], they can get additional power through the NFT conversion. So this is an additional game cycle. There’s the character creation, development and battle. And then on top of that, there’s an NFT cycle, and the user can own the NFTs, export them and sell them on OpenSea or other marketplace.”

“They can play the mobile game and enjoy it for free,” he continues. “But if the user purchases an item, they can accelerate their progress. There’s also a chance for the user to get that NFT for free. Our hypothesis is the NFT, as a tradable, ownable asset, will drive the users’ engagement and also lifetime value as well. We start from the web2 mobile game, and on top of that, we add the NFT elements.”

It’s possible to pre-register for TAT Rumble now in the US at https://tat-rumble.io/. A version of this article appeared first on our partner site BlockchainGamer.biz.