'Neko Atsume' - the Japanese Mobile Game - Is Now in English (Start Collecting Kitties!)

Exciting news from Japan! Neko Atsume, a popular cat-collecting freemium mobile game, is now available in English on both Android and iOS. Up until very recently, the game was only available in Japanese, but it was so popular, social gamers from around the globe were still playing it.

Neko Atsume was released in October 2014 by Japanese company Hit Point, and it took off like wildfire. Originally, there were no plans for the game to be made available outside of Japan or in other languages, so you can imagine the company's surprise when pictures of their cat game exploded across Twitter and Facebook! In fact, as of May 2015, the game exceeded 400 million downloads between Android and iOS. So, plans change and now English-speaking feline fanatics can both play the game and understand it.

For those of you not familiar with Neko Atsume, you set up your yard to attract stray cats with pet beds, scratching posts, balls of yarn and other various items cats are famous for loving. If they really like your digs, they will leave you some fish, which you can exchange for yet more items or use to upgrade to a bigger, better house. "How does a Japanese game become an international phenomenon when it is only available in one language?" you may ask. "Quite simply, the art style and goofiness clicked with a lot of people." Now that English-speakers no longer have to use online guides to understand what their menus say, perhaps it will go from a cult following to a mainstream sensation.

You may be concerned about the quality of the translation, since a lot of games that undergo such an upgrade just don't translate well. Don't worry. Hit Point actually went through some the trouble of outsourcing to an agency called 8-4 to address issues they simply were not equipped to tackle just to make sure it was done right.

They even take into consideration the cat naming convention. "Direct translations of the Japanese names would often be overly literal or miss some cultural nuance, so in the English version Shironeko ("white cat") becomes Snowball, Haiiro ("gray") is now Shadow and Kutsushita ("socks," bearing some resemblance to a popular Japanese character with a similar name) is known as Smokey."

Just to give you an idea of the game play, "The game works much the same as a Tamagotchi or Hatchi work, with low-stress playing and big rewards (if herding cats is a reward in your books)," and I can't argue that. My preference is to think of it as a Kitty equivalent to Sims, minus the delightful ability to commit virtual murder via swimming pool.