Ichiketsu Banketsu -ONLINE- (一血卍傑-ONLINE-)

~ the eulogy ~

The pitch was ancient Japan with a genetics problem. You played a lone god leading heroes against evil spirits to take back a world called the Yaorozukai, and the heroes were not recruited so much as manufactured. Everybody called it Banketsu. It opened in a PC browser on 3 August 2016 and as a phone app on 24 November, free to play with items for sale, and DMM marked the app launch by handing out a bonus for passing fifty thousand installs.

The setup is worth stating because of one word in it. Evil spirits arrive by black ship, which in Japanese is kurofune, the term the country uses for Perry's squadron turning up in 1853 at the end of two centuries of closed borders. A marshal named Belial comes off those ships, the lone god and the eight heroes of the divine age fight him and lose, and the survivors fall back on a secret rite to make replacements.

Rejet wrote the music into it as well as the story. The theme song was composed by Chiyomaru Shiizaki, with lyrics by Rejet's own president and a vocal by Eri Sasaki, and there was a collaboration cafe running at Animega branches from 17 August to 10 October 2016. The closure notice went up on 21 December 2020 and the service ended at noon on 25 January 2021, four years and five months after the browser version opened.

~ the dossier ~

~ one blood, ten thousand heroes ~

The rite the game is named after crosses two heroes to produce a third. The child could inherit a parent's standard technique, and its special technique changed depending on which species the parents were, which meant the collection you were building was also a breeding table you were reading. Over a hundred units existed by the end.

Every species had a source. Gods came out of Japanese mythology and humans out of folk tales, with the yokai tradition supplying the demons, and a fourth line of descending heroes was imported from Norse myth and a place called Asgard. Nobody bothered keeping the periods clean either, so Jiraiya, an Edo-period fictional ninja, stands next to Yamato Takeru.

~ what rejet was hired for ~

This is the unusual part of the record. In a 4Gamer interview, Yusuke Nashiki, who ran DMM.com OVERRIDE, said his company was good at making the game itself but felt it lacked the imaginative power to construct a world and a story, and that seeing Rejet's outline convinced him a game with a solid setting was possible. So the labor was split down the middle. Rejet took the setting, the music, the character art and the casting. OVERRIDE took the planning and everything mechanical, down to the 3D models.

Rejet's president Daisuke Iwasaki said the longest job in the whole production was picking the first batch of characters. Ancient Japan was chosen as the stage because the crossbreeding idea needed a mythology where humans and gods could plausibly produce offspring with monsters. The mechanic picked the period.

~ the flash clock ~

The browser build required Adobe Flash. Adobe had announced in July 2017 that it would stop updating and distributing Flash Player at the end of 2020, and that end arrived on 31 December 2020. EXNOA posted the closure of this game on 21 December 2020, ten days ahead of that, and the trade write-up gave no reason for the decision. The phone version did not need Flash and was switched off on the same day as the browser one.

I remember the Flash deadline. A lot of the web I grew up with was built on it, and this was the first time I had seen a runtime given its end date years in advance. What I did not notice at the time was how much went down with it in the few weeks either side, including this.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »