Aeria Mobile, the recently-launched subsidiary of Aeria Games, has brought its popular Japanese iOS game Monster Paradise to the U.S.

Monster Paradise is an anime-inspired multiplayer card-battle game developed by Pokelabo, Inc. Available on the iPhone and iPod Touch, the game casts the player as a monster trainer who travels a fantasy kingdom, battling and capturing monster cards to add to their collection.

As is standard with card-battle games, players can fuse their monster cards together to make them more powerful and engage in player-versus-player battles. Unlike card-battle games from the mobile-social giants DeNA and GREE, which use their own proprietary social networks, Monster Paradise uses Facebook as its social layer, allowing players to ask their friends on the service  to help them defeat powerful enemies.

Monster Paradise is Aeria Mobile’s first  U.S. title, but the company is in the midst of rolling out its debut lineup of English-language iOS games. The company has two other titles — the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game Eden Eternal: Monster Arena and the turn-based online combat game Tuff Tanks live in Canadian and Australian App Stores, giving the games a soft launch before bringing them to the U.S.  Aeria Mobile is also aiming to bring its a turn-based strategy game Armygeddon, stateside sometime this summer.

Although Monster Paradise is one of the first card-battle games to make the jump from Japan to the U.S., the title is still facing some stiff competition. DeNA’s card-battle game Rage of Bahmut has proven to be more popular in the U.S. than in its native country. According to our traffic tracking service AppData, the game is currently the No. 6 top grossing iPhone app. There is also GREE’s less successful U.S.-developed title Zombie Jombie, which is currently the No. 44 top grossing iOS app according to AppData. Japanese made competitors aside, Wizards of the Coast is also looking to capture some of the blossoming card-battle market. The company has brought its ultra-popular collectible card game Magic: The Gathering to mobile with it’s iPad-only game Magic 2013. While Japanese players have demonstrated an almost endless appetite for card-battle games, it remains to be seen if North American ones will make the genre as lucrative and popular.