Puzzle & Dragons Makers Reveal Their Next Big RPG, Divine Gate

GungHo Entertainment’s next game that it hopes will hit the dizzying heights of success is Divine Gate. Shown off at Tokyo Game Show, this iOS and Android title has a teaser trailer we previously saw that shows off six characters Midori, Aoto, Yukari, Ginji, Hikari and Akane.

They recently talked up the game at Tokyo Game Show, and 4Gamer and Famitsu reported in from the event.

The game was being shown off by GungHo Online Entertainment’s CEO, Kazuki Morishita, and Acquire’s Divine Gate director Takano Kota. Divine Gate hopes to bring a more stylish and speedy kind of puzzle RPG. To that end, it draws inspiration from card flipping, with a bevy of panels surrounding a character’s start point during the field portion of the game.

Each panel comes with multiple stars indicating difficulty of the foes within, and players have to slowly advance through them to find a key under one of the panels. Find the key, unlock the door at the end of the level and finish off the boss lurking within, and it’s stage clear.

Battles are frantic affairs. At the start players will have five blocks to choose from which they’ll then need to match to each character’s set of squares. Combining them correctly leads to chains and combos, while doing badly means that character sits useless for the round. Each character will have skills which fire off if you manage to link enough of the right colored blocks (Think of them as varying mana types).

Morishita revealed that the game will also diverge from what some have considered the “only road” to handling evolution of characters in mobile RPG’s. In titles such as Puzzle & Dragons, players had to sacrifice their own minions to empower another monster. Divine Gate, however, has a new feature called Resonant Evolve that revolve more on working alongside friends to clear evolution quests.

There will be some 200 different “stylish” characters to recruit at launch, and the launch will also see a collaboration with five Steins;Gate characters.

The Android version of Divine Gate will be available from September 30th, with iOS to be announced later.