AKB48 Stage Fighter

~ the last words ~

To explain this game I have to explain a machine I only know secondhand. AKB48 is an idol group built as a permanent competition. Dozens of members rotate through a theater in Akihabara that runs performances most days of the week, and once a year there is a general election in which fans buy singles to vote their favorite into the front row of the next one. The group's internal politics are the product being sold. Nothing in Turkey worked like that, and I met the whole apparatus years later as a curiosity rather than as music.

AKB48 Stage Fighter went live on GREE on 21 October 2011, on feature phones, which dates it precisely. An app version followed in January 2013. GREE built and ran it with Ateam, and by March 2012 it had passed two million registered players, later reported above 4.8 million. In August 2014 it was the top-ranked title on GREE on both iOS and Android.

The premise deserves writing down. The setting is a ruined world in a year given only as 20XX, where the members of AKB48 have been thrown through a distortion in time and space, and the position of center, the spot at the front of the formation that the group's real politics turn on, gets settled with fists. You picked your oshimen, your favorite member, and collected a resource called center aura on her behalf by grinding missions and attacking other players. Cards came in nine grades, climbing from Normal up through tiers named God and then Ultra God. The shape of the economy underneath is legible from that list alone.

~ the record ~

~ the center election ~

Players who had chosen the same member formed a team, and during a Center Acquisition Battle Event the teams raced to pile up the most center aura. The member backed by the winning team became the center of AKB48 Stage Fighter, a title that existed only inside the software. The members behind the next eight teams got something sturdier than that: the right to appear in a new television commercial, with limited cards printed of them. From the fourth event onward the top sixteen performed a special Stage Fighter concert at the AKB48 Theater.

Yuko Oshima, one of the group's biggest names, took the first three of these in a row. When AKB48 ran the general election for its 32nd single, the game put all 246 candidates into circulation as campaign poster cards, pulling in the sister groups SKE48 and NMB48 along with them. The fan vote and the gacha had been wired into one another, and both were feeding the same promotional calendar.

~ when a member graduated ~

AKB48 runs on turnover. Members graduate, and the group closes around the gap they leave. Stage Fighter had to encode that somehow, and the rule it settled on is the most quietly brutal thing in it: once a member graduated or transferred out, no new cards of her were printed, and nobody could select her as an oshimen any more. The cards already sitting in your deck kept working exactly as before.

So the roster inside the game drifted away from the roster outside it, in one direction only. A player who had backed someone since 2011 could keep fighting with her indefinitely and could never again recruit another person who felt the same way. The game became a record of who had been there, maintained by the people who had not moved on.

~ the second one died too ~

GREE gave notice on 9 August 2018 and closed the service on 19 December, after seven years and two months. Most of its contemporaries on GREE had gone dark years before that; a card battler which started life on feature phones rarely saw out the decade.

A sequel was already running by then. AKB48 Stage Fighter 2: Battle Festival, operated by Alt Plus, carried the line on until five in the afternoon on 29 July 2022, four years and nine months of its own. The group is still going, and still rotating members through its front row. The game that let people vote on that is gone twice over.

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