BODY: Nintendo is taking the selfie era straight into the microgame factory. On May 28, the company will release "PictoNico!" ("ใใฏใใใณ๏ผ"), a new smartphone party game that drops your own face into a barrage of bite-sized challenges in the unmistakable style of the WarioWare series.
The app itself is free to download, but the full experience runs on a "game pack" model: a selection of minigames is playable for free, while the bulk of the content is unlocked through purchasable packs. It's a structure that lets curious users sample the chaos before committing, while giving Nintendo a recurring storefront to drip-feed new pack themes over time.
The hook is the photo gimmick. Players snap a portrait โ their own, a friend's, or whoever happens to be in the room โ and that face is grafted onto the characters running, dodging, dancing, and flailing through each five-second microgame. It's a direct descendant of the WarioWare design language: blink-and-you-miss-it instructions, escalating speed, and the kind of humor that only really lands when someone you know is the star.
Coming on the heels of Nintendo's measured but accelerating smartphone strategy, "PictoNico!" looks aimed squarely at the casual, share-with-friends audience rather than the core Switch faithful โ a lighter, sillier counterpart to the company's premium console output.
The insider take
From Tokyo, this feels like Nintendo testing how far the WarioWare DNA can stretch outside its home console. The face-photo concept is tailor-made for Japan's group-play culture โ think nijikai drinking parties, school clubs, and family gatherings where passing a phone around is the entertainment โ and it taps the same vein as purikura photo booths and LINE camera filters that have been social glue here for decades. Whether Western audiences embrace photographing each other quite so eagerly is the open question, but in Japan, "PictoNico!" is pressing exactly the right buttons.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).