Akatsuki Games will release the “extreme death game” TRIBE NINE on February 20 for the PC (Steam), iOS and Android. Pre-registrations for the mobile version are currently open on the App Store and Google Play. Ahead of the release, AUTOMATON interviewed Tribe Nine’s director Yasutaka Soejima, who told us about the “shonen manga magazine-like” experience players can expect from this story-focused, live-service game.
Tribe Nine is a free-to-play action RPG in which teenagers participate in life-or-death games to liberate Neo Tokyo. The title is a joint project between Akatsuki Games and Too Kyoo Games, which is led by Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka. With Too Kyoo Games overseeing Tribe Nine’s original concept, expectations for its worldbuilding and story are sky high, and Akatsuki Games is making sure these expectations are met, by doing things like designing the game and its management model around the story.
The highly competitive live-service/gacha game market is dominated by hugely popular and technologically advanced titles from China. In such a climate, Tribe Nine’s director knew that just having a “vague goal of making a good game” wouldn’t be enough to ensure success. For Tribe Nine to stand a chance in the market, he set out to find a unique way to provide value to players. The result of this was to design Tribe Nine so that it can be enjoyed in a similar fashion to Japanese shonen manga magazines.
These magazines, like Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump, publish comic series chapter by chapter, keeping readers hooked on finding out what happens in their favorite stories with each weekly or monthly update. In a similar way, Tribe Nine aims to become a “stable and reliable” source of entertainment for its players, with regular releases of new story chapters being at the core of its game loop.
Soejima comments that while updates to the game will also include gameplay related additions, he wants the story to be the main reason players come back to Tribe Nine. “I think players will look forward to new features and content being added one after another with updates. However, rather than multiplying the number of in-game activities, I want to make this a game that players can look forward to purely for the start of a new chapter. Of course, in order to satisfy players, it is important to enrich the game itself, so we will continue to provide updates,” he explains.
To this end, Akatsuki Games is also paying special attention to how Tribe Nine’s story is delivered. “I’m not sure how to say this, but I feel that recent games have a huge amount of information that the player must decipher from the scenario, which can make things difficult to follow.” With this in mind, Soejima is focusing on striking the right balance for the story and its pacing, so that Tribe Nine doesn’t overwhelm players with text and exposition.
So far, these efforts seem to be paying off, as Soejima mentions being moved by feedback from players of Tribe Nine’s closed beta test – “Some players told us that they usually skip story parts, but that Tribe Nine’s story kept them reading.”
TRIBE NINE releases on February 20 for the PC (Steam), iOS and Android. Pre-registrations for the mobile version are currently open on the App Store and Google Play.
