Anime Streaming Service Crunchyroll Releases Its First Game

Crunchyroll, which delivers dozens of Japanese anime series to an international audience, is getting into game development. The streaming service  has co-produced Memoria Freese, a mobile game based off the program DanMachi, which is known in America by the unwieldy title Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?.

DanMachi (I’m going to refer to the game by its Japanese title, for simplicity’s sake) combines elements of romance and action in the dungeon setting suggested by its title. Memoria Freese, then, is a 2D RPG that features dungeon-crawling as the central element of its gameplay. Crunchyroll localized the game for the American market, working together with Memoria Freese‘s original designer, the Japanese social media service Gree. In the localized version, the original Japanese dialogue is left intact, with English subtitles provided.

Crunchyroll, which offers both free and paid tiers, is not the first streaming service to enter the world of game development. Last year, Netflix launched a mobile game that tied into the launch of the second season of the hit series Stranger Things. In exploring its own ambitions in the gaming space, Crunchyroll noted that 90% of its audience identify as gamers. For its first playable adaptation of an anime, Crunchyroll chose to design around a show that received universally positive reviews from its viewers, making it one of the streaming service’s most-liked titles.

Memoria Freese is available for both iOS and Android devices. It is free-to-play with in-game microtransactions.