There are many elite development teams in Japan, some of which stem from a similar background. Now a particular group of developers that have produced some true classics are working together on a new Nintendo DS title called PostPet DS: Yume Miru Momo to Fushigi no Pen. What do the following names mean to you: Vanpool, AlphaDream, Route24 and Marvelous Entertainment? Here is a little bit of help: Freshly Picked Tingle's Rosey Rupeeland, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, Chibi-robo, Harvest Moon. Yes, each developer has worked on a number of high quality games for Nintendo systems. They also all have ties with the company formerly known as Squaresoft (Square Enix in today's world).
Now they have teamed up with So-Net to use the Japanese brand PostPet. Originally, PostPet was a piece of Internet emailing software where users could feed their PostPet in a Tamagotchi-style manner, care for them, play with them and even pat or hit them when desired! The key difference between Bandai's brand was that your PostPet could wander across the online space and deliver emails to friends and family. It was one of those very simple ideas that caught on well with the Japanese public.
Under the publishing umbrella of Marvelous Entertainment, Route24, Vanpool and AlphaDream have taken the PostPet world and developed it considerably into what appears to be an Animal Crossing type of adventure, complete with Wi-Fi play where you can deliver photos taken within the game.
The game's official website can be found here, whilst there are twenty-three new images in the media folder, as well as two videos below:
There is no indication that Rising Star Games will be bringing this to Europe just at the moment, and sadly the game has not broken into the Media Create Top 50 since launching in Japan on 24th December, 2009. However, with such a rich pedigree of developers behind the project, it would certainly be a shame to see this resigned to life solely in Japan!
Are you interested in learning more about the offspring of those who made Mario & Luigi, Tingle, Chibi-robo and the Harvest Moon games?