Toy company Takara Tomy, creator of the likes of Beyblade and Transformers, has this week announced an all-new indie game publishing label, the fifth such brand to be announced in the last year in a shake-up of Japanese gaming. Takara Tomy revealed the Enjoyn Games initiative alongside a trio of toy-themed titles, the first two of which will be released later this month.
According to Takara Tomy, Enjoyn Games aims to bring the company’s experience making toys into guiding the development of new games. In that sense, its initial lineup has the feeling of more toy-like experiences, each emphasizing multiplayer. The first game, Stack and Sus, is a three-to-six-player social deduction game, with players divided into staff and spies, trying to make or sabotage a burger. Then there’s Sloppy Forgeries, a competitive party painting game tasking players with recreating classic art but with no ability to undo actions and all in a limited time, where accuracy determines a winner. Both of these games will release next week, on November 10 and 14 respectively. The third game, likely due in December, is Little Cheese Works, a puzzle-platformer for up to four players using voice chat to coordinate as mice negotiating levels to grab cheese, all without disturbing dastardly cats.
The crossover between gaming and toys for Takara Tomy seems obvious: each of these multiplayer experiences feels like a board game the company could have released, and there’s the potential to lean on the broader toy infrastructure in the company for promotion, and for future expansion to other mediums. It also, notably, makes Tomy the latest in a slew of major Japanese companies establishing transmedia initiatives that includes branching into gaming. Just before Tokyo Game Show, Sanrio announced Sanrio Games, with plans to release 10 games featuring Sanrio characters over the next three years. Toei Games has been set up to take the movie giant’s experience into indie publishing, also with a potential to broaden the IP if it’s successful. Then there’s PARCO Games, a division of the major Japanese department store Parco, which officially launched its label at the end of last summer.
Even beyond major studios, new publishers are embracing Japanese games—last month Visions of Mana director Kenji Ozawa moved his Studio Sasanqua into the indie publishing space with its first game, Afantasia. This is on top of more established Japanese publishers like Playism and Shueisha Games, and the launch of a publishing label by Palworld developer Pocketpair. In almost all of these cases, the desire is not just to make money selling games, but to cultivate ideas that can be established in other mediums. The potential to find a game that could become something larger, as seen by The Exit 8, has been a driving goal for many. Whatever the motivations, Takara Tomy’s new game publishing label is a great endorsement of the Japanese indie gaming scene, as more companies and players see potential and excitement in the works of the country’s solo devs and smaller teams.
