Formation Girls

~ the obit ~

編隊少女 is read hentai shoujo. The first word means formation, the kind an aircraft squadron flies in, and it is a homophone of the other hentai. The subtitle underneath spelled Formation Girls in Latin letters, which is the half of the title that survives translation and the half that is not funny.

Aiou Plus, a studio in Chiyoda in Tokyo, ran a beta in August 2015 and then spent eleven months rebuilding before Yahoo! Games launched the thing properly on 8 July 2016. What the rebuild took out is the interesting part. In the beta you picked a national army to serve under, and the campaign ran on a six-month cycle that looped through the war years from 1940 to 1945 and then started again. Both of those were deleted. What shipped kept the planes and the pilots and dropped the war's shape.

The surviving game had two halves. One was an air battle with the fighters modeled in 3D, Zeros and Mustangs detailed closely enough that the press materials made a point of saying so to readers who would know. The other was the half where you talked to the pilots and gave them presents until their affection unlocked their story and their voice lines. Sumire Uesaka and Saori Hayami were in the cast alongside twenty-two others, which is more voice work than a browser game of that size usually gets.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the names they borrowed ~

The pilots carry the aces' names, feminized. Alexandrina Pokryshkina is Alexander Pokryshkin, one of the two highest scoring Soviet fighter pilots of the war. Johanna Rudel is Hans-Ulrich Rudel, who flew more combat sorties than any pilot in the war. Isabel Lancaster and Emilia Junkers are not named after pilots. One is a British heavy bomber and the other is the German firm that built the Stuka.

The fiction is what lets that work. An unidentified enemy called FF, the foo fighters, starts appearing over the 1940s and bombing everyone indiscriminately, so the nations already at war stop long enough to form a joint body against it, and you command its Far East base. Which is a way of putting American, German, British, Soviet and Japanese pilots on the same airfield without saying anything at all about the year before.

~ launched twice ~

Nijiyome and mixi games picked the game up on 14 December 2017. Yahoo! Mobage followed on 6 February 2018 and a smartphone build arrived on 1 October. That is four browser storefronts inside nineteen months, which is what a game does when the first storefront has not been enough.

Then it went backwards. The press release for the 12 November 2018 update says in plain words that the game had been a beta version from the August update onward, and that this release was the official one. The title changed in the same breath, to 編隊少女 改, kai, meaning revised. A game that had been live on four platforms for over two years announced its launch.

Six months and four days later it closed. Aiou Plus had put the notice out on 29 January 2019, which gave players three and a half months, a longer warning than most of these get. 4Gamer's last report on the game is dated 25 December 2018. The trade press followed the renamed version for six weeks and then stopped, and 4Gamer never ran the closure at all. That came from gamebiz.

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