Kamen Rider City Wars

» see krcw.bn-ent.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Two games in one app, and the pitch said so in a single line: the Rider protects the city and the city makes the Rider stronger. One half was 3D combat worked by tapping and flicking, with form changes and a finishing move at the end of a fight. The other half was a construction game. It opened on 25 October 2017 with fifty thousand people already pre-registered, developed by Genki in Nakano and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment.

The credit matters because almost every English page about this game gets it wrong and hands both roles to Bandai Namco. Genki is a real studio with its own history and its own corporate site, and that site listed City Wars among its works with the publisher named separately. The game ran for three years and five months and passed half a million downloads on Google Play alone, where five and a half thousand people left it an average of 3.9.

Bandai Namco posted the closing notice on 28 January 2021 and shut the game on 29 March, sixty days later. Paid Hero Stones stopped selling on 26 February. The notice is short. It calls the closure most regrettable and names the date. It promised that any further news would appear on that same page, and then the page was never touched again: the archive holds two captures of it, three weeks apart, with identical digests.

~ the case file ~

~ the city was the point ~

The buildings came out of the shows. You placed Snack Amigo from Den-O and Fuuto Tower from W, structures lifted out of individual television series and dropped into one shared town. A player who had watched the shows was assembling a map of their own viewing history, and a player who had not was decorating with furniture that meant nothing. One Japanese columnist described the appeal as being allowed to build a secret base.

The music worked the same way. Bandai Namco licensed the television theme songs and shipped them gradually as collectibles, around thirty-seven of them, running from Let's Go!! Rider Kick in 1971 to ALMIGHTY in 2020. That is almost fifty years of a children's franchise reassembled inside a phone game, and it is the clearest statement of who the thing was actually for: not the kids watching the current series, but the ones who had been watching since some earlier one.

~ a template with somebody else's name in it ~

Here is the detail I cannot stop looking at. The archived front page carries a Twitter timeline widget, and the widget's link points at the Kamen Rider game account, correctly. But the fallback text inside the tag, the words a browser shows if the script never loads, still reads "Tweets by sslegendwars". That is the handle for Super Sentai Legend Wars, a different Bandai Namco tokusatsu phone game on the same bn-ent.net host.

Somebody copied the Legend Wars site to make the City Wars site, updated the link and missed the label. It sat there in public for years. Legend Wars died on 31 August 2020, about seven months before the game built from its template, and both of them closed without a published reason. The two products were close enough that one was literally constructed out of the other's HTML.

~ what came after ~

Nothing replaced it for three years. The next Kamen Rider phone game, Ride Kamens, arrived on 30 May 2024 from a different publisher and a different developer, and its online service ended on 31 October 2025, swapped the same day for an offline version. City Wars itself leaves no address. The old host now redirects every path to the Bandai Namco corporate homepage, and both store listings are gone.

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