Kamen Rider Legend (仮面ライダーレジェンド)

~ the obituary ~

For a few years in Japan a phone game could be sold through several storefronts at the same time, and the storefronts belonged to social networks and carriers rather than to Apple or Google. Kamen Rider Legend ended up on four of them. Nothing resembling that distribution stack existed anywhere else, which is most of why a game with a famous television property attached to it is unknown outside the country.

Bandai Namco Games built it on Toei's tokusatsu series. You collected Brave Jewels, each one holding the sealed power of a Rider or one of the monsters they fought, and you assembled a team out of them to go at an enemy organization. The roster ran from the original 1971 Kamen Rider up through Kamen Rider Drive. Free to play, paid items, which was the standard arrangement on DeNA's Mobage when it launched there on 28 November 2011.

The smartphone version arrived in March 2012 for iPhone and Android. A mixi version followed that June, running on both feature phones and smartphones, and in December it turned up inside docomo's dMarket as part of dGame. Service ended on 25 June 2015.

~ the case file ~

~ the brave jewels ~

The jewels are a tidy piece of design for a licensing problem. Forty-odd years of Toei shows, and every Rider and every villain in them becomes the same kind of object, drawn from the same pool and balanced against the others without anybody having to argue about who would really win a fight. Kamen Rider Drive was on the air while the game was running, so the catalog was still being extended in its last year.

~ who ran which copy ~

DeNA operated the Mobage version and Mixi operated the mixi one. Same game, different hosts, with docomo's own portal running a route of its own alongside them. The hidden clock in all of this is the device: it launched as a feature-phone title in late 2011, when the Japanese feature phone was already a product class with an end date on it, and it spent the rest of its life chasing its own audience onto newer hardware and other people's platforms.

~ one source for the ending ~

The launch is documented outside the encyclopedia. Gamer covered the Mobage release on 28 November 2011 and 4Gamer covered the mixi version in June 2012. The closure is not. The 25 June 2015 date comes from the Japanese Wikipedia article, and everything else carrying that date is copying it. No Japanese trade outlet appears to have written the shutdown up at all.

Drive was still broadcasting when the game switched off, and finished its run that September.

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