Sanrio Digital, showing a dedication to content creation and fan service that other game companies could definitely learn from, has already started in with some exciting news for Hello Kitty fans everywhere. Despite not being out of Closed Beta yet, It's been confirmed that Hello Kitty Online will have an expansion in 2009: Hello Kitty Island Adventures!

The expansion will open with Hello Kitty and her friends (Including you, the player) crash landing on a desert island while on Hello Kitty Air flight 337 to the 5th World Cuteness Symposium in Perth, Australia. That's right, in a gutsy move that should rightly earn them the applause of MMO designers everywhere, Sanrio Digital is shaking things up and actually shrinking the game world to one desert island, giving Hello Kitty faithful a whole new area to explore and giving them a break from the humdrum environs of places like Mari Land and Nightengale Lane. Join us after the break for a rundown of some of the other features you can expect!

There's planning in progress for all aspects of the game now. PvE will be focused both around the gathering of resources and crafting of shelter and tools for the survivors (including the introduction of the new Dessert making tradeskill and fire building as shown in the above screenshot) and the conflict with the original inhabitants of the item, a race of squat, foul-mouthed, inferiorily animated characters who will attempt to drive you and your friends off the island by any means possible. PvP will focus on the internal power struggle between Hello Kitty and Badtz-Maru for control of the survivors. Will you side with the powers of Cuteness, or will you agree with Badtz-Maru and aim for the survival of the fittest?

But perhaps the most intriguing feature to be announced is the ability for player characters to control NPCs such as Hello Kitty and Badtz-Maru for up to 1 hour in times of crisis. Other MMOs have long faced criticism for only letting a very small portion of their playerbase directly interact with major lore figures, so the fact that Sanrio is allowing people to be so intimate with the characters as to control them shows that there is finally a game company that listens. We're looking forward to seeing what scenarios will allow you to control such iconic characters, and what epic battles they might face!

Now that the announcement's been made, we're sure that the informational floodgates will be open. Stay tuned right here to HKO Insider, and we'll bring you all the latest news on the upcoming Hello Kitty Island Adventure Expansion!

Ed. Note: This appears to be a joke, posted by the official Sanrio blog. Which is a little silly, if you ask us -- what kind of professional blog would joke about combining World of Warcraft and Hello Kitty Online?

Tags: badtz-maru, dessert-making, flight-337, hello-kitty, hello-kitty-air, hello-kitty-island-adventure, hello-kitty-online, hko-insider, perth, sanrio-digital, world-cuteness-symposium

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, News items, Expansions, Rumors