Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

One thing that’s been dead on Nintendo’s home consoles for the past three generations is the RPG. While there have been some notable quality titles on Gamecube, like Monolith’s Baten Kaitos and some nice cross-platform deals like Skies of Arcadia Legends, Nintendo actually resorted to classifying Animal Crossing and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker as RPGs on their own site, presumably so that category on their master list of games wouldn’t be quite so barren. Let’s just say if you wanted your Japanese RPG fix on a Nintendo console after the SNES, you were, for the most part, scat out of luck.

I recall the appearance of Evolution Worlds on Gamecube with a cringe. Here was a game that actually sold itself on the line, “the only traditional RPG on Gamecube” or something like that. You actually had no choice at that point. You know what? I bought the game. To this day, my wife and I reference the horrendous dialog, game mechanics, and even the character names. There was a gal named Pepper Box in the game.

I’m filling this article out with all this nostalgia because there’s almost no information about this new game. There’s the developer, MistWalker, a developer stocked not only with a cute dog named Skip, but with big names from Square-Enix. We’ve got the image above, which makes us chuckle that a man sometimes referred to as the “father of Final Fantasy” cracked a thesaurus for a game called “The Last Story.” The team is best known for Blue Dragon on Xbox 360. They’re also behind the upcoming sci-fi RPG Infinite Space on DS and the critically panned Archaic Sealed Heat (ASH), also for DS.

Then there’s the fact that Nintendo is publishing the game. This is another curious Wii RPG expected this year in Japan which could mark the beginning of a trend. I mean, developing an RPG has always been an expensive proposition. Just ask Square-Enix, who happily dropped Dragon Quest IX, the latest entry in their biggest franchise, onto the cheap and unstoppable Nintendo DS. How nice must it be to make a big game that will sell really well for much less than it would cost if, say, you planned it for PS2, moved it to PS3, then had to build it for 360 as well?

One more point on the name. Squaresoft, according to lore, called their game Final Fantasy because it was a last stab at profitability before going under. Could this be a similar position for MistWalker? For Squaresoft, many sequels and spinoffs and one merger later, they’re arguably at the top of the genre. If so, let’s hope for MistWalker’s sake they can find the same fortune.

Source: Nintendo via 1up