Puzzles and Dragons is a phenomenon in Japan. One in five Japanese people play the mobile puzzle matching game released in 2012. Here in North America, the game is not nearly as popular. Mobile games in the U.S. are dominated by time wasting games like Clash of Clans, and time sensitive puzzles tend to struggle.
Gungho has tried to push their game stateside, even going so far as to create an English ad. Colton Haynes, one of the guys who shoots arrows on Arrow, sits on a subway and throws colored bubbles at a dragon. It’s a Japanese meets- American- culture style ad that may have been a bit too much for the American audience. Puzzles and Dragons even met America’s favorite Italian plumber, Mario, and even that wasn’t good enough.
The Japanese game has always gotten content before their American counterparts, but the NA side of things still gets their say. Stil, GungHo insists that both communities are equal prorities.
“We have to correspond, between getting new monsters and dungeons, we have to make sure that it fits, because their game system updates before ours so we have to make sure that we are to up to date,” a GungHo representative told iDigitalTimes. North America works on an earlier version of PAD and Gungho America has to make sure everything meshes.
At one point in my life, Puzzles and Dragons was the only game I played. I’d wake up to do time-sensitive dungeons, spend hundreds of dollars on magic stones and scream for joy when I got the newest and best monsters. Eventually I got sick of having my life run by a chibi version of Loki and hung up my matching fingers. I tried coming back after a few months, just to stick my toes into the pool again. My best monsters were no longer the best, and my cruddy team would have no chance of beating whatever super-boss they came up with.
Having nobody to play Puzzles and Dragons with was the final nail in the coffin. The friends I got addicted to the game had the same epiphany as me and distanced themselves from the addictive mobile dragon-collecting simulator.
PAD is never going to reach the popularity it has in Japan in North America, but it’s going to keep trying.
