Divine Gate: A preview of Puzzle & Dragons maker GungHo’s next big game

Dr. Serkan Toto is a gaming expert and independent consultant based in Tokyo. You can follow him on Twitter and his blog. This article is republished with his permission.

At this year’s Tokyo Game Show, mobile game maker GungHo (3765) finally revealed a few more details about its follow-up to Puzzle & Dragons, Japan’s most popular smartphone title.
And it’s not Puzzle & Dragons 2 but a completely new title called Divine Gate.

GungHo actually showed the game first on September 3, but at the Tokyo Game Show 2013, president Kazuki Morishita took the stage to explain it in more detail and also give a demo.

Genre and game play

Divine Gate is being marketed as a so-called “panel RPG”, but I think it could be simply called a puzzle RPG as well: instead of orbs, players need to shift blocks (or panels) on a grid in order to trigger an action in the RPG part.

A more significant difference to Puzzle & Dragons is that Divine Gate focuses more on speed during battles: when taking their turn during a fight, players just have five seconds to shuffle around panels to create the attack on the enemy.

Just like Puzzle & Dragons, the new game will feature quests, an evolve/level-up system, and special boss characters that have to be defeated to advance to the next stage.

Social features

From the presentation given at the Tokyo Game Show, it also seems like Divine Gate is putting more focus on the social aspect.

Whereas Puzzle & Dragons producer Daisuke Yamamoto said one more than one occasion that his title isn’t a “typical” social game (which is true), Morishita confirmed that cooperating with other players is a key element this time around.

Without going into details, he said that Divine Gate will feature a “next-generation friend system” – it remains to be seen what exactly he meant by that.

Art style and characters

What’s interesting is that during the demo, Morishita kept stressing that the main theme of the game is that it’s “cool and stylish” – as opposed to Puzzle & Dragons, which is rather cute when it comes to artwork and graphics.