Puzzle & Dragons and Groove Coaster Zero team up for fun in-game collaborations

The developers of the wildly popular mobile game Puzzles and Dragons, has created yet another collaborative effort with the hit title. On the back of GungHo’s (3765.OS) recent joint effort with Clash of Clans developer Supercell which ended last month, it has now entered into a new partnership with Taito Corporation’s famous game Groove Coaster Zero.

For players not familiar with the latter, Groove Coaster Zero is a rhythm-based game that requires you to synchronize your taps, swipes, or extended presses on the screen depending on the markers. The challenges occur over a range of music tracks that determines how your in-game markers are laid out for you.

As part of the collaboration, Puzzles and Dragons will receive a series of new dungeons based on Groove Coaster Zero which contain monsters from classic games like Space Invaders including crabs, squids and octopi. While on the other side, Groove Coaster Zero will receive a host of music tracks taken from the Puzzles and Dragons soundtrack. To encourage gamers, players who are ranked in the top 1,000 for the “Departure Remix” track at the end of the event on August 24 will receive ten free visible bonus items they can show off.

Image source: gunghoonline.com

Aside from GungHo collaborations, the Tokyo-based company has had a prior history of working together with others on Puzzles and Dragons. They include a crossover with Square Enix’s mobile tower defense game Crystal Defenders and another one with the Japanese anime Evangelion. Despite its huge growth to 17 million Japanese users, it was reported last month by Dr. Serkan Toto that it was the first time Puzzle and Dragons took more than 21 days to grow by a million users. Instead it took 23 days and would seem to indicate that growth has slowed.

This accelerating trend of cross-game collaboration and promotion is not new in Japan. But it might be indicative of GungHo’s new approach at maintaining the success of Puzzles and Dragons using fresh crossover themed content – as well as reaching out to foreign audiences through its Supercell tie-up.

Puzzle and Dragons can be downloaded from the iOS App Store here and from Google Play here.

Groove Coaster Zero can be downloaded from the iOS App Store here.

(Editing by Steven Millward)