Kamen Rider Battle: Ganbarizing

» see ganbarizing.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Ganbarizing was an arcade cabinet that printed trading cards. It belonged to Bandai's Data Carddass line, the family of Japanese machines where a child feeds in a coin and receives a physical card, then plays a short game using that card on a touchscreen. This one ran on Kamen Rider, the tokusatsu hero franchise that has been on Japanese television since 1971, and it took over from an earlier cabinet called Ganbaride on 31 October 2013.

Bandai posted the ending notice on 8 December 2022. It opened by noting the occasion: the fifteenth year of the Kamen Rider Battle arcade series and the tenth year of Ganbarizing itself. The notice named a final card series, Gekiretsu Grand Prix 3, said the game would end with it, and gave the dates it had at the time as a late-January start and a spring finish. The series duly began on 26 January 2023, and its nationwide ranking closed on 8 March. The successor cabinet arrived on 23 March 2023.

Which means the exact last day is not a published number, and this grave does not pretend otherwise. What Bandai printed was a season, not a timestamp, which is how arcade hardware tends to die: the machine is not switched off so much as hauled out and replaced by the next one, store by store, over some weeks. Nine years and five months is the honest span. I was in Ankara throughout, several continents outside the target demographic of Japanese primary schoolers.

~ the dossier ~

~ how the machine worked ~

A hundred yen got you a card dispensed from the cabinet and a round of play, and the card was the point. The physical object had a barcode, so you brought it back and it became your fighter next time. This is a model that only works where it was built: it needs dense retail full of small children with pocket money, and shops willing to give floor space to a machine that serves one customer at a time for ninety seconds.

Holding a card the machine printed for you a second ago does something a loot box cannot. Ganbarizing ran for nine years on that difference, through a parade of Rider series whose new protagonists arrived every autumn with the television season and needed cards of their own.

~ passing the cards on ~

The successor, Kamen Rider Battle Ganbare Legends, started on 23 March 2023 at the same hundred yen, and Bandai did the thing that card games almost never do. Every Ganbarizing card remained usable in the new cabinet. Account data came across too, through a QR code you generated from the old machine, with the carry-over bonus gated behind having played the final series online at least once and owning a Rider License card to claim it on the new hardware. Some stats and move names were restated to fit the new system, and Bandai said so in advance.

~ the club ~

There was a second death and it came much later. Ganbarizing Bu, the online club where cards were registered to an account, kept running after the cabinets were gone. Bandai closed it on 29 November 2023, roughly eight months after the successor launched, and with it the collections stopped being readable as collections.

The site is still there. ganbarizing.com answers today with the game's own tombstone at the head of the site, a banner in Rider-green that thanks you for playing and states that operation has ended. Underneath it the card list and the rankings are still navigable, nine years of a franchise's merchandise indexed and sitting online for nobody, long after the machine that sold it stopped existing.

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