Senran Kagura NewWave

~ the obituary ~

There was a layer of the Japanese mobile internet that never had a counterpart where I live. GREE and Mobage were social platforms with games inside them, reached through a carrier portal on a feature phone, with the billing already attached to your phone number. Turkey went from no mobile games to app-store mobile games with nothing in between. What drew me to this one was the shape of its survival: it had to be ported four times to stay in the same place.

Senran Kagura NewWave launched on GREE on 28 November 2012, published by Marvelous. You recruited from a cast of more than fifty girls training to be shinobi and ran missions laid out like an adventure game, then built card teams to fight other players' squads. Free to start with items for sale, which was the standard arrangement.

Mobage got a version on 4 September 2013. Mobcast followed on 1 March 2016 and d-game on 8 November that year. Those are not sequels or regional editions, they are the same game walked onto a new storefront each time the old storefront thinned out. The listed platforms by the end still included feature phones alongside iOS and Android, which is an unusual range to be supporting in 2020.

It closed on 30 October 2020, seven years and eleven months after the GREE launch. No time of day is recorded and no reason was given.

~ the case file ~

~ the G Burst year ~

On 14 February 2014 the game took a major update, and the day after that it was relaunched under a new name: Senran Kagura NewWave G Burst. The Japanese article treats this as a renewal rather than a replacement, so the service line runs unbroken through it. The practical effect is that the thing which died in 2020 had been carrying a different title for six of its eight years.

~ what eight years means here ~

Licensed mobile games in Japan die at two or three years. Eight is close to the ceiling for the form, and it was earned by relocation instead of by reinvention: the roster and the loop stayed, the storefront changed. GREE and Mobage were both well past their own peaks by 2016, and the game was still being installed onto newer ones.

~ the other world ~

Shinobi Master Senran Kagura: New Link started on 29 November 2017, three years before NewWave ended, and the series article is careful that these are separate and independent worlds rather than a succession. New Link outlasted it, closing at 2pm on 30 May 2025 and getting an offline build on 4 June. A third one, Shinobi Nexus, was listed for 2026.

So the franchise kept a live mobile game running continuously from 2012 into the mid-2020s, through at least three products that do not acknowledge each other as heirs. NewWave is the one that did it by moving house.

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