According to the Anime News Service, Sega Japan has announced two new anime movies based on popular card game/video game hybrids, Mushiking and Fashionable Witch Love & Berry. In both of these games, which combine elements of a collectible card game with arcade video games, kids can swipe bar-coded cards in arcade game machines and then proceed to play (or adorn) the characters they have introduced. So far Sega claims sales of more than 398 million Mushiking: King of the Beetles cards, while 207 million Fashionable Witch Love & Berry cards have been sold.
Mushiking is a battling beetles game ('mushi' means 'beetle') with a forest-saving ecological theme and hyper-realistic graphics that appeal largely to boys (beetle collecting is a major pastime in Japan). Mushiking has inspired a 50+ episode anime series that ran from 2004-2006 in
Fashionable Witch Love & Berry is a 'dress-up' and dancing game targeting girls 5-12. In