Akihiko Yoshida and Hitoshi Sakimoto are household names in the world of JRPGs. The former is one of the most celebrated character designers and artists in the business, while the latter is one of the most prolific Japanese video game composers of all time. The pair have collaborated many times over the years, from 1993’s SNES classic, Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen, through to numerous other iconic titles, including Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII.

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A powerful moustache.

Your very own steampunk airship...

“ Overall, we had a ‘no walls’ development [strategy], so no matter what your technical role in the game we really asked everyone to give opinions.

Nia enters the fray.

Makeway - a dev team fave.

Nia and a crew of champs. Too cute to fight, surely?

After a hiatus of many years – during which Yoshida left Square Enix and eventually wound up at CyDesignation – the pair have been reunited, and the project is a little different from what you might expect. Battle Champs is a Clash of Clans-style mobile game being developed by Tokyo-based BlazeGames, but one with a cute, Japanese aesthetic, and an interesting suite of modes.The fundamentals are similar, however. Players build out a heavily fortified base (atop a cool steampunk airship), which other players are able to attack. It’s also, however, your engine for farming alchemical resources, and you’ll need these to upgrade and expand your base, as well as to train up your avatar and roster of “champs”. As the name suggests, the champs are very much at the heart of the game – these are the minions you send into combat, and building out units for different situations is a central gameplay focus.You start out with a handful of different types, but there are more than a hundred champs to unlock all-told, and many have specific abilities that come into play in specific situations. This starts out relatively simply – you may want to include flying units to go over fortifications, for instance, or ranged units that can attack an enemy armament from a distance without taking damage, but the permutations become more involved. Some champs have tendencies like attacking defences first or doing extra damage to Giants, and these must be taken into account. Each champ can be trained up, and eventually morphed into more advanced variants, so you’re constantly juggling your resources to create better fighters.In addition to the champs, players take Nia – their avatar – into battle. An alchemist with a mad scientist edge, Nia can also be levelled up, growing more powerful and gaining additional skill slots as she does. Nia has elemental transformations too, allowing her to utilise elements like ice, wind and fire in battle.Akihiko Yoshida’s influence is felt throughout, and not just in the visual design. In fact, he took the project in a completely different direction when he came on board, shifting it away from a classical fantasy setting (albeit one where the player’s base was a dragon’s nest) to a steampunk world.BlazeGames’ CEO Yuji Okada quotes Yoshida as saying “But aren’t dragons a little… ordinary?” and emphasises that collaboration was critical, both between departments and subsidiaries within Cygames. “Overall, we had a ‘no walls’ development [strategy],” he tells me, “so no matter what your technical role in the game we really asked everyone to give opinions… we had a really long time in development. We would make the game, everyone would play the game, we would talk about it, we would remake it, play it, remake it, play it, and just kind of go back and forth. That’s how we got from the prototype to now.”“At the end of the dev period we had everybody who was involved in making Battle Champs debug the game,” he continues. “Everyone test-played it, and this includes Mr Yoshida, and actually, he spent a long time playing the game at the end, giving us feedback on game balance, and all of these things, and we took his feedback and implemented that back into the game.”This collaborative spirit extended to designing the game’s champs too. “We had designers from BlazeGames, from CyDesignation and then from our parent company Cygames,” says Yoshida, “and so there was really a large number of people who were involved. As a result of that we received a really wide variety of designs, with very different ideas and different origins of where people were coming from. So we were able to see a lot of the individuality and the touch and the taste of each of these different designers, and gather a really wide variety of champs that we wouldn’t have necessarily gotten if we’d just had one or two or three designers. So that’s one thing that I think was possible because of the team structure and the designer structure that we had.”This is new school Japanese game development, then, but it’s also reflective of the difference between making big budget games for console and more modest mobile-focused projects. Yoshida is enjoying that difference. “The more I got involved with high end development,” he explains, “it takes a lot more of your time and you’re very committed for much longer periods. Then in addition to that, the larger the project is that you’re working on, the amount that you can actually own becomes much more limited.”“I also have a personality where I like working within a certain amount of limitations,” he continues. “Especially with the current level of smartphones I think that level of technology is just the right amount of limitation and challenge for me, so it’s a lot of fun for me to work on these games.”It also shows just how important the mobile market is in Japan, where a dream team like Yoshida and Sakimoto can be reunited. “From the beginning we were struggling with who should create the music for Battle Champs,” Okada explains, “but once we’d decided that the visual aspect – the art aspect – would be done by Mr Yoshida, we thought it had to be Sakimoto-san.” The rest is history.“We have a very close relationship,” says Sakimoto of Yoshida. “Even if we don’t see or work with each other for a couple of years it doesn’t seem as though we’ve been away.” I ask about working in the mobile space. “In the beginning when I started working on mobile games, I had an idea in my mind that this is a mobile game, so I have to make mobile game music,” he says, “but now I don’t even have that in my mind any more. I just make the music.”The resulting score is charming and upbeat, a great complement to the detailed, stylish art and the wide array of – deliberately cute – champs. The proof is in the playing, however, and the core gameplay is very much pitched at a casual audience. It does try to offer a little something for everyone, however. There’s a whole set of Story missions that ease new players in, for instance, introducing them to some of the rock/paper/scissors-style elements in combat and rewarding them with champs and resources. Excursions are also single player missions and range from tutorials through to much more advanced challenges that expire after a few days. Team Trials, on the other hand, are co-op Story missions where you create a smaller unit and put the call out to friends or the community as a whole to join in on the particular mission.One of the major points of difference for Battle Champs is the Giants battles, where an unlimited number of players can work together to fell towering beasts. Each day a new big bad is available to fight, and obviously the unit load-out for these battles will likely be very different to what you’d take into other modes. And then there’s PVP, in the form of Tournament mode, and this is very much Battle Champs’ more hardcore end-game, where players can join crews of up to 50 people and compete for glory.

Check out some high-level gameplay.

“ The PVP element is the end-game content. That’s where the hardcore users are going to go.

“The PVP element is the end-game content,” confirms BlazeGames’ CEO Yuji Okada. “That’s where the hardcore users are going to go. However, in order to get stronger, in order to train your champs, in order to get the good champs, you need to play the story, you need to play the Giants battles, you also need to go into the Team Trials, which is four player and a different sort of cooperative [experience]. You need to go through all of these more casual aspects of the game in order to get to the end game. However, if you don’t go to the end game you can still play these more casual aspects.”It will be interesting to see if Battle Champs can successfully attract both casual players and those that just want to engage with the end-game. The early game is certainly strangely addictive, tapping into the cycle of acquisition and growth as you steadily upgrade your base and units, but it’s – by design - not challenging. Thankfully, unlike some free-to-play games, Battle Champs gives patient players plenty to do before they even have to think about spending money in-game.Available now on Android and iOS, BlazeGames is obviously hoping to recreate Battle Champs’ success in Japan, where it is called Little Noah, and has more than two million registered users, with a peak of 600,000 monthly active users. The international version represents close to a year and a half of additional development, so this is as feature rich and refined as the game has ever been, but the real test will be whether Western audiences will respond to this much cuter take on Clash of Clans.“I’m honestly not sure whether it’s going to be accepted or not,” Yoshida says on the topic of how the visual design will be received outside Japan. “I’ve – a number of times – tried to do the art design with the international approach in mind, so done research on what people in different countries like in terms of the style, then tried that a number of times, but that doesn’t always lead to success… I think really that what’s important is that you have fun making the game, that you are really confident in what you’re making, and go through with that, and then it’s not really going to matter, the country borders and whether it’s Japan or people outside Japan and so on. As long as you’re creating a game that you’re confident in and that you enjoy building, I think that’s really going to give you the best possible result.”

Cam Shea is senior editor in IGN's Sydney office and travelled to Tokyo to visit BlazeGames as a guest of Cygames. Tweet at him here