Hisho Collection

» see konami.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Konami put Hisho Collection on GREE on 23 August 2011, for Japanese feature phones first and smartphones afterward. It never ran anywhere else, because GREE's feature-phone product was a Japanese carrier product and almost nothing about it was portable. Ten days after launch it sat eleventh on GREE's overall feature-phone ranking. By February 2012, when the iOS build arrived, it had passed 750,000 registered members, and a campaign that July marked 1.3 million.

The engine underneath was Dragon Collection's. Konami had shipped that in 2010, it had gone to the top of GREE, and what followed was the Collection Series, a run of titles reusing one loop with the artwork changed. Hisho Collection is the one where the artwork was secretaries.

The rest was the standard social-game stack of the period. A stamina bar refilled at one point every three minutes and the mission track ran in a straight line, with limited-time events dropped on top that wanted better cards than the missions handed out. The attribute wheel had three positions at launch, sexy beating healing and healing beating intellect, with intellect closing the loop. A fourth attribute called mystic arrived on 18 November 2013, strong against everything and weak to everything at once.

~ the record ~

~ the year 2034 ~

The premise deserves stating plainly because the game states it plainly. It is 2034. Corporate conflict has grown more savage than it is today, and the age calls for an invincible company soldier, the super secretary. A custom has settled in by which disputes between firms are decided by a battle between the two sides' female secretaries.

You play a hired president, employed by a figure the game only ever calls That Person, and you never fight. Your secretaries do. All of them are women, and the catalogue reaches a long way past human: animals drawn as people, gods, demons, fairies, robots. Cao Cao is in there as a secretary, and so are Napoleon and Sun Wukong, all three gender-flipped to qualify. There was also an Android battery widget in which the secretaries helped you manage your phone.

~ the film on the card ~

Cards arrived wrapped. The game called the wrapper a film. A card still inside its film could not be leveled up at all, and it sold back for more money than an opened one. Opening it set the card's motivation loose, a four-step mood running from slump up to a state the game called sparkle, which moved its numbers in battle. Konami had built mint-in-box into a thing with no box.

The other idea borrowed off the collectors' market was circulation. Every card displayed roughly how many copies of it were out there across all players, in six bands running from absurdly common down to a figure printed as an actual count. A card rare enough for the game to tell you the exact number was telling you something the rarity grade did not, because the printed grades did not always match what was actually scarce.

A Mobage version, Hisho Collection: Dokidoki Secret President's Office, opened on 28 June 2013 and closed on 25 April 2014, just under ten months later. It had voiced secretaries where the GREE original had none, and once it was gone the GREE version got voices too, from 15 May 2014. Crossovers ran the whole way through, Saint Seiya and Bahamut Brave among them. In July 2013 Konami tied the game to the Japanese theatrical release of Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, in which the secretaries got lost in Silent Hill and you went in to bring them out. The GREE version stopped on 31 October 2014, and the Konami product page cited for it now lands on the company's game index.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »