Ring Dream: Joshi Pro Wrestling Taisen

» see ringdream.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Most licensed sports games pay a federation for the right to use its athletes. Ring Dream did that too, in a sense, but it ran the traffic in both directions. Real women's wrestlers appeared in the game as drawn characters, and then the game went out and promoted wrestling cards those same wrestlers worked. Success put it out on 20 December 2012 as a browser card game, free to play with item billing, distributed through Yahoo! Mobage and mixi games. The Niconico app platform carried it too, and Hangame came in March 2015. It was drawn from an original by an artist who goes by Deishirou and it closed on 26 March 2020, seven years and three months later.

The card game part was ordinary. You collected wrestlers into a roster and sent that roster at other people's. What was not ordinary was what Success did with the proceeds, starting in February 2015, when the company co-promoted an actual pro wrestling card at Shinjuku FACE with DDT Pro-Wrestling. Six hundred players got in free, picked off the in-game rankings or by lottery. Nearly four in ten of them had never been to a wrestling show in their lives. The Niconico stream of it passed twenty-five thousand viewers, and the president of Success got in the ring afterward and announced there would be a second one.

There was. On 29 December 2015 the game put a card into Korakuen Hall, the small Tokyo arena that functions as Japanese wrestling's parish church, and sold it out at 1,279. From the ring at the end, the same president promised a third.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the wrestlers were fighting for ~

Read the Korakuen card and the prizes stop making ordinary sense. One match was a battle royal contested for the right to be turned into a cute girl character in the game, which the wrestler Akito won. The semi-final was a five-way whose prize was having your in-game character voiced by Noriko Hidaka, an actor whose work any Japanese person over thirty can hum along to. Danshoku Dino won that one.

Individual matches on the card were sponsored by the platforms the game shipped on. Hangame paid for the opening match and Niconico for the battle royal. A browser game's distribution partners were buying ad space on a wrestling card promoted by the browser game, in a loop with no obvious outside. The women's match at both shows was provided by Tokyo Joshi Pro, whose name the in-game promotion had borrowed.

~ backdrops ~

The December show also debuted an idol unit the game had grown: three voice actresses performing under the name backdrops. Noriko Hidaka was one of them, which is what gave the five-way its teeth; Wakana Yamazaki and Naoko Matsui were the other two. They sang the game's new opening theme, then sat in on the broadcast as guest commentators. At the press conference they asked Danshoku Dino to become the promotion's general manager.

Japanese social game graves do not normally look like this, which is why this one is here. The ordinary version of this product runs for five years inside a browser tab and leaves behind a shutdown notice and some card art. This one left a gate figure for Korakuen Hall and a voice credit won in a five-way match.

~ six weeks later ~

Success attached something to the closure announcement. The official site carried a message saying the series would continue, and 4Gamer sat Deishirou down with the game's producer, Minami, on 29 January 2020 to ask what that meant. The answer was Ring Dream Stories, a visual novel that would focus on the characters instead of the fights.

It shipped. Ring Dream Stories went live on 7 May 2020, six weeks after the card game closed, as a browser novel that released a chapter at a time. Then Success switched that off too, on a 30 October, and the last thing the company said about any of it was that every chapter would go online free before that year was out. I cannot find a record of whether anyone went and collected them.

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