Fight League

~ the last words ~

Fight League launched on 22 June 2017 into Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Canada. Five of those make immediate sense for a Japanese phone game. The sixth is Canada, and nobody at mixi ever explained it in a press release, though the usual reason a publisher picks one Western market is that it is a cheap place to test the servers and the store listing before deciding whether a wider launch is worth paying for.

The game itself was a board-battler on twelve squares. You built a team of fighters and placed them, and the tactical interest came from position rather than from reflexes, which the second tagline eventually said out loud: 知が騒ぐ, roughly, your wits get restless. The first tagline had been BE THE BEST TOGETHER, and the original design leaned hard on two-player co-op, with a launch campaign that had GACKT and HIKAKIN publicly auditioning for partners.

mixi announced the end on 17 December 2019. The game closed on 31 March 2020 at 11:59 in the morning, one minute short of noon. That is a longer runway than most dying phone games get, about three and a half months, and mixi never gave a public reason for it.

~ the record ~

~ the overseas build ~

The Amazon Appstore version died first, on 6 June 2019, about ten months before the rest. Details like that only surface in a Japanese trade-press roundup of the week's shutdowns, filed between two games nobody remembers either. None of the six territories was Turkey, which in 2017 was ordinary: a Japanese publisher testing the West picked an English-speaking market where Apple and Google billing was already solved, and Turkey has never fit that description.

~ the anime ~

In November 2018 mixi announced that Fight League was getting an anime, with TeddyLoid producing the sound. The first episode premiered in Japan on 7 February 2019 and the series went out to five countries and territories, and the original soundtrack went on sale as a download a week later.

This is a recognizable move. A phone game eighteen months old that is not growing gets an anime, because an anime is a marketing spend that looks like a content expansion and can be booked as franchise development. Three weeks after the premiere, on 1 March 2019, the game shipped what mixi called a large-scale renewal. Both things happened in the same quarter, and neither of them changed the trajectory.

~ the crossover ~

On 15 August 2019 Monster Strike arrived in Fight League as a new brand, thirteen fighters at once, Lucifer included. Monster Strike is mixi's enormous hit, the game that made the company a games company, and lending its characters to a struggling sibling is the strongest card a publisher holds short of shutting the sibling down.

They played it in August and announced the shutdown in December. Four months is roughly how long it takes to see whether a crossover has moved the needle, so the sequence reads as a test that returned a negative result. Monster Strike is still running today, years after the game it was sent in to rescue stopped accepting logins.

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