Hime's Quest
Crunchyroll (2024)
In the press: GamesRadar+ · Nintendo Life · Pocket Tactics
Crunchyroll partnered with Limited Run to bring Hime, the platform's mascot, to life as the star of her own 8-bit retro video game. The game was called Hime's Quest, and a limited run of exclusive physical cartridges was made available through Crunchyroll's e-commerce store, and I led the end-to-end design on the marketing page to support the drop.
Working Within Constraints
As lead on the project, I was also mentoring another designer at the time, and the two of us were working against a tight timeline with a limited set of assets. We only had access to the web version of the game itself, so to build out the supporting artifacts on the page, we cropped and redrew the pixel art by hand from what we could pull directly from the browser build.
The Dual Purpose
The page had to do two jobs at once: work as a product landing page that converted visitors into cartridge buyers on the e-commerce site, while also hosting a fully playable version of the game directly in the browser.
Playable in the Browser
Rather than treating the game as a locked-away preview, we built it to run right on the page using keyboard controls, letting fans actually play Hime's Quest before deciding whether to buy the physical cartridge, turning the landing page itself into part of the pitch.
Hime's Quest launched as the #1 product on the Crunchyroll Store during announcement, with over 1,400 units sold to date, pacing to 70% of total sales in just two weeks.
The drop also punched above its weight on reach: new customers made up 67% of sales, well past the usual 50% baseline, bringing a wave of new audience into the store. ( ๑ ˃ᴗ˂ )ﻭ