Dragon Ball Z Bucchigiri Match

» see enza.fun as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

enza was a bet against the app store. Bandai Namco Entertainment and Drecom built it through a joint company called BXD, on the argument that HTML5 had finally become good enough to run a real game inside a browser tab, on a phone or on a desktop, with no install step and no platform holder taking a cut of every purchase. A bet like that needs a launch title big enough to make people try the unfamiliar thing. Dragon Ball is about as big as Japanese licensing gets.

Dragon Ball Z Bucchigiri Match opened on 16 May 2018 in a restricted form the company called a pre-open, and reached what it called its grand open on 25 July. Pre-registration had passed 700,000 in the week before launch. The game was a real-time duel: you built a deck of eight Dragon Ball characters, each carrying an attack rank from one to eight, and on every turn both players revealed a card, with the higher rank winning the right to swing. Matches ran twenty turns or until somebody's life reached zero. More than 150 fighters existed by the end.

Bandai Namco marketed it like a console release. The shutdown was announced on 15 January 2020 and the servers stopped at noon on 16 March, one year and ten months after the first players got in.

~ the record ~

~ the face of the campaign ~

The official supporter signed for the launch was Yuto Nagatomo, the Japan international, who appeared in a pair of television commercials set in a school clubroom. This is where the game brushes against my part of the world without ever being aimed at it. Nagatomo had moved to Galatasaray on loan from Inter in January 2018, four months before the game opened, and the transfer was made permanent that June on a two-season contract. For the whole life of Dragon Ball Z Bucchigiri Match, the man advertising it to Japan was playing his club football in Istanbul.

None of that made the game reachable from here. enza was a Japanese platform serving a Japanese audience, and the commercials ran on Japanese television. The overlap was one footballer, visible from both ends and meaning something different at each.

~ what enza kept ~

The platform did not die with its launch title. enza.fun answers today, which makes this a cleaner story than the usual one about a service dragging its host down with it: the host was fine, and the Dragon Ball game was what came apart. Browser distribution removed the install step and the store listing, but it never removed the problem underneath, which is that a free game has to keep enough people interested to pay for its own servers.

What a browser game leaves behind is also less than nothing. There is no app sitting forgotten on an old phone and no disc in a drawer. On 16 March 2020 the URL stopped resolving to a game, and that was the entire estate. The 150 fighters and the decks people had spent two years assembling were server-side without exception, which is the arrangement every player agreed to without being asked.

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