Nintendo's mobile Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing games will be free-to-play

This autumn's Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing smartphone games will be free-to-play, Nintendo and DeNA confirmed to the Wall Street Journal today.

There's no detail on what either game's in-app purchases will look like. Will Animal Crossing involve a currency you can buy? Will Fire Emblem charge for characters? Will there be an energy system?

Nintendo's first smartphone release, Miitomo, is free-to-play and sells Miitomo Coin currency in varying bundles. You can use the currency to buy outfits and play a kind of pachinko mini-game.

It's not surprising that Nintendo and DeNA have followed suit with Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing, but they are the first of Nintendo's "pure game applications", as it calls them, on smartphones.

"Both of these are pure game applications," Nintendo has said. "Compared to Miitomo, they have more prominent game elements, and the game content will tie closely into Nintendo's dedicated games business."

I wonder what a free-to-play Mario would look like.

Nintendo has a further two smartphone games planned for release by March 2017.