Kanpani Girls

~ the last words ~

かんぱに☆ガールズ cast you as the president of a mercenary company. The company had been dropped into a world of swords and magic, which is ordinary enough on its own, but the staffing was the actual game: your party members were 社員, employees, and you ran them the way you would run a payroll. DMM.com put it live in browsers on 17 September 2014.

It started as a plan for an orthodox fantasy RPG with quarter-view battles, and the team could not find the thing that would set it apart from everything else on the platform. Someone proposed hiring well-known voice actors and illustrators, which was not yet the default move it later became, and when that still was not enough the mercenary dispatch company got bolted on.

Producer Yusuke Nashiki steered away from the mechanic most of the market ran on, where you spin a gacha for duplicates and fuse them into levels. Characters here grew by being sent out on quests.

~ the record ~

~ the hiring ~

The pre-registration campaign was built around 履歴書, resumes. You read a stack of them before the game existed and picked three candidates to take on.

Players kept saying the same thing, which was that picking three meant rejecting the others and rejecting them felt bad. The studio recorded a dismissal voice for the characters and shipped it in a hurry, so that letting one go had a sound attached to it.

~ give back my bread ~

Stamina in かんぱに was bread. You spent パン to run a quest, and in the first weeks an error or a dropped connection partway through would consume the bread while recording the quest as never attempted.

The complaint arrived with a slogan, パン返して, give back my bread. The fix came later and let you restart a broken quest from where it stopped.

~ the company you ran ~

This never had a route out of Japan, being a DMM browser game with a Japanese platform account and a payment path to match. What is worth envying from outside is the music. Kenji Ito, who scored the SaGa games, wrote for a browser title about running a staffing agency, and Haruka Shimotsuki sang the theme over the top of it.

~ the second burial ~

Service ended at five in the afternoon on 12 July 2021, which is the moment the paid items stopped working. Two hours later a refund form appeared on login, run under the Payment Services Act, and by then the developer OVERRIDE had already been absorbed into EXNOA that January.

Then the IP came back. DMM Crypto relaunched it on 1 October 2024 as かんぱに☆ガールズ RE:BLOOM, a blockchain game, and closed it on 31 January 2025 when the Seamoon Protocol project it depended on was canceled. A game about hiring people got four months as an NFT and then lost its job too.

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