Shigeru Ohmori has been working on Pokemon games since the original Ruby and Sapphire in 2002, and has been directing the series since Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire over a decade later. Now, still at Game Freak, he's working on something all-new in the form of a magical girl RPG that relies on real-life weather.
Ohmori wants to build "forms of expression that can only be achieved in a completely original game," as he tells Famitsu (translated by Automaton). The result is Ame Nochi Hare Onna, a free-to-play mobile RPG. You build a team of magical girls who clean up the city by taking on trash in turn-based combat – the trash, in this case, being garbage-shaped yokai spirits.
The key gimmick is that your party's powers are determined by their outfits, and outfits get dirty over time. The game is built around short gameplay sessions, requiring you to wash your outfits to use them again. They dry in real time, and the drying time is affected by the real-life weather. Clothes will dry faster on sunny days than rainy ones.
The goal was to "thoroughly explore the concept of bishojo characters" and build a game that was "firmly rooted in real life, with a sense of everyday reality." With that in mind, Ohmori says that the real-time weather tracking and core gameplay loop meshed "most beautifully."
While it's easy to see Game Freak as purely the Pokemon Studio, it's made plenty of other games over the years – many of them quite offbeat and experimental. Ohmori himself worked on underrated gems like Drill Dozer, a 2006 rumble-powered GBA platformer, and HarmoKnight, a 2013 rhythm platformer released on the 3DS eShop. With those precedents in mind, Ame Nochi Hare Onna seems like much less of an outlier.
There's no word yet on whether Ame Nochi Hare Onna will be released outside of Japan. Given the success of the likes of Genshin Impact and Umamasume, though, I think it's clear that anime girls are a global draw.
In the lead up to Pokemon Winds and Waves, check out our guide to all the best Pokemon games.
