Gamevil’s hit RPG for the iPhone, Zenonia, is getting kind of old…actually, it’s been on the App Store for almost exactly a year. While I loved it at the time, the App Store moves quickly, and the passing time has allowed competitors like Inotia 2 to try and steal a piece of the RPG pie. Often, they include features that the original Zenonia lacks.

It’s good news, then, that the folks at Gamevil are preparing to answer their adversaries with the long-awaited Zenonia 2: The Lost Memories. The sequel is being submitted to Apple’s approval process by the end of this week. To add fanfare to the upcoming release, Gamevil has also released a new promo video. Careful…it’s got a scary butterfly-girl in it.

The video covers some of the game’s new features as compared to the original Zenonia title. We’ve heard many of them before: you can play four different characters with different storylines and abilities; there’s asynchronous multiplayer; in addition to Normal mode, dedicated gamers can also take on Hard and Hell modes. I don’t recall hearing about the “costumes” before, though. Check the video to see the new perks narrated by a perky Asian girl with butterfly wings. I kid you not.

Gamevil has just released a new teaser for their upcoming game HYBRID: Eternal Whisper, which is set to release in the US App Store this Fall. The product of the same team behind the amazing RPG Zenonia, HYBRID has a lot of promise. Gamevil’s calling HYBRID a “a new breed of stylish action adventure,” and it looks like it’ll focused more on combat and special moves than on a storyline. There will be 150 levels, a complex storyline, and plenty of challenge. If Zenonia’s success and level of polish is anything to go by, HYBIRD should delight the hardcore gaming crowd.

Gamevil doesn’t have a huge App Store presence on this side of the ocean yet (their only games with English localizations are Zenonia and Baseball Superstars) but from what I understand, they’ve got a solid presence in Korea. Like their other two US releases, HYBRID will be a port from a popular Korean title.

Gamevil is the fantastic company behind Zenonia and Baseball Superstars. I recently had the chance to review their latest game, Zenonia, and it blew me away; you can read my review here, but suffice to say that I thought it clearly surpassed other RPGs in the App Store. While the Korean-based company has only released two games in the US App Store so far (the other Baseball Superstars), both have been very well-received.

The president of Gamevil USA, Kyu Lee, generously agreed to answer a few questions about Zenonia, Gamevil, and the App Store in general. He has some really interesting and intriguing insights—it’s not often that we get to hear things from a mobile game developer’s point of view.

Parts of this interview were also used in my Search for Satisfaction editorial, but there’s plenty of additional content here!

Bonnie Eisenman (148apps): Hi, Kyu, and thanks for taking the time to do this! For starters, what inspired you guys to make Zenonia? I don’t just mean “why make an RPG”–I mean, “why make a good RPG?”

Kyu Lee (Gamevil): We’ve been developing and publishing mobile games since 2000 in South Korea. One of the most popular categories in South Korea is Role-Playing Games, and it is an extremely competitive category. We “had” to make good RPG games in order to survive through the tough competition. We have been developing RPG games ever since we launched “Last Warrior” in 2001, the first RPG mobile game in Korea, which was less than 50KB. ZENONIA was a project decided to be done after we launched our multiplayer network game, “Path of a Warrior”.
Continue reading Interview with Gamevil (Developers of Zenonia and Baseball Superstars) »