🌿 Maomao, the heroine of The Apothecary Diaries, spends her days grinding herbs and testing poisons inside an imperial palace. So when a producer at TOHO, the company behind the hit anime, went looking for a game idea, he landed on Maomao's Atelier. He took the pitch to Gust, the Koei Tecmo brand that has been making the Atelier alchemy RPGs since 1997. The answer came back almost immediately.

The result is The Apothecary Diaries: The False Imperial Brother, the series' first game for home consoles. On Oct. 21, 2026, Koei Tecmo set its release for March 18, 2027, in Japan and the West. It's a mystery adventure rather than an alchemy RPG, and the story comes from an original concept by the series author.

March 18, in Japan and the West

The game was first shown in the Nintendo Direct of Sept. 9, 2026, with only an "early 2027" window. In the West, the March 18 date came from Koei Tecmo America and Koei Tecmo Europe. It's coming to Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and Steam. The standard edition costs 8,580 yen (about $54), and the priciest collector's box goes up to 25,960 yen (about $165), converted at 157.6 yen to the dollar as of Oct. 22, 2026.

Text is available in Japanese, English, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, and voices are Japanese only. Spanish isn't supported. Koei Tecmo America's announcement does not list a dollar price (as of Oct. 23, 2026).

It isn't the first Apothecary Diaries game, though: the browser game The Apothecary Diaries: Palace Chronicles launched on the G123 platform on June 15, 2026.

A producer's pitch: "Maomao's Atelier"

The backstory came out at Tokyo Game Show on Sept. 17, 2026, during a stage talk with TOHO producer Takayuki Onishi and the game's director at Koei Tecmo Games.

According to Onishi, TOHO, which makes the anime, had wanted an Apothecary Diaries game for a while, but the project kept stalling. Onishi happens to be a Gust fan. At some point it occurred to him that a Maomao's Atelier could be really fun. He reached out to Koei Tecmo through contacts, and the idea landed with Gust executive producer Junzo Hosoi, who said yes almost on the spot.

Players got there on their own: after the September reveal, people were already calling the game "Maomao's Atelier" because of its medicine-making. Atelier games are about gathering materials and combining them into something new, and Maomao does the same with herbs and poisons. Neither company has said in detail how much of Gust's crafting design carries over.

Brew the medicine, re-create the crime

A case breaks out. Maomao explores the palace and the city, gathers ingredients, questions people and collects evidence. Then comes the deduction, where you present proof and connect the pieces until the case is closed.

Maomao makes medicines from what she gathers and uses them to re-create what happened, and the results become clues. The pharmacology is checked by outside experts, and some of the gatherable ingredients are real herbal medicines.

Case file screen with a relationship map linking suspects, places and clues

Source: Koei Tecmo Games / official game website

Clues are organized into a relationship map, so you can see what you've already learned. A wrong deduction leaves the case unsolved and ends the game, but you can retry from the deduction.

After each case, Maomao chooses whether to tell the people involved the truth or something more comforting, and that choice changes the ending. You also don't play only as her. Jinshi and a palace cat get their own exploration sections: Jinshi can get statements from people who won't talk to Maomao, and the cat can reach high places and eavesdrop. As the story moves on, the quack doctor and Luomen help with brewing and become playable too.

The author's concept: the story "in between"

Hyuganatsu, the author of the original novels, wrote the original concept for the all-new story. Onishi said that, after several rounds of talks with the author, they settled on neither a spin-off nor a what-if. Instead, the game fills in events that happened behind the scenes and between chapters of the existing story.

The setup takes place not long after Maomao starts working as a lady-in-waiting. A string of strange incidents known as the "Five Mysteries" spreads unease through the rear palace, and Jinshi asks her to look into them. Later, rumors of "Five Curses" spread through the capital, and the trouble comes to center on a masked imperial brother. Fitting new events into a timeline readers already know took work: the team checked details with the author, the novels' publisher and the anime production committee.

Maomao is played by Aoi Yuki and Jinshi by Takeo Otsuka, the same voices as in the anime, and the anime's composer handles the music. Yohei Azakami voices Guanyu, a new character who works as a traveling actor.

Apothecary Diaries season runs until 2028

The franchise schedule, as of Oct. 23, 2026:

When What
Since Oct. 2, 2026 Anime season 3 (part one) on Nippon TV
Dec. 11, 2026 Theatrical film
March 18, 2027 The False Imperial Brother (Japan and the West)
April 2027 Anime season 3, part two
2028 Live-action series starring Mana Ashida, on Prime Video in 240+ countries and territories

The series has passed 57 million copies, a figure that includes digital and translations in 16 languages. Season 2 of the anime won five Crunchyroll Anime Awards in 2026: Best Drama, Best Director, Best Main Character for Maomao, and voice acting awards for Aoi Yuki in Japanese and for the Hindi voice of Jinshi.

Gust's next mainline Atelier game, Atelier Karia: The Night Kingdom & the Guide of Memories, is due on Feb. 25, 2027, three weeks before this one.

We covered the live-action casting and how Japanese fans reacted here.

Does a mystery adventure feel like the right fit for Maomao? And where you live, is Japanese audio with English text enough, or are you waiting for a translation in your own language?

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