Metal Saga New Frontier (メタルサーガ ニューフロンティア)

» see success-corp.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Every earlier game in this series put one monster hunter in a ruined world and let you drive. The fourth one made you an employer. You ran a vigilante outfit, literally called a Company, and your job was to hire the hunters and the mechanics and then decide where to send them. The payroll grew as the company did.

Success developed and operated it, and it shipped as a browser game on Japanese social networks rather than on anything you would call a console. Mixi got it on 18 March 2010. Hangame picked it up on 24 September and Yahoo! Mobage on 20 October, the same game three times over. It was billed as a simulation RPG, abbreviated in Japanese forums to MS4 or MSNF, free to start, with a currency called Metal Coin for avatar items and extra capacity.

Every version stopped on 11 December 2013, three years and eight months after the first one opened. Success posted the closure notice on its own site under the game's page. No cause was given there or anywhere else.

~ the record ~

~ you were the employer ~

There were five things you could put on the payroll. Hunters drove and fought from inside the tank, mechanics repaired and built, soldiers were good on foot and terrible behind a wheel, and animals were bionic, which in this series had always meant a Shiba dog and now also meant a leopard. The fifth was the trader, a traveling merchant who had been an NPC in every previous Metal Saga and was finally playable here, bad at every kind of combat and the only class that could refuse a fight. Teams went out four at a time and you could keep up to twenty-four people employed.

Outside the base you did not control anyone. You issued an instruction, the travel and the fighting resolved on their own, and the game wrote you a log afterward. Each order burned fatigue that had to be slept off at an inn. There was a scheduler for repeating a routine, and it only ran while you had the browser window open.

Mixi in 2010 was effectively shut to anybody outside Japan, and i had no account there and no route to one. I was twenty-six and employed in Ankara, and the Japanese social-game layer only became legible to me later, in English, once most of it was dark.

~ the tank yard ~

The vehicles were the reason to stay. A Sherman asleep in a cave to the south, a Tiger buried in a minefield east of the desert, a Leopard 2 on the shore of a crater lake, a KV-1 abandoned at the bottom of an ant nest. There was also a Suzuki Jimny with a square turret bolted to the roof, and a 200-series Shinkansen carriage you could find in a vehicle center and take into combat.

Modification was a mechanic's skill rather than a shop, and it went further than upgrades. You could swap turrets and running gear, so a T-34-76 could be rebuilt into the 85, or a steam locomotive could be given a gun turret and four legs instead of wheels. The series had always been about scavenging armor out of a dead century. This version let you build something that had never existed in any century.

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