Solo Leveling was one of the biggest animated spectacles in the last year, beautifully adapting the Webtoon into a fantastical spectacle that raised expectations for every other anime that released in 2024. The studio behind the adaptation, A-1 Pictures, is well-known for producing other popular series like Kaguya-Sama Love Is War!, Fairy Tail, and perhaps most famously, Sword Art Online. Now, the studio is back with a gorgeous promotional trailer for the smash-hit mobile game, Nikke.
Videos by ComicBook.com
The full promotional video is only around three minutes long, but does an excellent job bringing some of the game’s core characters to life. The special is titled “Old Tales,” which primarily follows one of the main characters from the game, SSR Nikke Cinderella, to celebrate the game’s second anniversary, and to promote Nikke‘s latest story event, which shares a title with the animated promo. The storyboarding and technical animation were handled by Yusuke Shibata at A-1 Pictures, with Rina Morita, known for her work on another mobile game franchise called Hypnosis Mic, working as both the chief animation director and character designer. The background music used in the short, titled “Unbreakable”, was written and produced by Cosmograph with a stunning vocal performance by Yurisa.
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Nikke Has Become a Global Phenomenon For Its unique Blend of Gacha and Action
Goddess of Victory: Nikke has rapidly grown in popularity around the world, describing itself as a third-person, immerse shooting experience with gacha elements. The game was developed by the South Korean game studio Shift Up in 2017, and was released on mobile devices in 2022, with a Windows release being made available in 2023. The game does offer plenty of strategy elements, allowing for players to quickly swap between characters and utilize different abilities to complete missions. While the game is free-to-play, it does offer a gacha element to let players earn exclusive units, which has done extremely well, and earned the game over $70 million USD in one month after its initial launch.
Nikke is set in a post-apocalyptic future wherein Earth has been taken over by aliens called Raptures. The humans that survived the alien’s conquest took to building an underground society to recoup and build artificial, humanoid soldiers called Nikke to take Earth back. The game’s main story is primarily told from the perspective of the Commander, a Military Academy graduate who leads a squad known as “Counters”, which consists of important story characters that players meet throughout the game’s progression. While the game typically sticks to its own lore, Nikke has participated in numerous event collaborations with popular anime series like Chainsaw Man, which added Power, Makima, and Himeno as playable characters, as well as a collaboration with Nier: Automata that added 2B to the game’s roster. The game’s most recent content collaboration took place in March 2024, which added Emilia, Rem, and Ram to its list of playable characters.